>Love and Marriage

One thing I’ve noticed about my three-year-old’s soccer roster is the listing of parents’ names. Amy and Brandon Lee. Jessica and David Patterson. Maryanne and Robert James. All happy, cozy little nuclear families composed of smiling husbands and wives and their one or two children.

Look at my teenagers’ rosters, though, and the names are much different. Anne Foster and Mark Foster. Jane Gregory and Ben Taylor. Nadine Harper and Steven Harper. Fewer than half of their teammates’ parents are still married, and frankly, this scares the hell out of me.

Statistically, at least half of the cozy little families on the sidelines of my preschooler’s soccer game will have split up ten years from now. I look at my good friend and her husband, cheering on their daughter each week. They seem happy enough. But are they? And what about the parents of that cute little black-haired girl? Surely they would never split up. And what about, *gulp*, my own marriage? Will Hubs and I still be together ten years from now? I sure as hell hope so.

I’ll admit, though, that marriage is hard, much harder than you think it’s going to be, particularly after having children. Since adding four children to my life, I’ve changed faster and in more ways than ever before. Who was to say whether my husband would change with me?

I feel lucky to have a husband with the same goals and dreams and likes and dislikes that I have; our similarities have gotten us through plenty of tough times and made us a real team, one that only seems to get better with time. I’m also lucky to have a husband who was married once before, who knows how easily a marriage can fail and harbors no illusions about what it would be like to be a bachelor again.

But even with all this, I know the success of our marriage is not a given. I’m wondering what it is between the years when our children are preschoolers and when they become teenagers that upsets the balance of so many marriages. Is it simply time taking its toll? Or is the lure of our children’s lives so great that it pulls us away from the one who used to be our primary concern? And what do we do to keep this from happening?

It’s unimaginable to me now that my husband and I would ever divorce. But looking at the other young parents around me, I imagine that they think the same thing about their own marriages.

What do you think is causing so many divorces in families? And what advice do you have for those of us wanting to safeguard our own marriages?

This post originally appeared on Parents.com.