A newly married friend called me the other day: “Ari, I think I want to marry my personal trainer.”
Silly me, I thought that the Walking Down the Aisle thing at the Ridiculously Lavish Wedding meant that the lucky couple would be safe gazing into each other’s eyes for at least a few months.
My peers have yet again proven me wrong: Six months later, he’s madly in love with her, and she’s madly in love with her abs coach.
After making a number of faces at the phone that she couldn’t see, I delicately pointed out that perhaps marriage isn’t the ideal solution for escaping a first marriage. That’s precisely how one ends up 27 and twice-divorced.
Similarly successful is the marriage of a friend who met a guy doing community service and walked down the aisle seven months later. This year, in addition to her announcing that, “Things aren’t working out in bed, and I decided that I don’t really like him,” she told me that she was coming for a weekend visit to “escape the sadness of yesterday’s divorce paper filing.”
What she really meant was, “I’m coming to meet up with my new friend Sam,” with whom she spent the entire weekend.
This behavior is apparently to be expected in early-20s marriages.
“Lives are still very much in flux,” says Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, co-director of the National Marriage Project. “Many are still trying to finish school, pay off debt and establish a foothold in a career. This creates conflicts about the direction lives are going to take.”
Enormous conflict. I used to deal with my friends’ infidelities with aplomb. But marriage is different. Frankly, I don’t want to know the details of cheating wives.
Just because friends were honest with me during previous escapades doesn’t mean that they should be honest now: I can’t look half of their husbands in the eye.
And, given my friends’ behavior, I imagine that the husbands aren’t doing much better. Statistically, they’re not: Most cheating for both sexes happens in the early years of marriage and spikes again for men after two decades, according to a University of Denver study of 3,400 married adults.
For the rest of our adult lives, are we relegated to dealing with the messy affairs and tangled webs of friends’ libidos? Does nothing change after walking down the aisle?
By the numbers, the answer is: Yes, nothing changes. That is, if your friends are anything like my friends: youngish, already cohabiting and earning little, with widely ranging definitions of the term “moral.”
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Yet marriages in general are less doomed than we’ve all been led to believe. The “50 percent of all marriages end in divorce” statistic drops significantly if the couple meets a few requirements: Individuals aged 25 or older with an annual income over $50,000, no children, still-married parents and a college education maintain stunningly low divorce rates.
Add religious fervor to the mix, and you’re looking at a low-single-digits divorce rate. There is hope for marriage. For my own future marriage, that is. Not for the friends in question: atheists with families in shambles, motivated by minimal incomes to hire a mover on Relationship: Week 3. These people run astoundingly high divorce rates, approximated at over 75 percent.
“The early 20s are a time for finding your way and finding yourself,” Whitehead says. “I did a series of interviews with young women a few years back, and in many ways, they felt they weren’t really ready to pick a life mate. They had some personal goals they wanted to accomplish first.”
Such as hooking up with the personal trainer.
Whitehead then pointed out that her own son, age 25, will soon be walking the aisle.
“It’s hard to prescribe instructions for the entire population. If you feel ready, career and education goals are set, and the evidence is that you are ready to stay with one person, the marriage risk factors aren’t that high.”
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