on modern-day marriages, divorces

Craigslist sure does have a lot of, umm, “interesting” stuff. Just out of curiosity today, I went to their Divorce forum to read about the kind of stuff some people are going through (for the record, I’m not married or have plans on divorcing). The discussion posts really read like a bad reality TV show, but in discussion forum format. Some really sad or messed up stories. A lot of those are divorcing because of infidelity (cheated with a coworker or got involved in online relationships–chat rooms, IM, and Second Life) or just lost interest in one’s spouse, for financial issues, or for no apparent reason at all. While I know that this forum is not a representative sample of the general population, these are self-selected posters to this forum so there’s some bias, it’s still pretty sad (yet interesting) to read about the stories….how it got to that point, the nasty court battles, fighting for custody of the kids, the greed, and of course, the kids who get hurt the most in all of this. Are all these people suckers for marrying who they married? Or is this just today’s reality?

It’s interesting reading about their opinions on pre-nups…

In a strange way, I feel pretty lucky being single after reading those posts (“better to be alone than to be with someone you don’t want to be with”). At the same time though, I wonder if reading this will only make it more difficult for me to want to be with someone long-term, enough to want to get married…I’ll admit, there are times when I wonder whether I’m just being selfish by not wanting to ‘love’ someone else or whatever. But then when I think about my environment here, I’ve usually made the correct play by folding early on, so that the relationship or whatever doesn’t continue on. It’s “correct” in the sense that I probably wasn’t all that attracted to that person in the first place…or just knew that it wouldn’t work out, or there were some big question marks going in. There are times when I wonder if I should lower my standards when it comes to personality, attitude, values, smarts, etc (not necessarily looks, although let’s be honest, looks is something we all consider) and try to ‘like’ someone who I normally would not be interested in. Nah, $#% that! That’s like trying to convince yourself that I should eat dog poop because it just might taste good if I tried it.

I also find it quite ironic that the people who tend to give me crap for not being in a serious relationship now and thinking about marriage, are those who I know are probably having problems with their marriage themselves (whether they realize it or not). In fact, I don’t know many people who can say that they’re happily married (other than my parents).

Do you?