When 50 percent of marriages end in divorce, 75 percent of divorcees remarry, 65 percent of their marriages include children from another marriage and 60 percent of those marriages end in divorce, can there be anything traditional left about the “traditional family”?

We’re creating new traditions. We have more working moms and fewer children, but baby sisters and big brothers no longer have to be birthed or adopted. They can be married into.

Some studies show that children from divorced families have more social and emotional problems than those from intact families. But surely children from divorced families who become part of healthy families can have fewer social and emotional problems than children who remain in unhealthy intact families?

We’d do better to make loving — rather than staying together or divorcing — the tradition. And if we make loving the tradition before getting married (the first time), we’re bound to have fewer divorces and stronger families.
We must start where we are, though. For some of us, it is too late to marry for love the first time. For some of us, it is even too late to teach our children to marry for love the first time. But it’s not too late for any of us to teach our children to love now, right where they are.… More

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