He is often the first to suggest that it makes no sense to stay married or even get married in the first place. His painstaking brand of existential therapy has little in the way of sound bites to recommend it. He believes it works. Who Think about his work. Dr. Firestone, marriage today appears to be in peril.
People use marriage to support a destructive fantasy process.
When two people want to get married, they really intend to make a go of it over a long period of time. But they can't really make an emotional commitment for all time, because it is impossible to predict how we will feel or whom we will meet in the future. So the tendency to make it into a fantasy of foreverness is, I think, the dangerous issue. Nearly 50 percent of marriages end in divorce, and according to the National Center for Health Statistics, the average length of marriage in 1993 was seven years. So the picture for relationships in general is relatively negative unless people can challenge their defenses and develop to the point where they have more tolerance for love and intimacy.