For me, think the "stigma" of divorce is not nearly as great as say 30 years ago, so that marriages where people would have just suffer through are now ending. I also believe far too many couples live outside their means, because "means" are so vastly different. Back when I was a kid a household had a house payment, usually just 1 car, gas, water, and electric. Maybe cable tv if you were fancy.

Now you have Internet, satellite tv, multiple cellphones, data plans for them, multiple cars, and much more extravagant housing. All of these are now pretty much considered a necessity. Tag onto that recreation and you are pretty much guaranteed a bankruptcy if one person in the marriage gets carried away.

I've been married 13 years now, and honestly we've not really had to work at it. Yeah we squabble and my sex appetite is way stronger than hers, but it's not something I would leave over, or her vice versa.

I was married for 34 years, and not all of those years were wine and roses. We had times that were dark and filled with struggles, times that were stormy and distant, some sweet and fuzzy, some cold and indifferent, and we enjoyed times that were filled with the light of love. Things change so much over the decades because people change and circumstances change. Jobs change, we have kids, they grow up, we get distracted, our bodies change, even our looks and our love will change. I was 40 pounds overweight in my early 40's and my wife once snapped at me, when I (yet again) got angry about our (then) lack of a sex life, "Well maybe if you weren't so fat, you'd be getting more sex!" So I lost 40 lbs, was the same weight I was in high school. The sex didn't increase at all, but for every pound I lost, she gained--then she said she felt too unattractive for sex! When we couldn't conceive a child, our sex life suffered, along with our relationship, and so overall, I'd say that when we were having mutually enjoyable sex that I didn't always have to initiate, as often as I desired, our marriage was happy and strong. When the sex got bad and/or infrequent, the relationship in general got bad. Funny thing, 10 weeks before she died, she told me her New Years resolution for that year was that we needed to have more sex. I seconded the motion! We had about 6 weeks of great sex, then the cancer came back and she was gone a month later... Don't waste time.
Michael

I've been married for some thirty-something years now to the best man on earth. He is a huge pain in the, the cutest, most darling, the one I'd most like to strangle, funniest - oh, hell - he's a husband, my husband and I still adore him even when he's a tremendous pest!

But that's rather my point. You have to go into marriage knowing that marriage is unlike any other relationship, that it is going to be tough periodically, and be willing to fight for it.

Most people divorce because they married the wrong person for the wrong reason. Perhaps they wanted security, position, power, green card or thought their infatuation was love only to find out later that it wasn't love.

Money causes the second-most arguments in marriage. Usually, spouses argue over money because short-term vs long-term goals interfere with each other and the spouses have diverging expectations and different opinions about what's a 'need' and what's a 'want'. But then again, most parents don't teach their kids about money in the first place.

IF you pay attention, you will find that sex and gender is in everything your spouse does and is. From how he thinks to how she behaves. His cheeky grin. My pouncing upon him. His thinking I'm 'complicated'. My grumbling over how his helping me do the laundry results in him taking over doing the laundry because it is raining and he can't do his own job - washing the trucks.

We spend a lot of time being silly and enjoying it.
Forget keeping the spark - just go and burn the house down! LOL

Well said EEK