Are you *sure* marriage is worthwhile?

[outlier]

I don't mean this as a personal affront to anyone here. Honest.

I personally know one active member -- a total of *one* -- who admits that married life isn't all that great. Loves his kids, doesn't like living with his wife so much. The thing is -- he's the only one I know who has it bad enough to overcome the layers of self-deceit that seem to frequently be applied.

Hold on, don't crucify me yet. I'm not accusing anyone personally or saying it's impossible to be happily married.

What I'm saying is that I know *one person* who admits to being somewhat unhappy in his marriage (in truth, I think he's far, *far* more than "somewhat unhappy", but even he doesn't admit to much more than that). But I know many, many more who *are* unhappy in their marriage, but just haven't allowed themselves to realize that.

Hear me out first.

My real contention is merely this: there are a far larger number of members of the church for whom marriage isn't that great than there are who admit (to themselves first of all) that their marriage for them isn't that great. I'm not trying to lay down stats or percentages, just this concept. Granted, my assertion is based on a reasonably small sample of people whom I personally know and there are plenty of selection factors involved there, but still, this seems to be the case.

My theory: In a culture like the LDS culture in which family and marriage is so heavily stressed and so socially important, there is every pressure in the world to be "happily married". Therefore, a person in the church will all but always give marriage the benefit of the doubt. They will have a tendency to look on the situation favorably because they have to in order to maintain social credibility. There's very little incentive to look at the situation objectively -- it only seems to happen once self-preservation is on the line (or when the marriage itself -- for whatever reason -- threatens social standing).

Anyway. I guess that's all I got. And a strong counter-contention, I guess, is that even if it is a bunch of self-deceit keeping LDS couples together, then these people are probably getting a greater benefit from their self-deceit than they would from any objective, realistic introspection anyway. Certainly, I think society (and Mormon society in particular) benefits from this self-deception and, frankly, if humans weren't predisposed to self-deception, I'm guessing we'd mostly have killed ourselves by now after realizing there's no rational reason to believe that tomorrow's going to be any better than today.

Still, when I hear statements about the greatness of marriage, it makes me wonder whether this perception of the institution isn't the result of an en masse self-deception. And frankly it interests me particularly and personally being (a) unmarried and (b) unskilled at avoiding perceiving reality.

Thanks for the audience. I'd be ecstatic if someone could offer some solid objective and hyper-rational counterarguments.

o