Perfect person

How is it that marriage is down to 50-50 these days? Isn't it sad?

I hear marriages take place all the time on TV....yet, don't we always kind of mumble to ourselves, "yeah, I give that marriage 6 months." We all know it's not going to last. Britney and Federline...YEAH RIGHT!. Brad and Angelina..... SUUURE. I give that relationship maybe 3 or 4 years tops. You heard it here first folks.

So marriage has come down to nothing more then a piece of paper that makes things just slightly more complicated for a couple to separate?

How is it that there are some couples who are still desparately in love with each other after 40, 50 years of marriage? You rarely see this, but sometime you can watch a senior couple with obvious concern and feelings for each other just as much as the day they met. But this kind of sight is rarer and rarer.

Of course there are no guarantees in anything in life. And surely marriage is in some part a gamble I'm sure. It's an acceptance of someone both because of his or her strengths and weaknesses. It's hard to imagine the person you have a new love with to have faults but they are there as much as we would have our own.

My brother is convinced that the only true way to find out about the other person is to live together for a while. Kind of like a "test drive" for a car. I don't dispute that, but not everyone has that luxury. My own circumstance is a case in point of a difficult situation since we're thousands of miles apart.

But live-in relationships are only a fairly recent circumstance that has become socially acceptable.... look at the generations before us who didn't do that. How is it that they stayed together so long and how is it they knew they found the "one"?

Is it that our generation has become too obsessed with expecations? Too obsessed with having the perfect person?

Shit what am I, Oprah?

I guess it's all come up all of a sudden for me. I see my own parent's relationship sometimes gets tested, and I sometimes listen to friends complain about their marriage partners as well. I makes me fearful that marriage even works out at all anymore.