Contraception: Why Not? (part 9)

This post is part of a series by Professor Janet E. Smith.

Slide: Cohabitation and Divorce

We live in a strange world in which people live together before marriage and get divorced after marriage.  There is a much higher divorce rate for those who cohabit. The figures are just up and up. About 65 percent of those cohabit before marriage get divorced.  About 50 percent of the rest of the people do, but since more and more couples cohabit, the divorce rate is just going to keep climbing and climbing.

As a matter of fact, I think some people get divorced before they get married! That is, some people have two or three extended cohabitations, get “divorced” from them, and then they get married.

I feel I must apologize to those in this room who are younger than I. I often feel that my generation – I am 55– owes anybody younger than we are a big apology.  They call my father’s generation “The Greatest Generation”, they lived through a depression; they worked very hard.  My parents are of that generation: they have been married 60 years.  It’s just incredible.  I think a good name for my generation would be “The Stupid Generation.”  Whereas, my parent’s home is very well ordered, if you looked into my refrigerator, you wouldn’t know when I last did anything in that refrigerator.  It’s kind of a scary place.  I find it hard to pay my bills on time.  I find it hard to get the oil changed in my car.  I have a hard time doing what my parents do with great ease.  In fact, my whole generation is pretty much always stressed out.  We were exceptionally stupid in our youth. We were the generation that started the whole drug and sexual revolution.  We went off to college and experimented with drugs.  We thought that that’s what college is all about.  We got to smoke marijuana, if not take a little bit of cocaine and LSD.  Yeah, well, why not?  That’s what you do when you go to college.  And certainly have sex.  Our poor parents, they had to get married to get sex.  They had to rush into marriage.  We thought they probably married some totally unsuitable person so they could have sex.  I remember hearing people say, “You wouldn’t buy a car without taking it for a test drive, so surely you wouldn’t get married without having a test drive.  And you wouldn’t buy a car without taking several for a test drive.  So certainly you would do that in respect to marriage.  You’ve got to find what model you like.”  We thought that way.  That’s my generation.

My generation went down a lot of dead ends and fell into huge potholes and we’re having a hard time climbing out.  I want to save other people from going down those same dead ends and falling into those same potholes.  If you don’t know exactly what you think would be the right direction at least, look at what we did and do something different.  It doesn’t much matter what it is, just do something different.

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