It's probably true that she is better off financially since marrying my father, but I wasn't sure how that applied to me. The fact that my uncles and aunts and grandparents and family friends felt they had absolutely no choice other than to divorce doesn't change the outcome. They still got divorced, all of them. They still showed my generation, by example and by forcing us to go along with their example, that marriage was something easily and amicably exited from. Marriage, they said, was not that big of a deal.
Premarital sex is fine.
Families, they said, do not need to stay together if things become too boring. But the ones I'm familiar with continue to associate with flawed human beings. These second and third marriages still seem to require work, and still have shortcomings. My mother and father, for example, still struggle with the same issues that plagued their marriage to each other. The only difference is, older and wiser, they both seem more willing to compromise, to sacrifice and to accept.