Good guess, but totally wrong.

I am an American Christian man married to an Asian born woman, born in New Jersey and I have since becoming an adult lived in Me, Ma, NJ, Va, Fl, In, Wi, Il, Ca, Wa, Ga, and have lived temporarily in others. I have also spent about 6 summers living in Europe. I am married to a woman who grew up in Asia until she went to college. Is that diverse enough for you? Does that smack of the “Midwest” and it is sad that you disparage people based on where they grew up… I spent about a quarter of my adult life across three Midwestern states, Midwesterners are good people… only place I have ever lived where when you are out of town and it snows… someone shoveled the snow out of your driveway before you get home so you don’t have to fight your way inside when you arrive late at night after a week-end away.

So what is your background? Have you lived in a monogamous relationship for 30 years? Are your comments opinions or personal experience based? Have you raised five children with the associated challenges of different parenting opinions with your spouse based on cultural as well as normal personal differences. Have you picked up and moved your family more than dozen times with all the difficult decisions that entails?

I said largely the same thing you did about how couples should try to resolve differences, we both agree that love is the starting point. But you simply keep dodging the fundamental question… how do you resolve irreconcilable differences… While it is true not all couples divorce but far to many do. The number one reason is irreconcilable differences by far.

You sound a bit like “silly” youth. You make the assumption that something that has worked for thousands of years has suddenly become outdated… that somehow your generation has better insights into human relationships than the the thousands of generations that came before you. Some things about relationships do “evolve” over time because the underlying demands change. Those changes are not a function of “evolutionary” thought, but rather a function of societal changes… like industrialization, lower birth rates, greater demands by society for skilled workers, etc. Those changes have profound impacts on all societal interactions and relationships including marriage.

But even as relationships evolve, basic human behavior means people with have different opinions. In our case, you can have yours and I can have mine and it creates no inherent problems. But clearly, you would not choose to marry someone like me or I choose to marry someone like you because we have an “irreconcilable difference” over how marriage should work.

I respect your choices, I suspect they will evolve as you experience more “life”.