by Diane Burnside

Created on: December 21, 2008

The once mighty river of matrimony no longer quite makes it to the sea . The high mortality rate of first time marriages bespeaks the end of an era.

Traditional marriage got it's cohesion from a sense of mutual need,from the mutual goals of survival and child rearing. This was the glue that that kept many families together for decades even when it stopped being fun.

Then something began to change, almost imperceivable at first, people were evolving. They began to desire more from life and each other than the confines of traditional marriage would allow.

Suddenly, staying together for the children or the security weren't enough anymore.

women wanted to experience themselves outside of their roles as wife and mother and men wanted more of a role in the family. But these changes didn't always happen to both partners at once. Inevitably someone broke free of the shackles of marriage and set out to start over.

Second marriages, although not necessarily doomed do have the deck stacked against them. The marital glue just isn't as strong the second time around. If there are children from the first union then right out of the starting gate there is a division of energy, loyalties and finances that weaken the ties that bind.

Also second marriages are often comprised of people who have "Welched" on a previous commitment one way or another and those circumstances may serve to weaken the strength of subsequent unions.

As lousy as all this sounds there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

We continued to evolve you see we're not finished yet.

The things that once bound us so tightly no longer do, and that has weakened marriages of all kinds and broken countless families across the globe.

it has produced "Welfare moms" "Dead-beat Dads" and "Latch-key kids" too numerous to count.

However, this same phenomena has also produced women who who are just as active in the work force as they are in the home. It has produced men who have a more active and nurturing role with their children and who know their way around the laundry room.It has also created little girls who dream of careers as well as families and, it has given rise to bots who know when it is their turn to do dishes or make a meal.In short,this erosion of the marital infrastructure has has given birth to a whole generation of more balanced people who are capable of true interdependence.

This has taken all focus off the necessity of traditional roles in which the men were the sole breadwinners and the woman ran the household (and

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