Why did couples really stay together in the "good old days"?

One reason is that divorce was much more frowned upon by society “back then” than it is today. My grandmother left her abusive husband after 40 years of marriage, spmething I never knew until I was in my 30s—and apparently it caused quite a scandal.

Several societal changes have occurred – but the big two that I think have enabled couples to divorce more easily are these:

1. Women used to rarely work outside the home. Even women who graduated from college in the 1960s had really limited career options: teacher, nurse or secretary, essentially. This changed with the era of Equal Rights (ERA / NOW and feminism). We owe a debt of gratitude to the pioneering women who pushed for workplace equality—because now if a woman wants to divorce she can find a job to support herself and her children.

2. We’re growing less religious / more secular. (See links to surveys here.) This means fewer people feel judged by their pastor/church (and fewer churches will give divorced people grief!) if they want to or need to divorce.

Also…I would highly debate that the “good old days” were that good. Personally, I like tolerance, open-mindedness, better drugs and acceptance for women in the workplace a lot more than a lot of the “ideals” of the first half of the 20th century.

There were plenty of miserable matches made in hell but…it was the eras of not airing your dirty laundry and the stigma against divorce, hardcore programming/religious pap and yes, most certainly dependent, oppressed women. Where do you think the old fashioned sick headache originated? Women that wouldn’t/couldn’t turn down the sexual advances of their husbands for all the reasons above and at the same time couldn’t face the prospect of giving birth to child number 7. lol
Not any different than today, some couples enjoyed truly happy and healthy relationships and others just kept quiet and suffered in silence.

My ex husbands garndmother and grandfather hated each other for over 60 years, he moved to a hotel once when he was 84 for about a week but had to come home again because he was hungry. lol
I don’t romanticize anything, I’m too much of a logical realist.

Marital problems and even domestic violence were kept behind closed doors. My grandparents separated but never got divorced.

When I asked my mom why she got married at 16 and left school she said that there was no way she would ever have been able to go to college and she couldn’t imagine any other life.
Social pressure was great. Women couldn’t even buy a car, home or rent a house without their husband or father with them. If they were lucky enough to find a job they would not get paid enough to live on.
A divorced woman was considered “easy” because she was used to having sex and probably missed it.
In previous generations it didn’t matter if you weren’t “in love” anymore. You still had a responsibility to a family.
I am old enough to have watched as the stigma of divorce fell away. There was plenty of good about it. People no longer had to put up with abuse. On the other hand it made it awful easy to just give up when things got tough. That parts kind of sad.

Economics. Women mostly did not work. So women were basically prisoners of their marriage.

Peer pressure plus fewer other choices.

I don’t believe there ever was such a thing as the ‘good old days’. Both my maternal and paternal grandparents had horrible marriages. The abuse stories that my mother told me about made even some horror movies look pleasant. I’ll agree with what others have said above, that there were less options back then to get out of a bad marriage.

Another factor was that people didn’t live as long then as they do now. You have plenty of time to have more than one marriage now. Now, it isn’t unusual for people to live to 90 or 100. Then, 65 and 70 were tops. Divorces are not unusual as they are now. What’s the latest figure? 50% of marriages end in divorce?

Divorce in Canada used to require an act of Parliament! Now consenting partners can do it with one court appearance.

Because they loved each other?

No internet.

I agree with @geeky_mama and @coloma many of the other commenter’s.

I think people were more dependent on the family unit. I am thinking of the pioneer’s of America specifically when I add that men and women needed each other for the division of family labor. Homesteader’s needed a family to help with all the tasks set before them. Milking cows, and making and storing food, building houses, protector’s, planting and harvesting crops etc. No easy task when tools and machinery are simple and many of them were just eking by. I recall many books where a spouse died and a marriage was quickly made in a sort of business arrangement.

Some people today easily make or break contracts of marriage for all the wrong reasons. But abuse isn’t the only reason to break vows. There are many outlooks on life and just as many reasons to “give up”. But people do change and not all of them change together.

As a product of an unhappy marriage I can say with no uncertainty that I and my entire family would have benefited had the marriage ended much sooner.

I don’t say that lightly when people stay together just because it is their duty and nothing ever gets better things most often get worse. Children pick up on that.

Why waste the one life you have based on a concept or idea that doesn’t personally work for you?

I agree with @Unbroken
I stayed in an unhappy marriage for about 20 years too long. It really should have gone belly up within the first 2 years, but being young and unenlightened I put up with lots of crap, then we had a child, typical story.
Finally initiating a divorce was the best thing I ever did.

For many reasons. Because that is simply what you did. We hadn’t developed into a throw away society yet and you kept things you had invested in and tried to fix it. Also what @jonsblond said. Most people stayed together because they loved each other. There was a sigma attached to getting a divorce. It meant you had failed at something. Family and responsibility for your family were looked at in much higher regard than it is today.

In addition to divorce rates being lower, out of wedlock births were lower, domestic violence reports were lower, the number of families living on welfare wasn’t as high as it is today. People today don’t think twice about a young girl having a baby she can’t support and living on welfare without any word from the baby’s daddy. People don’t think twice about leaving children and a spouse to fend for themselves or leaving and then fighting them in court when someone says they have to pay money to help support the children. Those are some of the reasons. That’s my opinion. I may be wrong.

In all the years I was growing up I heard of only one divorce: my sister’s. And there was some ridicule and jokes told about her and embarrassment. She had another guy all lined up and remarried quickly. But she wasn’t happy in that marriage either and died at 35.
Anyway, there really was a social stigma against divorce and I didn’t know of any women who worked outside the home. If my friends’ mothers didn’t like their lives I never heard anything about it. My mother seemed to love her home, cooking, cleaning, just hanging out at the house raising her three kids and keeping everything neat. I saw lots of hugging between my parents. There was an invisible line of demarcation: she stayed home and cooked the bacon that dad paid for. And he stayed at the same company for 46 years. Fear did not exist . I had no fear of them splitting up, no fear walking home in the dark , no fear riding the bus and no fear at school. I did, however, have a feeling my older brother was an alcoholic and stayed away from him. My parents never spoke of it around me. It appeared we all loved our country’s president, our homes and our places of worship. My only nightmare all those years was my fourth grade teacher who seemed to detest me and the feellng was mutual. Not once did I hear my parents argue. It was really a dream life. The world of the 1950’s didn’t have the anger, danger, bitterness, hatred, shootings, arson and disrespect for authority figures I see now on a daily basis. I’m sure people were suffering but I was somehow shielded from it.

In at least a few cases, they didn’t split because there was no need.

I think it is everything you named. Women are in better financial positions, women now are looked down on for putting up with abuse, it is more socially acceptable to divorce. In fact I would go as far to say that there is social pressure to divorce if you are unhappy. Less influence from religious expectations. Although, I know many many Christians, religious Christians who have been divorced and they never mention worrying about their church frowning upon it. Only Catholics I know talk about their family or churchmembers being very dissapproving. The Protestants I know, even Evangelicals, do emphasize keeping amarriage together, they have couples retreats, things like that, but at the same time it doesn’t seem the same as my Catholic friends. I also think because people are more aware of the world. All different things out there and what they want to do. If one spouse is stifling the other they leave, years ago I think fewer people had desires that were very adventurous and ambitious. Life had different expectations.

@bkcunningham I don’t know how much you really meant to generalize, but when you say people today don’t think twice about children of unwed parents and people not thinking twice about leaving their children, my feeling is maybe, maybe at the most 50% if people don’t think twice about those things. Many people who are divirced suffered for years and really thought through how it would affect their kids, and even their extended family, let alone their spuse and themselves. I don’t know many people who just decide in a moment to divorce without considering how it will affect their children. People still look down on multiple half siblings born to an unwed mother who have different fathers. Some people might think that is normal, but a lot of people don’t. I know more than one coupe who has stayed together because ofbtheor children. I also know men who wound up staying, because they couldn’t stand to not be in the same house as their children. Some of them left, separated temporarily or were thrown out, but they go back primarily because of their children. Now, many states favor equal custody, so maybe that has changed the dynamic a little.

I generalized a little less than you did, @JLeslie, when you said, “Many people who are divorced suffered for years and really thought through how it would affect their kids, and even their extended family, let alone their spouse and themselves.” ~

Seriously though, you did make some good points, @JLeslie. My husband was married before and stayed with his now-exwife for many years even though he caught her in bed with different men on numerous occasions. They moved out of state and tried to start over and she cheated again and again. He stayed because he couldn’t bear the thought of not being with his daughters.

Some people did and still do think marriage is forever. Abuse and other issues are exceptions for most people.

@KNOWITALL I agree. I have friends who also stayed single because of that philosophy. I have never been able to envision an endless future with one person even though I am incredibly loyal. It is because of that loyalty to an ideal that I have never married.

I have also met some people with seemingly wonderful longlasting marriages. I almost envy them.

@Unbroken For my husband and I, the committment of forever was the only way we would have gotten married. There are benefits and drawbacks of a permanent marriage, but the stability is a big plus for us, since we missed that as children.

In the first 4 or 5 years of our marriage we had some tough times. Once my husband said, “maybe we should get a divorce!”
I told him that if he wanted a divorce then do it now because I refused to live with that threat hanging over my head. Either we’re in it for the long haul or we’re out.
We made a pact never to use the “D” word again.
This August we will be married 23 years and I can’t imagine life without him. He is a bit clingy at times but its better than the alternative. I really did get my “Happily ever after.”

@bkcunningham I know two men who decided to stop cheating to be able to stay at home where their children were. One seriously thout he wanted to leave his wife when he was cheating, the other was just part of a cheating family and it was normal behavior for the men in the family, a few of them broke the mold, he was one of them. Those men I knew well, I know of other men who stay because of the children, but I don’t know the details of the marriage, and a few of them did divorce once the kids were out of the house.