Happily (N)ever After: Why children of divorce are more well adapted to deal with complicted modern lives...

As culture evolves and changes over time, old ideologies and institutions are forced to keep up to speed with newer younger generations. Older, less relevant people die off, and take their outdated, irrelevant world views with them.

In the 50s divorce was much less common, most likely due to the social stigma of admitting to failure when it comes to love. The 50s was overall a horrible time to be alive, full of repression, close mindedness, and hatred for minorities. As delusional puritanical norms fade away (albeit too slowly to make any real kind of social progress) and the years have gone by, divorce has gotten more and more common...

Throughout the 80s, divorce rates went up exponentially, and unless a child was living a blissfully naive life in a mostly white suburb, chances are that children born during those times came from divorced parents, which is to say they grew up with just a mom.

Is it bad to be missing a dad? Probably not... most people I knew who actually had a dad don't really have anything good to say about him. Out of my entire peer group, I can only think of 3 individuals who had a "good" dad.

What I'm trying most to assert is when your parents divorce at a young age you are forced to see love and life for what it truly is- constantly changing. When your basic archetype for a love relationship fails, you accept the fact that love could never be real. People don't stay together because they don't have to; moreover, it's impossible and unfair to demand a life time commitment from anybody. As these children because adults, they deal with prospective love interests more cautiously and less naively. Children of divorced parents see love for that it truly is- fleeting and intangible.

I personally did not come from a home with divorced parents, which means my parents lived in complete misery instead of choosing to make a break. Overall, I find this unhealthy, because the amount of couples I know who stayed together and still are in love happen to be so few that I can count them on one hand. We're not here to talk about my and my dysfunctional family life. From speaking to other people in my peer group who don't come from divorced parents, I've noticed overwhelming similarities to the way we view relationships and they are all unrealistic and unhealthy- for both people involved.

Where do I fit into this? Of course I dream about falling in love and making it last forever. Will it happen? Most likely not. Does it happen for anybody? Maybe... but probably not.

As I've gotten older, I've been forced to psychoanalyze why I feel the way I do, and from where do those feelings and notions come? It's obvious to me that almost everything that I think is real about love comes from Disney movies and television shows that were on TV when I was a little boy. Is this healthy? Perhaps. Is it delusional? Most assuredly. That's why love remains my one delusion.