by Carol Dunn

Created on: February 26, 2009

Setting our expectations too high in a marriage, then having those expectations go unfulfilled, will chip away at the foundation until the whole thing crumbles.

The institution of marriage is not what it used to be. I'm sure most of us in our 50s and 60s can recall the dedication our grandparents had to each other and their marriage. For their generation, life was harder, and they needed each other to make the whole thing work. Duties around the home, and work in general, were more demanding. Without modern labor-saving appliances, being a homemaker was a full-time job. There was a cow to milk, bread to make, kids to watch, butter to churn, maybe a chicken to kill and clean for Sunday dinner.

"For better or worse" had a different meaning for the "World War" generations. The main expectations people had in marriage were to support each other, raise a hard-working family, be neighborly and make a living. People didn't sit around wondering if they could be happier who had the time?

These days we have it easy. Maybe too easy. Marriage takes work, and many people are just not willing to put that much work into it. With dishwashers and microwave ovens, electric mixers, bread machines, food processors, furnaces, washing machines and clothes dryers, life is easier, and we have leisure time. People have more time to look around and compare how other people live. They have TV to tell them they must be beautiful, they must be muscular, they must be thin, in short, they must get happiness from somewhere. Rather than making the most of their marriage, they have other options, and they are willing to get a divorce to pursue those other, easier, options in order to truly find happiness.

Nowadays, we have too many expectations. If the statistics on marriage are correct, most people enter into marriage with expectations that cannot be met by their partner, so they abandon the marriage and possibly even try again. They are unhappy. They are not getting enough out of the relationship to make them happy. This is when and why marriage goes bad. In our "me" focused society, most of us are looking to get the most out of life for ourselves. We are looking out for number one us. We have a warped sense of what it takes to be content in life, and some of us stumble through relationship after relationship, or marriage after marriage, searching for someone to make us happy.

Unfortunately, it's usually not the marriage that is faulty, it's the high expectations. Of course, both partners must

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