Too many people have grown up with the false assertation that marriage is all about, and only about "who you love" and these people all fail to take any real consideration of the needs and requirements of two people actually living together for life.
I've started calling it the "fairy tale syndrome", and, sadly enough have come largely to blame it on the female half of the population. These women grow up with low self image, selfish natures, and the inability to sepperarte a real relationship from the romantic comedy fiction they've come to beleive in.
I think you're onto something, there, but what do you think marriage is really about?
I've had an hour and rolled it around in my head a bit. I'm not convinced the argument is a false dichotomy.
Social and cultural devaluation of marriage means that more people will be willing to leave unhappy, broken relationships. I don't think this is a bad thing. I'm curious, if this is a false dichotomy, what is your counterpoint?
A false dichotomy occurs when someone claims (or at least suggests or implies) that the logical or only alternative to A is Z, when in fact there may be a whole alphabet of options in between the two choices. Often, as in this case, the opposite of one extreme is presented as the only alternative.
So, if I have a counterpoint, it is that you've made the mistake of thinking that any bar to easy divorce is some soul-crushing regime of social pressure that makes lots of people miserable. And I think you're also minimizing the downside of divorce, for those involved. Aside from the legal and social ramifications, isn't divorce at best a necessary evil, and therefor to be avoided?
I think we may need to consider that it might be best if people were
less willing to leave unhappy, broken relationships than they are in our society, today. If there were more of a social (and legal) cost to divorce, more couples would stick it out and work a little harder than they seem to do, today. We might actually be happier, that way. Now that doesn't have to mean that divorce would be utterly unthinkable and marriage inescapable. Nor does it mean we have to have arranged marriages, which is what I think your Indian friends are probably describing.
But, to me, the problem with most of our social experimentation, sexual revolution, etc, is that we have been so eager to escape some societal ill that we have thrown out
the baby a number of babies with the bathwater. Just to use the OP as an example, there was a time when no one would have complained about a business owner firing someone just because he heard that the employee was cross-dressing on the weekends. But we've now reached a point where the employer is in trouble if he doesn't allow it on the job. There's a more reasonable middle ground in there, somewhere. I think we have the same thing with marriage. Not everyone has to be as opposed to divorce as my wife and I are. But it's becoming more and more obvious that when a culture makes marriage almost meaningless, it becomes, well, almost meaningless.
I admit, I have no defense against the charge that I don't understand the horrors of a bad marriage. Happily, I don't have a lot of experience with those, directly or indirectly. But those who do know about unhappy marriages often know about unhappy divorces. From what I've heard, that's not a very good option, either.
