Great piece. Sorry for the long response, but you struck a chord.
I'm both a NY divorce lawyer and someone who has been married for 38 years. My constant refrain is that marriage is about "we" not "me." That is the first and most important step in a marriage. At 64, I'm not the person I was at 25 when I married and neither is my wife. But, as we grew older, we continued to accommodate each other.
Self-understanding is important. I don't blame my wife for my flaws or failures, those are mine. This is the view from my foxhole (sorry old soldiers can't resist military metaphors).
Yes, a lot of men avoid therapy, but, many men are socialized from childhood to equate emotional openness with weakness. Stoicism isn’t a personality flaw, it’s a survival strategy that got overlearned. When I was kid back in the dark days of the sixties, boys who showed any emotion other than anger were bullied. Period. We were trained to be "tough." I still see that with my veteran clients suffering from PTSD.
This lead to my next point: For men, the skillset required for therapy often feels like being dropped into a foreign country without a map. They’re told to “open up,” but were never trained how to identify, name, or process emotions in the first place. Oh, yes, did I mention as a kid in the school playground "opening up" got you "beaten up"?
Now, let's look at what I've learned from my women clients: women are often given the opposite constraint, they’re told, implicitly or explicitly, that they are “too emotional,” which creates its own distortion. Expression becomes both expected and criticized at the same time. This creates a mismatch: one partner suppresses, the other is told their expression is excessive.
The result is not just conflict, but mutual misunderstanding of what “normal” emotional behavior even looks like. When people walk into my office having reached this "walkaway dynamic" its because they have reached the point of living in different worlds, speaking a different language. To be fair to both, the “walkaway” dynamic isn’t always about indifference or refusal.
Sometimes it’s about two people operating under completely different emotional rulebooks that neither of them consciously chose. Now, we get to the really hard part: Introspection and self-understanding. Self-understanding is hard because it requires abandoning the story that your reactions are purely rational responses to the other person. Most people, regardless of gender, resist that shift.
My take as someone married for 38 years and together for 40? Long-term marriages that survive tend to involve a gradual renegotiation of identity. So as you move forward it shifts from “we instead of me,” to “who am I now, and who are you now?” repeated over decades. I loved the young woman I married, and I now love the senior citizen I share my life with. We're not the same people who started this journey. We have grown, love and accomodate the people who we are.
Gary, thank you for such a thoughtful and wisdom-packed response. Seriously. Are you sure you're a divorce lawyer? LOL Because you've got the logical brain clearly, but you're operating with emotional fluency most people don't develop unless they've done serious work.
I want to honor what you named about men and their relationship with emotion. They've spent millennia being asked to go to war, to fight, to not feel a damn thing. So they do. But you can't do both at the same time. Our nervous systems don't work that way. It suppresses and comes out in other harmful way. So yes, I get it.
I am grateful the stigma is finally being lifted on men’s mental health. Men have just as many emotions and traumas as women. They just don't have the skillset yet.
It's not just about therapy for men. Therapy is clinical. It's hard for men to open up to a woman therapist, no matter how qualified. It's also hard to open up to a male therapist who's been educated on it but hasn't lived it.
A men's coach? That's different. A coach has been where you are. They've gone through it and come out the other side. They have skin in the game. That's why coaches can push men further than therapy ever could. Not because therapy is bad. But because lived experience changes everything.
You said your wife isn't the same person you married. And you love who she is now, not who she was. That's remarkable. Most people don't get there. We go into marriage imagining the same person sitting in a rocking chair with us someday. But that person doesn't exist. You marry someone young, living one kind of life, maybe have some babies. By the time you're sitting on that rocking chair, you're two completely different people. Bodies change. Priorities change. Everything changes. People either grow together or they grow apart.
So here's what I want to know, and I'm asking for myself as much as anyone reading this. You and your wife have clearly figured something out. You've been married thirty eight years, together forty. You don't blame her for your flaws. You accept hers. You honor who she is today. So what does that actually look like? What do you guys do consistently that keeps the trust and connection there? Daily rituals? The way you show up? Because we're all trying to build something here. Tell us what that looks like.
Sorry to put you on the spot like that. I really enjoyed reading your comment and had so many questions. Many of the people I know married that long, are not aware enough to think of marriage as a WE. They do a little but not all the way.
I really hope men read this. I almost walked away 10 years ago after my concerns were dismissed as “you’re too sensitive” or “you’re expecting too much” too many times. He had become so oblivious that he was actually shocked. Given his attitude towards me, I had expected him to just shrug and say “Okay.” We did a TON of work to repair our relationship and we’re much happier now. If men tried want to stay married they can’t hide behind toxic masculinity anymore.
Very well put Amanda. I’m really happy to hear you were able to work it out and rebuild something stronger. It’s not easy either way and it says a lot about your husband and his love for you and the relationship.
I definitely identify with this read. It’s like a slow death.
The ex husband was only willing to go to couples counseling because he thought I was the one that needed help, not him. He was “older and wiser” (note: makes me want to vomit when I think about it now). I recognized I had things I wanted to work on, and work on them I did (and still do; maintenance and practice is key 😉).
What’s fascinating is that the couples counselors we met with often spent a lot more time asking the ex husband questions (more than me) during the sessions. It took me a few couples counselors in to realize what was happening — he needed significantly more work than I did. One counselor reflected back to me, after they knew I was going through a divorce, “you were/are more self-aware and willing to do the work. He lacks self-awareness, the ability to reflect and repair… he wasn’t willing to do the deep work.”
Divorce is f-ing hard; but I would much rather go through the nightmare of a divorce than continue to live in a marriage that felt like purgatory, hell.
Don’t know if I ever want to get married again, but I now know the difference between a man who has “done the work” vs. one who hasn’t or won’t.
Thank you for reading this Carly and commenting. Sadly, you aren’t alone. So many people (women especially) choose divorce over the hell of a broken marriage. It’s so sad to watch, (especially if they have good qualities underneath) for them to ignore their shortcomings. Their self-protection and lack of self-awareness hurts them more than they realize. But I can say congratulations on your ability to stand up for yourself and choose happiness. Good for you to face your stuff and notice that you brought some baggage to the relationship as well. And it definitely is a forever thing once we start working on ourselves. (Check out my latest article on it takes to the tango in toxic relationships) Divorce is definitely hard, but once we get to that point, it’s 100% worth it.
“Gray divorce.” The first time I heard that phrase was during the pandemic.
Couples married for years, but travelled separately. Did things on their own. Then the pandemic started. They were forced to hunker down because everything was shut down. Then realized how incompatible they were. I had friends who went through it.
From own experience the red flags often show up in a relationship even before we get married. Yet we get married anyway.
We see the red flags before we ever say “I do.” We just talk ourselves out of them. We’re high on oxytocin and convinced that what we’re feeling is destiny. So we jump. Sometimes we have the babies first and figure the rest out later.
And then it settles. And it’s like… oh. This is who we actually are together.
Gray divorce gets me because it’s not that people shouldn’t leave. It’s that they stayed somewhere they were quietly disappearing for so long. Fifty years together isn’t fifty years of happy. Longevity and fulfillment are two very different things.
But you’re right. It starts at the beginning. We’re not always marrying the right person, in fact I think most of us don’t. We’re marrying the feeling or the comfort. And people tend to forget that love is a verb, not just a feeling. Your core values, your character, the non-negotiables that make you who you are? Those don’t lie. And when two people’s don’t align, time doesn’t fix that. It just makes it heavier.
Yes this is all so, so, true. I’m dealing with my situation right now. And, I can tell you, I wish, I would have heeded the red flags from the beginning.
There is this quote I heard that stuck with me ever since- it’s something about the things you ignore in the beginning are the same things that destroy you in the end. When I think of that, it causes me to step back and pause.
The real issue is that legal divorce was passed in 69 by the Democrat socialist party, legal abortion in 73, telling us that it was women’s rights, and that divorce was necessary because of abused spouses. If that was true, they would’ve made the law for just certain cases. But they wanted legal divorce for everybody, by the 70s a third of the country was divorced broken homes kids doing drugs sexual disease, then crack AIDS sex education total perversion, and corruption of school curriculums. And divorce became something that people could go into a marriage with knowing they could divorce. This created millions of marriages where people married because of attraction or just loving a person, no matter what they believed opposite values no value values, people marrying for money. When divorce was not legal People were very careful not to marry the wrong people. There was a lot less abuse, people that believed in God married other others that believed in God, people knew that marriage was permanent till death to them part. It was a marriage vowel a covenant under God that would be for life. Legal divorce totally destroyed that. Marriage is a sham because how can you say it’s for life when there’s such thing as divorce as a legal policy? Legal divorce, destroyed marriages it destroy destroyed families. Today more than half of every marriage ends in divorce, and that’s because people don’t worry about who they marry they marry for all the wrong reasons. Our parents and grandparents married for biblical values, they took painstaking measures to make sure each one of them had the same values the same kind of family value values, so there was a lot less chance of ever having the problems we see today. The fact we have discussions about marriage counseling with divorce issues, that is the rot of our society. Just like abortion was never about protecting the rape victim or incest victim, if it was, abortion would only be legal for those cases. The truth was that they wanted Planned Parenthood to be packed with kids like us getting rid of our babies because we were having tons of sex and didn’t want to be married and didn’t wanna have kids. It was just a factory to murder fetus in the womb for convenience of millions of young kids. Never met anybody at Planned Parenthood that came out out of that building that was raped or a victim of incest, but I have countless names endless names of girls who were devastated after getting rid of the baby usually convinced by us boyfriends to get rid of it because Planned Parenthood was so easy and convenient, and by the way, it was always in the lower neighborhood the black neighborhood.. go figure.
Bud, there’s a lot here and I appreciate the depth. And I’ll give full credit where it’s due. The mutual submission piece is real. When both people genuinely put the other first, both people get their needs met. That’s not a weakness, that’s the design. We need so much more of that.
And the Judeo-Christian foundation piece? I’m with you a hundred percent. That framework, covenant, sacrifice, mutual honor, is exactly what’s been gutted from our family systems. It wasn’t just a religious preference, it was the blueprint. And we are absolutely feeling the absence of it.
And yes, a lot has been dismantled culturally and politically. That’s not nothing.
But here’s where I have to pump the brakes a little, because I think we’re externalizing the responsibility. Even if the Bible had never been removed from a single classroom, we still have to choose to do better. We still have to do the inner work. External forces can create harder conditions, but they don’t get to be the reason we opt out of personal accountability.
At the end of the day, if we get right with ourselves, get right with God, and actually move through a real courtship instead of chasing a feeling, maybe we don’t marry wrong to begin with.
Because that’s what keeps happening. People confuse chemistry for compatibility. They feel the butterflies, they go all in, and when that high fades, and it always fades, they go hunting for it again. That’s not a culture problem. That’s a self-awareness problem.
You don’t find a life partner in a feeling. You find them in a values conversation.
OK, here’s the major difference about the Bibles being removed. There’s hardly anybody left who even remembers what was being taught about the Bible, not just the history with the founding fathers and the pilgrims that use the Bibles to frame our government. There were great apologetic Christian teachers in almost every school in the country kindergarten grade school high schools, not only were they Christians, but they studied theology, theology student students, these were our educators, and professors in colleges, in the 40s and 50s all the major universities were heavily influenced by Christianity, and here’s the number one factor that kept our society intact before the liberalism before the drug drugs before all the music and the divorce and abortion, it was the idea of heaven and hell. Preschool, kindergarten and grade school, there wasn’t one school in this country in the 50s that didn’t have teachers answering the questions about heaven and hell telling the children that these things are real. There wasn’t a kid in kindergarten in 1950 that hadn’t heard from multiple sources and usually parents also that there is such thing as hell. Of course, many kids didn’t totally believe it, but there was a doubt. Our entire society had had doubts whether there was hell, like it could be true. We certainly didn’t have the majority of our school systems. Teachers and kids totally rejecting the idea like they do today. There was nobody that thought it was a total joke or no nonsense. There was just too much apologetics too much historical content, like the apostles being tortured and put to death and none of them denounced Jesus the Romans could not get them to denounce Jesus because they swore they saw Jesus alive after he was crucified. These are historical facts not just biblical stories. The rulers of Rome were losing support from the citizens, they started following the gospel, be believing in Jesus. The apostles were offered a lot of money, land and wealth just to denounce Jesus publicly. They were tortured. They kept their mouth shut because they saw Jesus alive.
These things were taught in our schools since the 1700s. This was a normal lesson for a kid to learn by the time a child was seven years old, they heard these stories. We heard these stories when we were in kindergarten and we had dress codes, you weren’t allowed to wear jeans or sneakers, every teacher was a Christian our kindergarten and preschool were all in churches, our kindergarten was out of church, every church in the country had preschool and kindergarten classes.
When there is the idea that there might be hell, when a child grows up with this possibility, that is the number one factor that creates a child that will lie a lot less, they will be more afraid to do wrong be more afraid to cheat, the girls were more afraid to have sex before marriage, the Christians and other countries were really scared of sex outside of marriage, if you talk to any Syrian Christians, Middle Eastern Christians that grew up in the 60s in Syria, anybody who has sex that wasn’t married, was considered dirty. They were ostracized. People say that that’s radical. Will it certainly created a lot of really solid families that dealt with their problems through marriage, and it certainly prevented a lot of people from just having sexual lifestyles. See what I’m saying.? stigma, the fear of hell, the fear of God, the reverence, things that were normal in society, those kinds of social norms were actually the healthiest things in our lives. The Bible being removed was not just the book. It was the teachers they were removed, history books were removed. All curriculums were removed, and within 20 years, by 1984, every high school had smoking lounges for the teacher, I remember in the 70s we had openly gay teachers that were flamboyant, we had a sort of pedophile sex education teacher, they brought in dildos to explain erections to us when we were 13, this was the sex education curriculum that went into every public school, there was no more kindergarten classes telling children that there’s such thing as hell, there was no teaching that we should abstain from sex instead, it was safe sex condoms, Planned Parenthood posters on the wall walls. It wasn’t just the removal of the book it was an entire fundamental transformation of everything that Kids used to be taught in classrooms, and it turned into a ungodly evil, sexually perverted music, drugs, sex abortion, pedophiles LGBT activism, I mean everything you can possibly think of that was a sin in the Bible, it was brought into the classrooms as normal and normalized…. Like my mother was taught that is a sin to have sex unless she’s married she waited until she was married. When we grew up, our teachers were telling us to use condoms for safe sex because we could get our girls pregnant or get a disease, and in case we got a girl pregnant we can go to Planned Parenthood and get rid of the baby. This is what we were taught in sex education class in freshman year 13 years old. And none of us had a fear of going to hell because most of us didn’t really believe that anymore. Without the fear of hell, it gives us a sense that this is the only life to live, so why not have as much fun as possible? Why not have multiple sex partners like who cares about a sin in the Bible if there’s no hell? There’s no real heaven. There’s just nothing after death. This is the only life that’s what we were taught.
So it wasn’t just removal of a Bible. It wasn’t just the fact that we didn’t see or read the Bibles, the only thing we have left that was teaching us. Anything biblical was our families. And if there wasn’t any biblical teaching going on in the home, then a child would spend most of their hours in school and with those friends and those teachers, and that’s how we got poisoned. Like I can trace everything back to junior high they ended parent teachers associations, one year later my entire school was doing LSD mushrooms, and smoking weed, freshman year in high school. It was a drug fest., the Grateful Dead led Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith Pink Floyd AC/DC, Jimi Hendrix tons of drugs, the teachers were all liberal… the sexual revolution, then our cities became flooded with crack then came AIDS sex parades.
No fear of God, no fear that there’s hell… that was the key to keep Kids in line to keep a kid away from drugs to keep a kid abstinent from sex, to keep girls and boys afraid of going to hell, that is the number one factor that actually kept people from doing things that were harmful to them.
If you remove the fear that there is hell from a child and there is no hell or heaven. That child will have no fear of doing anything wrong no consequences, and they will only have to worry about being punished by their parents or not even, if they get away with a crime, they think they got away with it. And people will pleasure themselves because they think this is the only life.
So there’s way more to it… and that also used to transcend into the marriage, the fear of God, the fear of hell… my mother and father had that biblical marriage.. they really didn’t care about themselves at all. My father totally only cared about my mother, and my mother only cared about my father and that was to show me and my sister that they will never split up, they’re only concern was that we would be safe and sound and healthy, and it was a cherishing of one another… we never even heard of divorce, we heard that was evil, that there’s no such thing because it’s till death to them part. My grandparents same thing, it would be evil to get divorced and it was evil to have sex before marriage, somebody could go to hell. That’s what people believed.
And I don’t care what anyone says just like you mentioned, if the liberals were correct, then we would live in a utopia today. If not be believing in God, but just loving a pet like a dog would make life great, we would live in a utopia today.
But without the belief in hell, kids grow up and make a hell on earth.
You’re not entirely wrong. And I’ll give you that, because I think you deserve a real conversation instead of a dismissal.
When we removed the weight of permanence from marriage, when we made “till death do us part” into a suggestion instead of a covenant, we did something dangerous. We turned a sacred act into a trial run. People stopped being careful. They stopped asking the hard questions before the wedding because they knew there was a door behind them if things got hard. That part? I agree with you.
But here’s where your argument loses me.
You keep pointing at the laws. The politics. The church being removed from the public square. And there’s truth in all of it. But you’re skipping right over the reason women ran toward that exit ramp the second it appeared.
Women didn’t leave because divorce became legal. Women left because they finally could.
Before women entered the workforce, before no-fault divorce existed, wives weren’t staying because they were God-fearing. A lot of them were staying because they were trapped. No income. No resources. No legal standing. No real choice. And the men? They weren’t suddenly different because of the 1960s. This is not a new story. Men were emotionally unavailable, domineering, and checked out long before any of that. The wars didn’t create that. The wars just created the circumstances that finally gave women a way out.
They ran the households alone. They built the budgets. They raised the children. They held everything together by themselves and realized, oh, I can actually do this. And when the men came back and expected things to go back to the way they were, women had already tasted what it felt like to be capable. To be whole. So when the laws finally caught up, they left.
Not because of Democrats. Not because of Planned Parenthood. Because they’d been pushed and pushed and pushed, and they finally had somewhere to go.
And here’s the other thing I need to say, because this is important. You can have two God-fearing people in a marriage and still have an incredibly unhealthy, abusive dynamic. Faith doesn’t automatically make someone safe. There are people in every religion, not just Christianity, every single one, who hide behind their beliefs while they manipulate, control, and abuse the people closest to them. They’re not actually walking with God. They’re using God as a shield. They’re using it to stay dominant, to keep their partner compliant, to make abuse look like devotion.
The Bible does say a wife should submit to her husband. But it comes with a condition nobody wants to talk about. That submission is contingent on the husband being someone trustworthy enough to follow. Someone who leads with love and not control. Someone who is emotionally present, not just physically there. If he can’t show up for her emotionally, if he’s manipulative or abusive or hiding behind a Sunday morning smile, then he hasn’t held up his end. And she’s not failing God by recognizing that.
So yes, let’s talk about the fall of the family. Let’s talk about all of it. But let’s tell the whole story, including the part where men have to take accountability for what they brought, or didn’t bring, into those marriages.
Oh, and I will agree with you on the men, though blaming them doesn’t really work because it is the sin of man itself of mankind, but the husband in the marriage overtime did not adhere to the marriage vows, I don’t know what caused that exactly, but if I had to point to something it would be television, the invention of media electronics, and before that it was perverted magazines, sexual images started creeping into our society especially in the 50s with pin up calendars, and television put a lot of things in the eyes and ears of men, sexual images, and other influences, and I believe it really poisoned the minds of a lot of married men. The Bible tells us that we should protect our eyes and ears from these things we’re not even supposed to look at those images, they will poison. Men started looking at the perfect wife in a TV show, movies on television depicting unrealistic lifestyles, and I believe men started comparing what they would see on TV and magazines to what they had at home.
It’s really easy to pinpoint drastic changes in lifestyles and behaviors as certain things in our society changed like when penthouse and Playboy magazine became legal and normalized, when movies started showing more skin, there used to be a time where no actor could have their clothes off, and only a kiss was allowed on screen, and not an open mouth. There were very strict sexual guidelines.
A great movie to watch it’s called cinema Paradiso. It’s an Italian film one of the best movies I’ve ever seen absolutely absolutely brilliant. It’s a love story with a young kid, and his love of the movie theater just before World War II. Cinema Paradisio. I just thought of it because of what I was saying about the sex scenes in movies and how these were banned from the screen, this movie has a great narrative about that.. cinema Paradiso you’ll love that movie!
On the Bible and the woman submitting to her husband, it goes both ways. It says the woman should submit to her husband and vice versa. The husband has to unconditionally give himself to his wife, and on top of that, the husband has to die, for the woman has to protect her with his life, and the children, so there’s even more weight put on the husband, in a biblical sense.
About the marriages, and and any social problems, you have to look at how our society worked, the benefit of the kids, that was the most important thing about the marriage not whether a woman was happy or a man was happy, in fact the Bible is not about a couple being happy, that that’s why the marriage vows are so severe. For better or worse, and there’s gonna be a lot of worse, it is really about children understanding marriage, and that it is to build a kingdom for God. If you look at the numbers, it’s about 47-50 million married couple couples in the 1950s, there was only about 160 million people, there were some years where over 75% of the country was going to church. Regardless of their personal behaviors or own happiness and issues, the strict laws, our political system, it was a Judeah Christian based ideal that was at the core and foundation of government and schools, there was no Board of Education there was no government school, the church was very much involved in politics and schooling. One of the lies in our history books in the 70s was the separation of church and state which doesn’t exist in the constitution in fact all the actual documents were removed from our classrooms, handwritten documents from the founding fathers, including Abigail Adams and their concern that Christians would eventually be removed from leadership and the church would be removed from government and schools, and either foreign or domestic non-believers could end up running the country and they would be more corruptible, schools would be run by atheists or Muslims, other religious figures, and they would poison our Judeah Christian system. The constitution was about freedom of religion, not separation of government from church, they believed that only with a Christian government Christian schools would everyone be free to worship all religions that’s why we had the pledge of allegiance, where no matter what religion we were we aligned with the Judeah Christian government Judeah Christian school system under that God, even if our private life was about the synagogue or some other temple. Christianity was almost the entire population, with a very small populous of Jews and other religions. So those married couple couples, by 1958, they created the most prosperous safest healthiest most sovereign country in the history of the world in the shortest amount of time, the black communities were thriving, there was no crack they weren’t all in government housing they were homeowners, most wealthiest per capita for the smallest group with world class churches like right next-door to my house on the beach where Asbury Park New Jersey was one of those wealthy black communities. Someone came in and burned it down in 1970, NAACP civil rights activist groups, they were doing this since 63 Lyndon B Johnson Newark, same year they removed all the Bibles from the schools. 69, they passed legal divorce. 73 legal abortion. By 78 they already had sex education for 13-year-olds in our schools, 1980 total takeover of school schools by government Board of Education. The 69 legal divorce broke up over 30% of the homes within five years, the poison of liberalism, the music, the drugs, the sexual revolution, there was so much cheating and disasters happening within the households by 69, that that divorce bill was basically the man’s escape to go marry younger women, which was happening, especially in the wealthy or communities and entertainment, almost every celebrity got divorced, and remarried, cheating was through the roof. If they cared about abuse or a really bad situation in marriage, the government would’ve made a stipulation or exceptions and divorce would’ve only been granted for severe case cases just like the abortion bill, they could’ve made that just for rape, victims, or incest, but it was connected to plan parenthood, another one of the Democrats organizations like the teachers unions, it was all about killing babies as many as possible, getting kids to not get married, liberation movement telling women to have a career don’t get married have multiple sex partners, universities teaching that marriage was a social construct, basically slavery. This was coming from academics and political figures. It was an absolute attack on our Judea Christian nation starting with the removal of the Bible and 63.
I have a list of the political figures going back to the 50s that were in the courts trying to get those Bibles removed just before Kennedy was elected, it took them a few years, they already had the plan for taking over the schools changing history, the legal divorce and legal abortion was already on the table back then, but people like JFK were against it. These political people were communist, socialists. Regardless of what anyone thinks about the personal social issues within a marriage in the 1950s, this country was working to create thriving, healthy children. The generations were getting better, more innovative smarter, living longer. The church churches were thriving. It was about 1959, when these communist in our country in infiltrated, the black churches pastors, Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson, then Al Sharpton, and the NAACP became famous, these people were actually destroying the black communities. They would put news stories about a white cop, beating up a black kid, then they would have militia groups go into those black cities and burn them down, the news covered it as racial uprising, these were lies the Black people did not burn their own cities down.
Newark in 63 all the other cities in the country and Asbury Park NJ became war zones, the government allowed crack to flood the cities, Al Sharpton made millions of government housing so did Jesse Jackson. The legal divorce, legal abortion, Board of Education teachers unions, Planned Parenthood, also Weaponized immigration, the funding of radical Islamic terrorism in the Middle East against Israel, the drug cartels, communism in Cuba Venezuela, this was all part of the Democrat socialist party Marxism.. to literally destroy our country spiritually and politically until we were a communist state.
It’s hard for people to really grasp how many tentacles they had, how many different policies they passed and how long they were willing to work at this for decades, it’s why most people look at one issue at a time and think they have a handle on a problem, like legal divorce, or what was wrong with marriages.
No marriage is perfect, but if you wanna look at any nation on earth since the history of this world, nothing was more perfect than the American family in the history of the world from the 1700s until 1958. If you look at it through a biblical lens, forget people’s personal issues in the house, it is overwhelmingly true that our communities were producing the greatest children, healthy, no sexual perversion, no AIDS no crack no smoking meth, no sex parades, no trans children, no sex education, no legal divorce, no legal abortion, I could go on and on. We can absolutely see all hell broke loose in our communities literally the same year they removed the Bibles from the school in 63 starting with the racial riots and the destruction of black communities, churches and families, eventually they started attacking white people, today they call white people supremacist, Nazis, they call Christian’s nationalists and fascist, and they celebrate sexuality in school schools, gender, affirming care surgery for children without their parents permission, trans shooters, something we’ve never seen in our history.
These are the things that would’ve never happened if we didn’t have this communist poison in our democrat party. And many Republicans went along with it.
Do you think people actually have an argument about legal divorce, being a good thing, whatever they say about it, they are missing the entire picture of the people that created that bill, the reason they did it was to absolutely break up the families because that also creates kids that end up drinking doing drugs having sex outside of marriage, stopped going to church. It is all linked to the destruction of the Christian communities, people of faith. And yes, everybody is sinful. But whatever sin plagued our households for almost 180 years, there was no reason to try to fix any of it with government or bureaucrat agencies or activist groups, women’s rights groups, civil rights groups. I can show you an endless list of groups like this that kept popping up in the 60s as more people got divorced as more people married the wrong people, as we started having abortions, the nightclubs the drugs the sexual diseases, everything skyrocketing, including suicide, depression, anxiety, and psych meds for children
What’s striking is how often the real breakup happens years before the divorce papers. One person is still arguing about the problem while the other has already finished grieving the relationship.
Most “sudden” divorces are only sudden to the person who wasn’t paying attention.
One line that really stood out to me was “she didn’t leave suddenly, she left slowly.”
From the outside those moments often look abrupt. But in many long relationships there is a quiet maintenance system running in the background for years. The remembering, the anticipating, the emotional buffering that keeps tension from escalating.
When one partner has been carrying most of that maintenance, the relationship can appear stable for a very long time.
What looks like a sudden walkaway is often the moment that invisible maintenance finally stops.
From the outside it feels shocking. From the inside it has usually been building for years.
Paul, you’re not wrong that mothers shape emotional landscapes. But you’re not entirely right either.
Dad was in that house too or at least helped raise the kids. And if dad spent thirty years teaching his son that crying is weakness, that feelings are for women, that you tough it out and move on… mom was fighting an uphill battle before she even started. Boys don’t just watch their mothers. They watch their fathers & other men to learn what it means to be a man, moms cannot teach that.
This is generational. It’s societal. Men were handed a script that said: provide, protect, don’t feel. That script didn’t come from moms. It came from wars, from locker rooms, boardrooms, from grandfathers who passed it to fathers who passed it to sons.
But here’s what my essay is actually about in case you didn’t read it… Not how he got there. What he does once he’s a grown man with a wife who is begging him to go to therapy, to do the work, to show up differently. And he still says no.
I get the frustration. And yes, the cycle has to be examined. But blame is just pain looking for a place to land. The more useful question isn’t who raised you this way. It’s what are you going to do about it now that you know?
That’s where accountability lives. And that’s where the real work begins.
“All happy marriages are alike; each unhappy marriage is unhappy in its own way.” Perhaps couples counselors see a biased sample, but this pattern of “It can be either gender, but men are more commonly the ones who reject growth opportunities” starts to sound repetitious and weak. Who are the parents that raised their boys so emotionally stunted?
Women, is who.
Who denies it when their boy children do wrong?
Women.
Not every household is a Bates Motel. But the emotional patterns of boys, which become the emotional landscape of men, inarguably result from the households of their youth. Adults make choices, sure, but how they make those choices stems from the generational legacies handed them. Can we please keep that in mind?
Divorce starts when the story changes from “I do” to “I need.”
agreed. There must be a WE always.
Great piece. Sorry for the long response, but you struck a chord.
I'm both a NY divorce lawyer and someone who has been married for 38 years. My constant refrain is that marriage is about "we" not "me." That is the first and most important step in a marriage. At 64, I'm not the person I was at 25 when I married and neither is my wife. But, as we grew older, we continued to accommodate each other.
Self-understanding is important. I don't blame my wife for my flaws or failures, those are mine. This is the view from my foxhole (sorry old soldiers can't resist military metaphors).
Yes, a lot of men avoid therapy, but, many men are socialized from childhood to equate emotional openness with weakness. Stoicism isn’t a personality flaw, it’s a survival strategy that got overlearned. When I was kid back in the dark days of the sixties, boys who showed any emotion other than anger were bullied. Period. We were trained to be "tough." I still see that with my veteran clients suffering from PTSD.
This lead to my next point: For men, the skillset required for therapy often feels like being dropped into a foreign country without a map. They’re told to “open up,” but were never trained how to identify, name, or process emotions in the first place. Oh, yes, did I mention as a kid in the school playground "opening up" got you "beaten up"?
Now, let's look at what I've learned from my women clients: women are often given the opposite constraint, they’re told, implicitly or explicitly, that they are “too emotional,” which creates its own distortion. Expression becomes both expected and criticized at the same time. This creates a mismatch: one partner suppresses, the other is told their expression is excessive.
The result is not just conflict, but mutual misunderstanding of what “normal” emotional behavior even looks like. When people walk into my office having reached this "walkaway dynamic" its because they have reached the point of living in different worlds, speaking a different language. To be fair to both, the “walkaway” dynamic isn’t always about indifference or refusal.
Sometimes it’s about two people operating under completely different emotional rulebooks that neither of them consciously chose. Now, we get to the really hard part: Introspection and self-understanding. Self-understanding is hard because it requires abandoning the story that your reactions are purely rational responses to the other person. Most people, regardless of gender, resist that shift.
My take as someone married for 38 years and together for 40? Long-term marriages that survive tend to involve a gradual renegotiation of identity. So as you move forward it shifts from “we instead of me,” to “who am I now, and who are you now?” repeated over decades. I loved the young woman I married, and I now love the senior citizen I share my life with. We're not the same people who started this journey. We have grown, love and accomodate the people who we are.
Gary, thank you for such a thoughtful and wisdom-packed response. Seriously. Are you sure you're a divorce lawyer? LOL Because you've got the logical brain clearly, but you're operating with emotional fluency most people don't develop unless they've done serious work.
I want to honor what you named about men and their relationship with emotion. They've spent millennia being asked to go to war, to fight, to not feel a damn thing. So they do. But you can't do both at the same time. Our nervous systems don't work that way. It suppresses and comes out in other harmful way. So yes, I get it.
I am grateful the stigma is finally being lifted on men’s mental health. Men have just as many emotions and traumas as women. They just don't have the skillset yet.
It's not just about therapy for men. Therapy is clinical. It's hard for men to open up to a woman therapist, no matter how qualified. It's also hard to open up to a male therapist who's been educated on it but hasn't lived it.
A men's coach? That's different. A coach has been where you are. They've gone through it and come out the other side. They have skin in the game. That's why coaches can push men further than therapy ever could. Not because therapy is bad. But because lived experience changes everything.
You said your wife isn't the same person you married. And you love who she is now, not who she was. That's remarkable. Most people don't get there. We go into marriage imagining the same person sitting in a rocking chair with us someday. But that person doesn't exist. You marry someone young, living one kind of life, maybe have some babies. By the time you're sitting on that rocking chair, you're two completely different people. Bodies change. Priorities change. Everything changes. People either grow together or they grow apart.
So here's what I want to know, and I'm asking for myself as much as anyone reading this. You and your wife have clearly figured something out. You've been married thirty eight years, together forty. You don't blame her for your flaws. You accept hers. You honor who she is today. So what does that actually look like? What do you guys do consistently that keeps the trust and connection there? Daily rituals? The way you show up? Because we're all trying to build something here. Tell us what that looks like.
Wow, those are loaded questions! Joking aside, this is complex because people are, and there is no magic bullet. Give me some time to process this.
Sorry to put you on the spot like that. I really enjoyed reading your comment and had so many questions. Many of the people I know married that long, are not aware enough to think of marriage as a WE. They do a little but not all the way.
You're not putting me on the spot. Just making me think. I'll work on this.
I really hope men read this. I almost walked away 10 years ago after my concerns were dismissed as “you’re too sensitive” or “you’re expecting too much” too many times. He had become so oblivious that he was actually shocked. Given his attitude towards me, I had expected him to just shrug and say “Okay.” We did a TON of work to repair our relationship and we’re much happier now. If men tried want to stay married they can’t hide behind toxic masculinity anymore.
Very well put Amanda. I’m really happy to hear you were able to work it out and rebuild something stronger. It’s not easy either way and it says a lot about your husband and his love for you and the relationship.
Thank you ♥️
I definitely identify with this read. It’s like a slow death.
The ex husband was only willing to go to couples counseling because he thought I was the one that needed help, not him. He was “older and wiser” (note: makes me want to vomit when I think about it now). I recognized I had things I wanted to work on, and work on them I did (and still do; maintenance and practice is key 😉).
What’s fascinating is that the couples counselors we met with often spent a lot more time asking the ex husband questions (more than me) during the sessions. It took me a few couples counselors in to realize what was happening — he needed significantly more work than I did. One counselor reflected back to me, after they knew I was going through a divorce, “you were/are more self-aware and willing to do the work. He lacks self-awareness, the ability to reflect and repair… he wasn’t willing to do the deep work.”
Divorce is f-ing hard; but I would much rather go through the nightmare of a divorce than continue to live in a marriage that felt like purgatory, hell.
Don’t know if I ever want to get married again, but I now know the difference between a man who has “done the work” vs. one who hasn’t or won’t.
Thank you for reading this Carly and commenting. Sadly, you aren’t alone. So many people (women especially) choose divorce over the hell of a broken marriage. It’s so sad to watch, (especially if they have good qualities underneath) for them to ignore their shortcomings. Their self-protection and lack of self-awareness hurts them more than they realize. But I can say congratulations on your ability to stand up for yourself and choose happiness. Good for you to face your stuff and notice that you brought some baggage to the relationship as well. And it definitely is a forever thing once we start working on ourselves. (Check out my latest article on it takes to the tango in toxic relationships) Divorce is definitely hard, but once we get to that point, it’s 100% worth it.
Great article!
“Gray divorce.” The first time I heard that phrase was during the pandemic.
Couples married for years, but travelled separately. Did things on their own. Then the pandemic started. They were forced to hunker down because everything was shut down. Then realized how incompatible they were. I had friends who went through it.
From own experience the red flags often show up in a relationship even before we get married. Yet we get married anyway.
Peter, yes. Exactly this.
We see the red flags before we ever say “I do.” We just talk ourselves out of them. We’re high on oxytocin and convinced that what we’re feeling is destiny. So we jump. Sometimes we have the babies first and figure the rest out later.
And then it settles. And it’s like… oh. This is who we actually are together.
Gray divorce gets me because it’s not that people shouldn’t leave. It’s that they stayed somewhere they were quietly disappearing for so long. Fifty years together isn’t fifty years of happy. Longevity and fulfillment are two very different things.
But you’re right. It starts at the beginning. We’re not always marrying the right person, in fact I think most of us don’t. We’re marrying the feeling or the comfort. And people tend to forget that love is a verb, not just a feeling. Your core values, your character, the non-negotiables that make you who you are? Those don’t lie. And when two people’s don’t align, time doesn’t fix that. It just makes it heavier.
Yes this is all so, so, true. I’m dealing with my situation right now. And, I can tell you, I wish, I would have heeded the red flags from the beginning.
Jennifer that just my head snap back. As I think about it, it is so true.
We are masters of our own destiny, but also masters of bad decisions at times. There’s certainly no do overs, but course correction is possible.
There is this quote I heard that stuck with me ever since- it’s something about the things you ignore in the beginning are the same things that destroy you in the end. When I think of that, it causes me to step back and pause.
The real issue is that legal divorce was passed in 69 by the Democrat socialist party, legal abortion in 73, telling us that it was women’s rights, and that divorce was necessary because of abused spouses. If that was true, they would’ve made the law for just certain cases. But they wanted legal divorce for everybody, by the 70s a third of the country was divorced broken homes kids doing drugs sexual disease, then crack AIDS sex education total perversion, and corruption of school curriculums. And divorce became something that people could go into a marriage with knowing they could divorce. This created millions of marriages where people married because of attraction or just loving a person, no matter what they believed opposite values no value values, people marrying for money. When divorce was not legal People were very careful not to marry the wrong people. There was a lot less abuse, people that believed in God married other others that believed in God, people knew that marriage was permanent till death to them part. It was a marriage vowel a covenant under God that would be for life. Legal divorce totally destroyed that. Marriage is a sham because how can you say it’s for life when there’s such thing as divorce as a legal policy? Legal divorce, destroyed marriages it destroy destroyed families. Today more than half of every marriage ends in divorce, and that’s because people don’t worry about who they marry they marry for all the wrong reasons. Our parents and grandparents married for biblical values, they took painstaking measures to make sure each one of them had the same values the same kind of family value values, so there was a lot less chance of ever having the problems we see today. The fact we have discussions about marriage counseling with divorce issues, that is the rot of our society. Just like abortion was never about protecting the rape victim or incest victim, if it was, abortion would only be legal for those cases. The truth was that they wanted Planned Parenthood to be packed with kids like us getting rid of our babies because we were having tons of sex and didn’t want to be married and didn’t wanna have kids. It was just a factory to murder fetus in the womb for convenience of millions of young kids. Never met anybody at Planned Parenthood that came out out of that building that was raped or a victim of incest, but I have countless names endless names of girls who were devastated after getting rid of the baby usually convinced by us boyfriends to get rid of it because Planned Parenthood was so easy and convenient, and by the way, it was always in the lower neighborhood the black neighborhood.. go figure.
Bud, there’s a lot here and I appreciate the depth. And I’ll give full credit where it’s due. The mutual submission piece is real. When both people genuinely put the other first, both people get their needs met. That’s not a weakness, that’s the design. We need so much more of that.
And the Judeo-Christian foundation piece? I’m with you a hundred percent. That framework, covenant, sacrifice, mutual honor, is exactly what’s been gutted from our family systems. It wasn’t just a religious preference, it was the blueprint. And we are absolutely feeling the absence of it.
And yes, a lot has been dismantled culturally and politically. That’s not nothing.
But here’s where I have to pump the brakes a little, because I think we’re externalizing the responsibility. Even if the Bible had never been removed from a single classroom, we still have to choose to do better. We still have to do the inner work. External forces can create harder conditions, but they don’t get to be the reason we opt out of personal accountability.
At the end of the day, if we get right with ourselves, get right with God, and actually move through a real courtship instead of chasing a feeling, maybe we don’t marry wrong to begin with.
Because that’s what keeps happening. People confuse chemistry for compatibility. They feel the butterflies, they go all in, and when that high fades, and it always fades, they go hunting for it again. That’s not a culture problem. That’s a self-awareness problem.
You don’t find a life partner in a feeling. You find them in a values conversation.
OK, here’s the major difference about the Bibles being removed. There’s hardly anybody left who even remembers what was being taught about the Bible, not just the history with the founding fathers and the pilgrims that use the Bibles to frame our government. There were great apologetic Christian teachers in almost every school in the country kindergarten grade school high schools, not only were they Christians, but they studied theology, theology student students, these were our educators, and professors in colleges, in the 40s and 50s all the major universities were heavily influenced by Christianity, and here’s the number one factor that kept our society intact before the liberalism before the drug drugs before all the music and the divorce and abortion, it was the idea of heaven and hell. Preschool, kindergarten and grade school, there wasn’t one school in this country in the 50s that didn’t have teachers answering the questions about heaven and hell telling the children that these things are real. There wasn’t a kid in kindergarten in 1950 that hadn’t heard from multiple sources and usually parents also that there is such thing as hell. Of course, many kids didn’t totally believe it, but there was a doubt. Our entire society had had doubts whether there was hell, like it could be true. We certainly didn’t have the majority of our school systems. Teachers and kids totally rejecting the idea like they do today. There was nobody that thought it was a total joke or no nonsense. There was just too much apologetics too much historical content, like the apostles being tortured and put to death and none of them denounced Jesus the Romans could not get them to denounce Jesus because they swore they saw Jesus alive after he was crucified. These are historical facts not just biblical stories. The rulers of Rome were losing support from the citizens, they started following the gospel, be believing in Jesus. The apostles were offered a lot of money, land and wealth just to denounce Jesus publicly. They were tortured. They kept their mouth shut because they saw Jesus alive.
These things were taught in our schools since the 1700s. This was a normal lesson for a kid to learn by the time a child was seven years old, they heard these stories. We heard these stories when we were in kindergarten and we had dress codes, you weren’t allowed to wear jeans or sneakers, every teacher was a Christian our kindergarten and preschool were all in churches, our kindergarten was out of church, every church in the country had preschool and kindergarten classes.
When there is the idea that there might be hell, when a child grows up with this possibility, that is the number one factor that creates a child that will lie a lot less, they will be more afraid to do wrong be more afraid to cheat, the girls were more afraid to have sex before marriage, the Christians and other countries were really scared of sex outside of marriage, if you talk to any Syrian Christians, Middle Eastern Christians that grew up in the 60s in Syria, anybody who has sex that wasn’t married, was considered dirty. They were ostracized. People say that that’s radical. Will it certainly created a lot of really solid families that dealt with their problems through marriage, and it certainly prevented a lot of people from just having sexual lifestyles. See what I’m saying.? stigma, the fear of hell, the fear of God, the reverence, things that were normal in society, those kinds of social norms were actually the healthiest things in our lives. The Bible being removed was not just the book. It was the teachers they were removed, history books were removed. All curriculums were removed, and within 20 years, by 1984, every high school had smoking lounges for the teacher, I remember in the 70s we had openly gay teachers that were flamboyant, we had a sort of pedophile sex education teacher, they brought in dildos to explain erections to us when we were 13, this was the sex education curriculum that went into every public school, there was no more kindergarten classes telling children that there’s such thing as hell, there was no teaching that we should abstain from sex instead, it was safe sex condoms, Planned Parenthood posters on the wall walls. It wasn’t just the removal of the book it was an entire fundamental transformation of everything that Kids used to be taught in classrooms, and it turned into a ungodly evil, sexually perverted music, drugs, sex abortion, pedophiles LGBT activism, I mean everything you can possibly think of that was a sin in the Bible, it was brought into the classrooms as normal and normalized…. Like my mother was taught that is a sin to have sex unless she’s married she waited until she was married. When we grew up, our teachers were telling us to use condoms for safe sex because we could get our girls pregnant or get a disease, and in case we got a girl pregnant we can go to Planned Parenthood and get rid of the baby. This is what we were taught in sex education class in freshman year 13 years old. And none of us had a fear of going to hell because most of us didn’t really believe that anymore. Without the fear of hell, it gives us a sense that this is the only life to live, so why not have as much fun as possible? Why not have multiple sex partners like who cares about a sin in the Bible if there’s no hell? There’s no real heaven. There’s just nothing after death. This is the only life that’s what we were taught.
So it wasn’t just removal of a Bible. It wasn’t just the fact that we didn’t see or read the Bibles, the only thing we have left that was teaching us. Anything biblical was our families. And if there wasn’t any biblical teaching going on in the home, then a child would spend most of their hours in school and with those friends and those teachers, and that’s how we got poisoned. Like I can trace everything back to junior high they ended parent teachers associations, one year later my entire school was doing LSD mushrooms, and smoking weed, freshman year in high school. It was a drug fest., the Grateful Dead led Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith Pink Floyd AC/DC, Jimi Hendrix tons of drugs, the teachers were all liberal… the sexual revolution, then our cities became flooded with crack then came AIDS sex parades.
No fear of God, no fear that there’s hell… that was the key to keep Kids in line to keep a kid away from drugs to keep a kid abstinent from sex, to keep girls and boys afraid of going to hell, that is the number one factor that actually kept people from doing things that were harmful to them.
If you remove the fear that there is hell from a child and there is no hell or heaven. That child will have no fear of doing anything wrong no consequences, and they will only have to worry about being punished by their parents or not even, if they get away with a crime, they think they got away with it. And people will pleasure themselves because they think this is the only life.
So there’s way more to it… and that also used to transcend into the marriage, the fear of God, the fear of hell… my mother and father had that biblical marriage.. they really didn’t care about themselves at all. My father totally only cared about my mother, and my mother only cared about my father and that was to show me and my sister that they will never split up, they’re only concern was that we would be safe and sound and healthy, and it was a cherishing of one another… we never even heard of divorce, we heard that was evil, that there’s no such thing because it’s till death to them part. My grandparents same thing, it would be evil to get divorced and it was evil to have sex before marriage, somebody could go to hell. That’s what people believed.
And I don’t care what anyone says just like you mentioned, if the liberals were correct, then we would live in a utopia today. If not be believing in God, but just loving a pet like a dog would make life great, we would live in a utopia today.
But without the belief in hell, kids grow up and make a hell on earth.
Hi Bud. I always enjoy your responses. Thank you.
You’re not entirely wrong. And I’ll give you that, because I think you deserve a real conversation instead of a dismissal.
When we removed the weight of permanence from marriage, when we made “till death do us part” into a suggestion instead of a covenant, we did something dangerous. We turned a sacred act into a trial run. People stopped being careful. They stopped asking the hard questions before the wedding because they knew there was a door behind them if things got hard. That part? I agree with you.
But here’s where your argument loses me.
You keep pointing at the laws. The politics. The church being removed from the public square. And there’s truth in all of it. But you’re skipping right over the reason women ran toward that exit ramp the second it appeared.
Women didn’t leave because divorce became legal. Women left because they finally could.
Before women entered the workforce, before no-fault divorce existed, wives weren’t staying because they were God-fearing. A lot of them were staying because they were trapped. No income. No resources. No legal standing. No real choice. And the men? They weren’t suddenly different because of the 1960s. This is not a new story. Men were emotionally unavailable, domineering, and checked out long before any of that. The wars didn’t create that. The wars just created the circumstances that finally gave women a way out.
They ran the households alone. They built the budgets. They raised the children. They held everything together by themselves and realized, oh, I can actually do this. And when the men came back and expected things to go back to the way they were, women had already tasted what it felt like to be capable. To be whole. So when the laws finally caught up, they left.
Not because of Democrats. Not because of Planned Parenthood. Because they’d been pushed and pushed and pushed, and they finally had somewhere to go.
And here’s the other thing I need to say, because this is important. You can have two God-fearing people in a marriage and still have an incredibly unhealthy, abusive dynamic. Faith doesn’t automatically make someone safe. There are people in every religion, not just Christianity, every single one, who hide behind their beliefs while they manipulate, control, and abuse the people closest to them. They’re not actually walking with God. They’re using God as a shield. They’re using it to stay dominant, to keep their partner compliant, to make abuse look like devotion.
The Bible does say a wife should submit to her husband. But it comes with a condition nobody wants to talk about. That submission is contingent on the husband being someone trustworthy enough to follow. Someone who leads with love and not control. Someone who is emotionally present, not just physically there. If he can’t show up for her emotionally, if he’s manipulative or abusive or hiding behind a Sunday morning smile, then he hasn’t held up his end. And she’s not failing God by recognizing that.
So yes, let’s talk about the fall of the family. Let’s talk about all of it. But let’s tell the whole story, including the part where men have to take accountability for what they brought, or didn’t bring, into those marriages.
You want the covenant back? Start there.
Oh, and I will agree with you on the men, though blaming them doesn’t really work because it is the sin of man itself of mankind, but the husband in the marriage overtime did not adhere to the marriage vows, I don’t know what caused that exactly, but if I had to point to something it would be television, the invention of media electronics, and before that it was perverted magazines, sexual images started creeping into our society especially in the 50s with pin up calendars, and television put a lot of things in the eyes and ears of men, sexual images, and other influences, and I believe it really poisoned the minds of a lot of married men. The Bible tells us that we should protect our eyes and ears from these things we’re not even supposed to look at those images, they will poison. Men started looking at the perfect wife in a TV show, movies on television depicting unrealistic lifestyles, and I believe men started comparing what they would see on TV and magazines to what they had at home.
It’s really easy to pinpoint drastic changes in lifestyles and behaviors as certain things in our society changed like when penthouse and Playboy magazine became legal and normalized, when movies started showing more skin, there used to be a time where no actor could have their clothes off, and only a kiss was allowed on screen, and not an open mouth. There were very strict sexual guidelines.
A great movie to watch it’s called cinema Paradiso. It’s an Italian film one of the best movies I’ve ever seen absolutely absolutely brilliant. It’s a love story with a young kid, and his love of the movie theater just before World War II. Cinema Paradisio. I just thought of it because of what I was saying about the sex scenes in movies and how these were banned from the screen, this movie has a great narrative about that.. cinema Paradiso you’ll love that movie!
On the Bible and the woman submitting to her husband, it goes both ways. It says the woman should submit to her husband and vice versa. The husband has to unconditionally give himself to his wife, and on top of that, the husband has to die, for the woman has to protect her with his life, and the children, so there’s even more weight put on the husband, in a biblical sense.
About the marriages, and and any social problems, you have to look at how our society worked, the benefit of the kids, that was the most important thing about the marriage not whether a woman was happy or a man was happy, in fact the Bible is not about a couple being happy, that that’s why the marriage vows are so severe. For better or worse, and there’s gonna be a lot of worse, it is really about children understanding marriage, and that it is to build a kingdom for God. If you look at the numbers, it’s about 47-50 million married couple couples in the 1950s, there was only about 160 million people, there were some years where over 75% of the country was going to church. Regardless of their personal behaviors or own happiness and issues, the strict laws, our political system, it was a Judeah Christian based ideal that was at the core and foundation of government and schools, there was no Board of Education there was no government school, the church was very much involved in politics and schooling. One of the lies in our history books in the 70s was the separation of church and state which doesn’t exist in the constitution in fact all the actual documents were removed from our classrooms, handwritten documents from the founding fathers, including Abigail Adams and their concern that Christians would eventually be removed from leadership and the church would be removed from government and schools, and either foreign or domestic non-believers could end up running the country and they would be more corruptible, schools would be run by atheists or Muslims, other religious figures, and they would poison our Judeah Christian system. The constitution was about freedom of religion, not separation of government from church, they believed that only with a Christian government Christian schools would everyone be free to worship all religions that’s why we had the pledge of allegiance, where no matter what religion we were we aligned with the Judeah Christian government Judeah Christian school system under that God, even if our private life was about the synagogue or some other temple. Christianity was almost the entire population, with a very small populous of Jews and other religions. So those married couple couples, by 1958, they created the most prosperous safest healthiest most sovereign country in the history of the world in the shortest amount of time, the black communities were thriving, there was no crack they weren’t all in government housing they were homeowners, most wealthiest per capita for the smallest group with world class churches like right next-door to my house on the beach where Asbury Park New Jersey was one of those wealthy black communities. Someone came in and burned it down in 1970, NAACP civil rights activist groups, they were doing this since 63 Lyndon B Johnson Newark, same year they removed all the Bibles from the schools. 69, they passed legal divorce. 73 legal abortion. By 78 they already had sex education for 13-year-olds in our schools, 1980 total takeover of school schools by government Board of Education. The 69 legal divorce broke up over 30% of the homes within five years, the poison of liberalism, the music, the drugs, the sexual revolution, there was so much cheating and disasters happening within the households by 69, that that divorce bill was basically the man’s escape to go marry younger women, which was happening, especially in the wealthy or communities and entertainment, almost every celebrity got divorced, and remarried, cheating was through the roof. If they cared about abuse or a really bad situation in marriage, the government would’ve made a stipulation or exceptions and divorce would’ve only been granted for severe case cases just like the abortion bill, they could’ve made that just for rape, victims, or incest, but it was connected to plan parenthood, another one of the Democrats organizations like the teachers unions, it was all about killing babies as many as possible, getting kids to not get married, liberation movement telling women to have a career don’t get married have multiple sex partners, universities teaching that marriage was a social construct, basically slavery. This was coming from academics and political figures. It was an absolute attack on our Judea Christian nation starting with the removal of the Bible and 63.
I have a list of the political figures going back to the 50s that were in the courts trying to get those Bibles removed just before Kennedy was elected, it took them a few years, they already had the plan for taking over the schools changing history, the legal divorce and legal abortion was already on the table back then, but people like JFK were against it. These political people were communist, socialists. Regardless of what anyone thinks about the personal social issues within a marriage in the 1950s, this country was working to create thriving, healthy children. The generations were getting better, more innovative smarter, living longer. The church churches were thriving. It was about 1959, when these communist in our country in infiltrated, the black churches pastors, Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson, then Al Sharpton, and the NAACP became famous, these people were actually destroying the black communities. They would put news stories about a white cop, beating up a black kid, then they would have militia groups go into those black cities and burn them down, the news covered it as racial uprising, these were lies the Black people did not burn their own cities down.
Newark in 63 all the other cities in the country and Asbury Park NJ became war zones, the government allowed crack to flood the cities, Al Sharpton made millions of government housing so did Jesse Jackson. The legal divorce, legal abortion, Board of Education teachers unions, Planned Parenthood, also Weaponized immigration, the funding of radical Islamic terrorism in the Middle East against Israel, the drug cartels, communism in Cuba Venezuela, this was all part of the Democrat socialist party Marxism.. to literally destroy our country spiritually and politically until we were a communist state.
It’s hard for people to really grasp how many tentacles they had, how many different policies they passed and how long they were willing to work at this for decades, it’s why most people look at one issue at a time and think they have a handle on a problem, like legal divorce, or what was wrong with marriages.
No marriage is perfect, but if you wanna look at any nation on earth since the history of this world, nothing was more perfect than the American family in the history of the world from the 1700s until 1958. If you look at it through a biblical lens, forget people’s personal issues in the house, it is overwhelmingly true that our communities were producing the greatest children, healthy, no sexual perversion, no AIDS no crack no smoking meth, no sex parades, no trans children, no sex education, no legal divorce, no legal abortion, I could go on and on. We can absolutely see all hell broke loose in our communities literally the same year they removed the Bibles from the school in 63 starting with the racial riots and the destruction of black communities, churches and families, eventually they started attacking white people, today they call white people supremacist, Nazis, they call Christian’s nationalists and fascist, and they celebrate sexuality in school schools, gender, affirming care surgery for children without their parents permission, trans shooters, something we’ve never seen in our history.
These are the things that would’ve never happened if we didn’t have this communist poison in our democrat party. And many Republicans went along with it.
Do you think people actually have an argument about legal divorce, being a good thing, whatever they say about it, they are missing the entire picture of the people that created that bill, the reason they did it was to absolutely break up the families because that also creates kids that end up drinking doing drugs having sex outside of marriage, stopped going to church. It is all linked to the destruction of the Christian communities, people of faith. And yes, everybody is sinful. But whatever sin plagued our households for almost 180 years, there was no reason to try to fix any of it with government or bureaucrat agencies or activist groups, women’s rights groups, civil rights groups. I can show you an endless list of groups like this that kept popping up in the 60s as more people got divorced as more people married the wrong people, as we started having abortions, the nightclubs the drugs the sexual diseases, everything skyrocketing, including suicide, depression, anxiety, and psych meds for children
What’s striking is how often the real breakup happens years before the divorce papers. One person is still arguing about the problem while the other has already finished grieving the relationship.
Most “sudden” divorces are only sudden to the person who wasn’t paying attention.
One line that really stood out to me was “she didn’t leave suddenly, she left slowly.”
From the outside those moments often look abrupt. But in many long relationships there is a quiet maintenance system running in the background for years. The remembering, the anticipating, the emotional buffering that keeps tension from escalating.
When one partner has been carrying most of that maintenance, the relationship can appear stable for a very long time.
What looks like a sudden walkaway is often the moment that invisible maintenance finally stops.
From the outside it feels shocking. From the inside it has usually been building for years.
Paul, you’re not wrong that mothers shape emotional landscapes. But you’re not entirely right either.
Dad was in that house too or at least helped raise the kids. And if dad spent thirty years teaching his son that crying is weakness, that feelings are for women, that you tough it out and move on… mom was fighting an uphill battle before she even started. Boys don’t just watch their mothers. They watch their fathers & other men to learn what it means to be a man, moms cannot teach that.
This is generational. It’s societal. Men were handed a script that said: provide, protect, don’t feel. That script didn’t come from moms. It came from wars, from locker rooms, boardrooms, from grandfathers who passed it to fathers who passed it to sons.
But here’s what my essay is actually about in case you didn’t read it… Not how he got there. What he does once he’s a grown man with a wife who is begging him to go to therapy, to do the work, to show up differently. And he still says no.
I get the frustration. And yes, the cycle has to be examined. But blame is just pain looking for a place to land. The more useful question isn’t who raised you this way. It’s what are you going to do about it now that you know?
That’s where accountability lives. And that’s where the real work begins.
“All happy marriages are alike; each unhappy marriage is unhappy in its own way.” Perhaps couples counselors see a biased sample, but this pattern of “It can be either gender, but men are more commonly the ones who reject growth opportunities” starts to sound repetitious and weak. Who are the parents that raised their boys so emotionally stunted?
Women, is who.
Who denies it when their boy children do wrong?
Women.
Not every household is a Bates Motel. But the emotional patterns of boys, which become the emotional landscape of men, inarguably result from the households of their youth. Adults make choices, sure, but how they make those choices stems from the generational legacies handed them. Can we please keep that in mind?
Yes. And it can come off cold or cruel bc “she” already grieved and mourned in silence with the hope still…until the hope is gone. ☹️ It’s really sad.