Are people generally less forgiving of others as they get older?

Having been raised as a catholic, as a young person I thought divorce as something rare, shameful and wrong, wrong, wrong.

Must be something wrong with me because I'm getting mellower by the day.

Having been raised as a catholic, as a young person I thought divorce as something rare, shameful and wrong, wrong, wrong.

Then, as a late teenager, I read something Margaret Mead had said. While I couldn't fully comprehend it at the time, it opened my eyes to a new way of looking at things, and made me think.

Here, I just looked up part of what I remember...

Ahrons quotes the noted anthropologist Margaret Mead, who was married and divorced three times; a reporter asked about her ‘failed' marriages, to which she replied," I didn't have any failed marriages. I've been married three times and each marriage was successful."

Says Ahrons: "She went on to explain that she had gone through several very distinct life stages and had at each time chosen a different mate, one who could meet her needs and priorities of that time. She also suggested in her writings...that her own pattern of serial monogamy was the wave of the future."

Perhaps this evolution away from the catastrophic predictions about the consequences of divorce can be seen to correspond with parallel shifts in the meanings of marriage. In Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage, family historian Stephanie Coontz discusses the very modern notion of marrying for romantic love and the elevated expectations (and greater disappointments) of that partnership when it is no longer primarily an economic arrangement between families.

What I more remember her saying was how we now live for such an extended time, it can be unrealistic to think that the person who was a good match for you during one phase of your life was necessarily a good match for other times.

As I've gotten more mature, that feels so right. We change over our lifetime. While it would be so romantic and pleasant to think both people in a marriage will remain on the same track, both looking in the same direction, it's not realistic.

As far as nature is concerned, after people have raised offspring to the point where they are physically capable of taking care of themselves (or at least likely enough not to get in the way of a lion or tiger), the parents can just as soon drop dead. They can't have any more young, their job is done, and they are wasting resources.

Come civilization, over the years we live longer and longer.

tell us what u think of MAGNESIUM please.

But if you have that sort of attitude, then why get married?

As time goes by, I find myself more tolerant of human mistakes, and a great deal less tolerant of rudeness and arrogance.