So, I visited Liz today, and we ended up talking about a topic that's been nagging at me for quite some time. It seems like so many people in our parents generation are either miserable in their marriages, or divorced. How does this happen? How can we, the next generation, prevent that exact same thing from happening? None of us want to believe that we'll grow old with someone and be miserable with them.

Liz and I talked a lot about generational differences and how things were when our grandparents got married, versus our parents, versus us. When our grandparents' generation got married, it was a very quick process. You met someone. You "courted" or whatever for a while, you got engaged and then you got married. There were very specific, defined gender roles for what the wife and husband were supposed to do. It was simple, and you knew what to expect. They didn't expect to find a "soul mate" or a best friend for life, or anything like that. They just found someone that they thought would be suitable and then learned to deal with whatever challenges they had.

Our parents generation was kind of in a rough place now that I think about it. They had the example from their parents about what a marriage was. At the same time, they were experiencing the women's rights movement, and the gender roles weren't quite as defined. I'm sure it was very confusing, because people still didn't spend a whole lot of time searching for "the one." Most people were married by the time they were my age. But yet, they didn't have the security of knowing exactly what to expect from their spouse.

My generation, on the other hand, is waiting longer and longer to get married. Which has its own set of confusions. We don't have very specific gender roles. The challenge lies in finding someone whose idea of what a husband and wife should be matches yours. So many people my age are caught up with finding the "right one," and believe that when they do, everything is going to be happy and wonderful and easy. I think we could learn something from our grandparents, by learning how to deal with what we've got and learning to be happy with what we chose. At the same time, I don't think it's unreasonable to delay marriage to meet a wide variety of people and to develop a sense of self before getting married. I think it's a pretty good idea to do so actually. I mean, really, can someone really know themselves and know what they want out of life at 21? 21 is a lot younger than it used to be. If that makes any sense.