A Polygamous Future

When I observe the world around me today, I see a world that is changing. "How very obvious," you might say, but our world is changing at such a rapid pace that we are finding it increasingly difficult to keep up. The wealth of information available to us is currently doubling less than every five years, and by 2020 it is projected that knowledge will double every 73 days. From this, it can be concluded that the people we are, our personalities and beliefs and hobbies, will change just as rapidly as a result. My computer tells me that iTunes has to be updated just about every month and my cell phone is outdated despite being only about a year old. With some tapping upon a keyboard and the click of a button, our sense of individual, our perception of self, can be changed on MySpace or Facebook. If we want to be someone else to others, we simply say what we are, and in an instant we have taken on a new persona. Instant gratification and instantaneous change have become the standard of our society.

Now, given this, it would seem necessary that the institution of marriage must change along with everything else. Why? Because if one person can change so fast, it is highly unlikely that their spouse will change in a similar or compatible fashion. It is also more likely that spouses are in very different environments despite being married, and will change accordingly. For example, Mr. and Mrs. Jones may be married and live in the same home with the same children, but for the majority of the day Mr. Jones works at his urban business firm. Mrs. Jones remains in the suburbs, running errands, or perhaps has a job of her own closer to their home. Mr. Jones becomes more and more like his corporate peers, but Mrs. Jones is in an entirely different environment. After five, seven, ten years of marriage they are nothing like the people they were when they took their vows.

So now what? It seems that logically (and almost tragically) that to have one spouse is both impossible and irrational. A few statistics to leave you with...

• In America, 11% of adults are currently divorced, and 1 in 4 adults has been divorced in their lifetime.
• Interestingly enough, rates of divorce for conservative Christians are significantly higher than that of other faiths (http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_dira.htm).
• Baby boomers (33 to 52 years of age) - 34% have been divorced
  Builders (53 to 72 years of age) - 37%
  Seniors (above 72 years of age) - 18%
• My personal favorite: red states have a divorce rate 27% higher than blue states.