by Frances Ruocco

Created on: June 26, 2008   Last Updated: April 19, 2011

Yes, love and marriage should go together especially if you want the relationship to last. If you are living with someone and you don't think the relationship is going to last then you should not be living with them to begin with.

Years ago most people dated for six months to one year, they then got engaged and started planning their wedding day. Most didn't even think about have sex with each other for a long time if at all before they married. In a lot of cases both were virgins and they taught each other all there was to know about the facts of life.

Most people who were married before the sexual revolution in the 1960 are celebrating their 50th plus wedding anniversaries today because they knew all about each other before they married. Most of these couples have had only one lover and that was each other.

They married in their twenties, a year or two apart, started their families and he worked while she stood at home until the children were teenagers, then they might have tried going back to work again.

The woman cooked and cleaned and the man provided for all their needs, they were friends, had the same interests and were not in competition with each other because she was his woman and he was her man.

Movies and television shows were about a happy family with love that lasted forever. Family get together were fun times and people respected the old ways and would try and keep the same values and morals.

Yes there were divorces in every family but only about ten percent got divorced. Today more than fifty percent of married couples get divorced. If we wanted to count how many lived together and then broke up, it is a much higher ratio.

For the most part before the 1960, if a family member got divorced, they did within a year or two of their marriage and then they remarried and stayed with the second mate for over twenty-five years or until one passed into the next world. Everyone married thinking it would never end and everything the owned was theirs, not his and hers.

After the 1960s when the sexual revolution came along, and there was free love and everyone was going to change the world and make it better for everyone. We were taught that there was no need to marry, have a family, be a homemaker while he worked and tended to the grounds around the home. We were taught that we needed two cars, two homes, a boat, and vacations to all the islands, a honeymoon in Pennsylvania or another nearby country setting resort in the USA was something to be frowned upon.

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