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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]How often do you think this happens?

I caught up with a grad school friend I hadn't seen or spoken to in 4 years. Married, 52, three daughters 12, 14, 17, lawyer. Husband is a lawyer too. No abuse, cheating , drugs or excessive alcohol according to her. [b]Just a ho hum, one foot in front of the other marriage.[/b]

Husband came home from work one day last February and said:

"I'm done. I'm in love with a colleague (17 years younger) and I want a drama and trauma free divorce. Please don't make this messy for the girls. Please lets just end this. I'm sorry. I didn't mean for this to happen but I don't love you anymore."

It actually made me tear up typing this out because it's just so.... sad. She is a great person- so kind, funny, pretty and now she is.... in deep, deep depression.[/quote]

I mean, that doesn't sound like a great marriage to me. Clearly there were cracks.

I know someone whose husband did the same thing but after the initial shock wore off I realized I wasn't actually that surprised - their marriage wasn't that great.

I'm sorry for your friend, that sounds awful, but if I had to list the people I'd expect something like this to happen to, it's all the ones where their marriages aren't very strong. Now, if it happened to some of my friends I would be jaw-on-the-floor shocked. But others? Sad, of course, but not all that surprised. [/quote]

I think only a minority of people have GREAT marriages. Do you disagree PP? [/quote]

I'm the PP. I'll use our neighborhood as a sample size because I can reasonably analyze that amount of people.

In no particular order:

Couple 1 - I thought their marriage was rocky when I met them 10 years ago and I was right, they divorced about a year after that
Couple 2 - married 30 years, great marriage
Couple 3 - married 20 years, great marriage
Couple 4 - married 30 years, great marriage
Couple 5 - married 20 years, great marriage
Couple 6 - married 15 years,  great marriage
Couple 7 - married 25 years, lots of cracks over the years, divorcing right now
Couple 8 - I didn't think their marriage was that great but didn't think it was as terrible as it was but I also didn't spend a lot of time with them, they divorced in 2020
Couple 9 - married 15 years, some cracks but both seem committed to the marriage, currently in therapy
Couple 10 - married 15 years, some issues but they love each other fiercely and have a pretty great marriage
Couple 11 - married 10 years, some major issues with alcoholism but she hasn't left him yet so who knows, I'd say their marriage is pretty terrible
Couple 12 - married 15 years, great marriage
Couple 13 - married 15 years, great marriage
Couple 14 - married 10 years, great marriage
Couple 15 - married 25 years, great marriage

So yes, most of the people I know would likely rate their marriages as great. We all spend a lot of time together, our kids all go to school together (different grades, but private school), the dads go on trips together, the moms go on trips together, various families vacation together, etc. We talk a lot and support each other and see all the couples in a lot of different situations (including stressful ones, we've all suffered loss of parent, loss of job, sick kids, etc. to some degree). Some are religious, some aren't. Most are dual-income, some are miliary, some wives out earn their husbands, some are same-sex marriages. Everyone has at least one advanced degree if not more, all are UMC.

If I expanded outside of this group and thought about my best friends from high school, college, and beyond, I would say that most of us have great marriages. We're not perfect, no one is perfect, and who knows what the future will bring, but when I read the posts on DCUM with people saying that all men are useless, etc., I just don't relate. Those aren't the men I grew up with (my dad wasn't like that, my friends' dads were not like that) and they're not the men I'm around now (my husband, my friends' husbands, my male friends). You can say I don't know what goes on behind closed doors all you want, but I haven't been surprised by a single divorce (they all had some pretty serious cracks/issues), and again, we do talk. You can discount my experience all you want, it doesn't bother me, this is just what I see.[/quote]You're so full of it. You know the status of 20 couples in your neighborhood and they've all been married some amount of time that is divisible by 5?  When you're making shit up like this, you really need to do better.  [/quote]

No, I rounded because I wasn't going to actually calculate the lengths of all the marriages. I also wasn't looking to provide real identifying information. You can always scroll past posts you don't like, you know. Why you think someone would bother to make this up is weird. [/quote]

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