How is it we share and repeat such common patterns of marriage and divorce?
Without understanding what skills were required to make joint and mutual decisions, we each begin our marriages with optimism and great hopes. At courtship and marriage, we seem to make decisions easily, because we appear to want the same things. But over time differences challenge decision-making skills, and we return to the only decision-making we have seen modeled by our parents and in our culture. Someone is chosen or takes the decision-making. Sometimes an on-going competition for control characterizes the relationship. Abuse of power and resentment of its abuse follows. Marriage and divorce feel ultimately personal. We choose who to marry and when to divorce. We have personal explanations. We fall out of love, lose interest, and drift apart. Acting on this first step people divorce easily. However, most people hang on 6 years after the marriage turns sour. Then acting on the pain, there are affairs, jealousy, deceit, failure of trust or cooperation, physical or sexual brutality.
