For those with children: Do you think you’re a better parent than your parents were?

[Rain Man]

Originally Posted by DJ's left nut

I'll openly concede that I'm needlessly dogmatic here, but I'll never understand the "lets get married at the courthouse" folks.

It's important. ACT like it.

I've never known a couple to do the half-assed marriage thing where "Oh we're gonna just get the certificate signed and have a party later" where the marriage lasted. Now I don't know 50 people like that, but I think I know 5 or 6 and all of those folks got divorced within 5 years. And yes, I know that it's not universal, but I absolutely think the 'success rate' on those marriages is significantly lower.

Meanwhile myself and most of my friends got married fairly young; all by age 25. And all of us did the full marriage ceremony and what not. And all of us are still married, most of us over a decade later (I'm at 20 next summer).

I just think a lot of folks are strangely glib about what SHOULD be the most important decision you'll ever make in your life.

Then again, I'll spend months researching breeders before I'll so much as buy a dog. So there's probably an acceptable middle ground to be found.

But man, if it's that important, treat it as such.

Oooh, I can be your first. My wife and I have been married for 30+ years and we had a five-minute wedding with a justice of the peace and no witnesses.

As background, we had just moved for graduate school and we were living in an area where we didn't know anybody within 700 miles. It seemed like a financial burden to ask others to come to us, and our families lived 1,000 miles from each other so there wasn't an obvious "home base" to go to. Plus, I'm not big on churches to start with, and that's where a lot of "event" weddings are held.

I get your point, though I don't fully agree with it. I can see your logic, but I think it depends on the personalities. I've known of a few weddings where it was obvious that the odds were against them due to immaturity or whatever, but they wanted a flashy wedding in part due to that immaturity. But that also may be a function of my age, because when I was marryin' age, pretty much everyone in my home area did a church wedding due to cultural mores.

I'm actually pretty shocked at how common divorce has been in my peer group. When I think about my best friends from high school, a majority of them have been divorced, and these are not sketchy people. They were all mature solid citizens, but we may be running at a 50% divorce rate as a group.