From a pretty early age I decided I didn’t want to get married or have kids cuz both my parents seemed utterly miserable. For a long time I found it weird anyone wanted to do it at all, why would you want to be trapped with someone you hate who you get into screaming arguments all the time?
And it’s not just me, you see a lot of jokes online about people like playing that one scene from Marriage Story while playing old N64 games for nostalgia.
I think the experience of seeing our own parents be so miserable maybe soured a lot of us on starting families.
Just as a counterfactual I think one has to consider that given historical marriage arrangements this feels like it’d’ve been the norm for most of it and that didn’t stop people from recreating
Historically marriage was for working together, and kids were just a bonus. Now work is completely divorced from family, so people, who don’t really have any reasons to be together tend to get eventually divorced too.
Was it really, though? I favor the explanation that across societies, marriage has always served as a foundation for families. And historically, with less geographic mobility and limited contraception, affairs were harder to keep secret, also with stronger religious structures there was more pressure toward monogamy.
There are enough love poems in antiquity oriented around marriage to be a clear trend. I think people have been marrying for infatuation since prehistory, but there has been a variable aspect of workability applied to it sometimes.
The family in traditional agrarian societies functioned as a smallest unit of production. Marrying for love was seen as “good as an ideal, but mostly unrealistic in practice” both in lower and upper classes. And kids were basically free labor for peasants. And monogamy wasn’t universal over the world, and even where it was dominant, it often had plenty of holdovers from the group marriage.