Deep dark, huh? I think maybe I should have included the word "context" in there.

I see a lot of misconceptions about divorce statistics going on in this thread.

Divorce rates have increased since the introduction of no-fault divorce (1950-1970), certainly, but the per capita rate of divorce (number of divorces per 1000 people) has actually decreased since 1980. General divorce rates have actually held fairly steady since the 1970s. Additionally, marriages that end in divorce last about 7 years on average.

I'm sorry, woods, but you're buying into the idea that somehow yesterday was better than today. I see plenty of long-term marriages surviving today. My parents have been married for 27 years, and I fully expect them to stay married until death separates them. My SO's parents are the same, and his family is full of similar, stable marriages. I also see marriages break apart; divorce has touched both of our extended families, but in both cases, the divorce was for a good reason, and certainly not for any lack of trying. People don't throw in the towel on a 25+ year marriage without a good reason. Regardless of how long a marriage has lasted, the alternatives must outweigh the costs for divorce to take place.

The real reason why divorce rates seem higher is because of the introduction of no-fault divorce. Prior to no-fault divorce, it was very difficult for women in particular to get out of bad marriages.

The CDC does a great job of tracking marriage and divorce trends. You can read a report here: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_23/sr23_022.pdf

/threadjack

I'll give it a shot if there's mutual interest, but I won't stay with someone I can't trust. It's also possible that I can trust someone, they can trust me, and we just drift apart after a while or don't have the same interests. June Cleaver would never cheat on me, but I'm pretty sure she wouldn't react very favorably if I suggested she strap on some gravity boots and 69 while hanging upside down.

I see why you see me as on the fence, but I think you also seem to be. I want my relationship based on mutual trust but don't really find the traditional way of doing things appealing, while you like the traditional marriage and family idea (which comes with loving each other till death do you part,) but are afraid it won't work out that way and worry that your worst fears are true.

I think this is one of those things where we have to agree to disagree. I hope you find someone who never makes you suspicious enough to want to snoop, because it sounds like some people in the past have screwed you over pretty badly and you blame your "choices in men," and probably at least subconsciously feel responsible, which you shouldn't.
The annual divorce rate is 3.6 per 1000 people. The marriage rate is 7.5 per 1000. This doesn't take into account the 54.5 million married couples out there. Yes, for every 2 couples married this year, one will divorce, but there are a whole lot of people who were already married who will stay married, and the ones who divorce are not all from this year's new marriages. It's a really deceptive statistic.

I understand what you mean - wasn't saying 'oh it's too bad they didn't try.' I just hate to hear about any divorce, unless there's some sort of abuse or cheating involved. It's great your parents are both happier now.
GET OUT OF MY BRAIN! lol

This slut was breaking up with her bf of 4 years. She started spending the night. Started with a couple nights / week then it turned into every night. When she wasn't around, I pitched a fit to him saying I didn't want her living with us, etc. Of course, he stood up for 'poor her and her unfortunate situation.' I will never allow anything like this to happen again.

Last I heard, they're still together. Glad I could help. pft.
I am over him completely though. It's the situation that I'm still aching over. Being screwed, in general. Fuckerz.
They've decreased slightly, but not by much. I found a killer graph last night that showed where it shot sky high and pretty much held steady. But I didn't post it because I didn't want to derail too badly.
I'm with you on everything you said here. It's not like 100% of marriages are ending in divorce. Of course there are those that will last. And I said earlier that no, I don't necessarily believe divorce is always a bad thing.
I'll agree that this is 'a' reason. But not 'the' reason.
I dunno - she always struck me as a dirty, dirty gutter slut.
Totally.
That's very sweet (and true) of you to say. Thank you. :o

:lol: Oh, she totally was.



I'd also like to mention, even if it's not that important, that my best friend, my (now ex-) husband, and me shared an apartment for a while. It was fine.

I shared an apartment with my wife and her classmate/friend one summer. She was decently attractive but a total slut. She was all about anon sex with no protection, had constant yeast infections (or something else, she always complained but never went to the doc), etc. I wouldn't fuck her with someone else's dick, seriously. My buddy came over one night for a party and I told him, as a friend, that he shouldn't fuck her. He was bewildered, but when I explained why he took my warning well and thanked me for saving his dick :lol:

She tried to hook up with my wife while I was out of town for a summer job. My wife called crying when she was alone and I had to quit my job and move back. She was scared of psycho slut LOL. We kicked her out a month later.

lmao .. sorry.. i swear.. but if i didn't know you were out of my area i'd have to say you're a damned mirror of me.

i'm the same way, i feel completely over the guy but the situation i went through still gives me nightmares

The United Bank of Switzerland at this very moment....

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Well it's been quite a few years now that my wife has had them and I can say for a fact that she hasn't looked at my 2 main email accounts (work and personal), they are on a FreeBSD box that reminds you when you last logged in an keeps a log of all accesses of email (as well as other things) that I review regularly to make sure that it is still secure and hacker free. As for my throwaway accounts (yahoo/gmail etc) I delete or forward and delete as soon as I read the messages. So offhand I'd say she trusts me enough not to even bother spying on me. Oh yeah she does have the ROOT password but honestly she hasn't a clue how to cover her tracks that I wouldn't see the first time I did a system review, to be candid the command line is not her friend at all :shakehead: no matter how much I try teach her otherwise.

I have never felt I needed to do it. I don't think I would. I am pretty honest and straight-forward and I expect the same back. Without trust, I can't be with someone for long.

I wouldnt ask my girlfriend for her passwords... she knows my bank card PIN, but not any of my passwords (not that I dont trust her or have secret things - there is just no reason she would ever need them)

It wasn't the finding of things you wished you hadn't, that destroyed you, it was the fact that your ex was disrespectful of you and the relationship you had...disrespectful enough to have done the things he wanted to keep hidden from you. Why live a lie? It's probably the best thing that happened in your relationship, at that time...for you to find out...it was dead already, but it sounds as if he was willing to go on living a lie...maybe for convenience, or maybe because he was getting away with it and had the best of both worlds. You deserve better than that. I don't hide anything from my SO...he knows my passwords, my mistakes, my hangups, my desires, my past...he can ask me anything, and he'll get the truth in return. If I felt there was something about my life that he shouldn't know...then that's something that shouldn't be in my life.

You should feel no guilt about the end of your marriage...you should feel joy! Marriage is about love, not deceit. Good thing you're free of it.

Shared passwords before, but nothing exciting in it anyways (got asked to check a few things for my ex, but didn't rummage through everything).

I'm usually trusting enough to not snoop.

I know I'm going to take a lot of abuse for this one. But I did the mother-of-all violations of trust and privacy. I read my ex-wife's diary. We'd been married for 6 years, I've always known where she kept it, always had all her passwords, as she had mine, and had never snooped. Then over several months she started doing things that made me suspicious. Nothing that I could really pin down, I work a lot. Little things, little mannerisms, little clues. So one day I had to know. I sat down, read her diary, and I was right. She'd been having an affair, and was planning on leaving me.

So, yes, doing it was wrong. But here's how these things are supposed to go. I snoop, I find nothing, I feel like an asshole, and I don't do it anymore. Not I snoop, and I find out all my suspicions are confirmed. I certainly found enough to not feel any guilt about violation of privacy. I suppose the opinion would be that I should have just asked, but I didn't want to insult her if I was just being paranoid.

So all this talk about uncompromising trust is well and good, I suppose, in an ideal world. But in my mind, what I found justified my actions. All of the people talking about how the quality of marriage has gone down, how people don't try enough, etc., are probably right. But being in the Army for 8 years, I've seen enough people betrayed, enough marriages fail, that I don't really know if I'll ever be able to achieve that uncompromising trust that would be ideal. At the very least, it'll take a long time.

On a side note, my fiancee introduced me to TFP, so I know that she stops in here to read. She might not like all of this, but since she helped me recover from the wreckage of my divorce while I was in Iraq, I think she'll understand.

Unbelievable! How did you avoid succumbing to the overwhelming need to know everything about your partner even though it violated their trust, privacy, and simple human dignity to do such?

/sarcasm

It's nice to see some people still have scruples.

...

That sounds familiar.

I have. It was a weird time in both my life and our relationship - I was a young, crazy 18 year old, angry and paranoid. And he was stationed in South Korea. So yeah, I obsessively hacked into his e-mail account. It was stupid and childish, and I hope I'm past such things.

His e-mail password hasn't changed, but I haven't snooped since I gew up. Oh, and after he came home I confessed everything. He rolled his eyes and laughed at me.

I would LIKE to.. but I wouldn't. Not even if he had left his account open on the browser or something. Unless I saw something fishy right off the bat. If I saw something like, "Hey horny, this is Britney, the girl you fucked last Saturday..." then of course I'd look! :P

Kinda like Spiritsoar I had an experience.

In a 7yr relationship my fiancee was always accusing me of cheating, even though she was a drop dead gorgeous (in my eyes) model. I had no reason to ever snoop in her diary or phone or stuff.
One night she confronted me (again) that she had "hard proof" I was cheating this time. I again wondered what ingenious story she might have since the highlight of most days on campus were sitting in the computer lab cold and hungry, or cleaning toilets at my dad's shop.

She found a letter of me writing to a girl talking about how positive life can be and that one day we can see each other again and it was signed LOVE and my name.
The only problem was I wrote this letter in class and stuffed it in the back of the thick textbook. She actually flipped through ALL my text books at some point that night and found that folded letter!

Oh, it was to my little sister who was away in treatment and not doing well. Apparently I didnt address the letter "dear sister" but I just started writing.

this was just ONE incident of many that I should have had a lightbulb turn on in my head telling me something was wrong.

The day I did find out something was wrong (her having an affair), her defensive remark was "well, you have to had known for years and been ok with it, its in my damn diary that's in the room, and don't tell me you didn't read it!"



speechless....................

snooping is bad. I am still defensive and hide passwords and emails, though they are just bills usually.

Nope. I'm not the jealous type and I've never been given a reason to look. Even if I had a strong suspicion, I wouldn't look. I've had the opportunity to do so in the pass and readily declined it. Respect for one's privacy is too much of an priority for me.

Damn. Now I know why liquor is so cheap on post.

I even refuse to take the wallet out of somebody's purse/bag. I just bring them the bag. The idea of somebody going through my email or private messages is just mind boggling. I don't have anything to hide, but the act itself is insulting. I envision a big fight if a woman in my future asks for my passwords as a show of trust. I don't even give them to my family, yet I know all theirs and a few of my friends'.

No, only cause I doubt I'd ever be interested enough to care. If it's not a danger to my health, then my life will go on regardless of what happens.

I wouldn't care if my bf looked. Nothing to hide, and he knows it. :)

I set up her email, both on the server and on the computer and I've never looked except to see if my test email got through. I trust her completely so I've never even had the mental debate to check on her, it just doesn't enter into my thoughts.

She has my passwords and checks on a regular basis though. Since I have nothing to hide, I don't mind. The only part that is annoying is missing important emails since they are marked as read by the time I get to them.