Marriage: A Dying Institution or an Opportunity to Thrive? - Essay Sample

Introduction

The institution of marriage is facing some big challenges today. For decades, marriage has been a source of suffering to a lot of people who are married. Most people attribute this to the broken families, and that leaves uncertainty on whether it suits most of the people who try it. A lot of marriages end either in acrimony or divorce with a lot of children being raised in single-parented families or in families where remarrying has occurred. One of the reasons why marriage is a dying institution is because it deprives the women and men the feeling of being 'chosen' every day. For humans, it is natural to like being wanted and appreciated. Once most the couples are used to each other, they end up not exerting more effort in making that their other halves are appreciated.

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Also, it is a norm to see a lot of empty-nest families, families that have been formed through remarriage, and the single-parent families that have mothers as the heads. Despite these shifts, there is an increasing divorce rate and reduce birthrates and marriage (Barnett et al., 2005). Statistically, the American birthrate is half of what it was in the '60s. The number of couples that are cohabiting is higher than it has ever been in history. A survey done by the American Community in 2005 reveals that unmarried person was leading more than fifty percent of the households and forty percent of children are born to mother who is not married. It is argued that one of the reasons behind these developments is that marriage is now being viewed as a crowning event of later adulthood where it is put last after being done with college and getting stability or establishing a career.

Despite the broken families, the other reason why someone might conclude that marriage is a dying institution across the country is the fact that there is a collective experience with most numbers of marriages failing. Apparently, about 50 percent of all the marriages end up in divorce. Most people who are not yet married would be scared of getting into something that seems more like a gamble. Moreover, few people would like being part of a group of hypocrites (Cox & Demmitt, 2014). Millions of people across the country take vows to stay in marriages 'for better for worse, for sickness and in health, for richness for poor' but end up leaving those marriages sometimes even two or three times. This ideation has so much trivialized and mocked the vows that most people would silently chuckle to themselves while listening to them.

The marriages today are different from those of the past. They look different, are dissolved differently, and are formed at different times. Regardless, all the changes that have been discussed do not mean that marriage is dying as an institution. More than 80 percent still marry and children. Most of those who also divorce usually end up remarrying. Despite that, the institution of marriage is inevitably dying due to several reasons as there a lot of broken families (South & Tolnay, 2019). Numbers never lie; there would be fewer broken families if at all, marriage was an institution that was growing. Unfortunately, it is the opposite. It is only a time bomb before marriages completely fade away. People should be thinking of the alternatives that they can use to replace it with such as coming up with factors to improve lives quality.

References

Barnett, O., Miller-Perrin, C., & Perrin, R. (2005). Family violence across the lifespan. Sage Publications.

Cox, F., & Demmitt, K. (2014). Human Intimacy: Marriage, the Family, and Its Meaning, Research Update. Wadsworth Cengage Learning.

South, S., & Tolnay, S. (2019). The Changing American family. Routledge.