by Dayna Rutherford

Created on: July 27, 2011

Now there are many studies that will tell you how married men and women live longer. That may be true, but the real question may be, do they really want to? That’s not saying that marriage is a bad thing, many of our parents were married fifty or more years to the same person and loved them until the end. But at what cost and at what compromise? Was that cost really worth the pay off?

Currently our divorce rates in this country are estimated to be around 50% of all marriages. This was before same sex partners were allowed to marry so we don’t know what effect, if any, that will have on the statistics. I can only assume they will, very often, make the same errors in matrimony the rest of us do. These numbers vary up to 10% one way or the other depending on where you find the results of the survey. But the point being, is that half the time people get married somewhere down the road they look at the person they were madly in love with and could not live without and think, “ What the hell am I doing here? I can’t live like this.” Then the fun begins.

Did I say fun? Scratch that! They call divorce a civil action, when in all reality there is nothing civil about it. Its fighting over things you really don’t care about. People fighting for things, that at least one party believes they really don’t deserve. It’s making explosive and often times false allegations from one party, sometimes both parties, to do nothing more than hurt the other person, as if everything doesn’t hurt enough already. It’s dividing friends, family and pets and sometimes running dirty laundry through the public eye for no more than a petty bitterness because things did not turn out as they thought they should. It’s fighting over support and custody and who pays for what. In the end, you leave emotionally devastated, looking for a new place to live, with half of everything you worked for all of your life, if your lucky.

So are there benefits of being single? Absolutely! One of the most obvious is that every decision you make for your life is yours, good or bad. Conversely if something goes wrong you have only yourself to blame. Every decision you make may not be your best, but you will learn how to adjust to the circumstances and how to avoid these mistakes in the future. It gives you the opportunity to find out what you can really do on your own. If you want to start a business or change to a completely different career, it is

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