It’s deader than Queen Elizabeth’s libido. Deader than Al Gore’s charisma. Deader than my sex life. Too Much information?

That said, here’s some facts to back up my original point: Provisional estimates provided by the National Center for Health Statistics’ on their website show that 7.5 out of 1000 people in the United States were married in 2005. The same site also shows that 3.6 out of 1000 people were divorced in 2005. Calculating a ratio between divorces and marriages in the U.S., we find that for every 100 marriages in 2005 there were between 41 and 42 divorces.

Interesting, ain’t it? And you’ve probably heard similar statistics elsewhere, have heard in the national news, in keynote speeches, in the barbershop, that marriage is a dying institution. And everyone seems to have an answer as to what’s making marriage deader.

Marriage is an institution dependent upon the extended family, another institution that has seemed to die at a brisk pace in comparison to marriage. Sounds strange? It should. Our generation, and Generation X before us, wasn’t taught to think of marriage as the union between two families, though we find traces of it at wedding ceremonies, bachelor parties and baby showers. No. For our generation, this is a secondary, and far less permanent relationship than the one built by the husband and the wife, one that will last until the day they die.

Indeed, we have crawled into the world of the Romantic ideal, where the lovers’ love is a love far greater than love in a sepulchre by the sea. Where the lady and the lad, brave every obstacle to fall into each others’ arms at night, with a power that circumvents death itself, Tristan and Isolde with vines spurting out of their graves wrapping around each other.

Let’s face it: Romeo and Juliet kill themselves, the sirens lead sailors to a shipwrecking death and Orpheus’ head lies decapitated in Hell. Tristan and Isolde are dead and Edgar Allen Poe is creepy. Know what the morals of those stories are? Passion kills. And you can’t go it alone.

But we reproduce the romantic ideal, of the conquering lovers, and tie it into our marital relationships, to justify what is, in truth, the reality of most of our generation: the extended family is on its last breath.

Marriage wasn’t built to last in a vacuum, a controlled experiment where we can discover whether two people can get along with only each other as company. Marriage was this union of families where, usually, the wife went to live with the husband’s family. And surely it wasn’t always a joyous union, but if there were disagreements between husband and wife, there would be uncles, aunts, grandparents, cousins, brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces that lived with the couple for as long as they had been married, could help settle disputes and, most importantly, give the couple breathing room. Someone would be there to take care of the children when they had to go to work. If husband or wife needed a break, there’s a family there to pick up the slack. Now?

There are marriage counselors to help solve marital disputes. And these are nice enough people. Professionals? Sure. But how many meetings does it take before the counselor knows all about the history of a marital relationship? Can they be sure that they aren’t receiving biased information?

Can counselors actually witness how a couple interacts in daily life? A marriage counselor…the idea seems meaningful, seems like a great service. Indeed, marriage counselors, I’m sure, are nice enough people with good intentions. But they got a bird’s eye view from the wrong perch: they aren’t where they need to be to help a couple.

Think a self-help book can replace what a good brother or sister can? Scientific assessment of your relationship is helpful, but how many scientists can actually be part of the experiment and remain at an appropriate cognitive distance? A husband or wife will find it hard to apply principles to real-life circumstances as they come about: emotions come up, and they don’t work well with logic.

Can every parent afford a childcare center? Can they step out of the house without their children?

What is making married couples have to make these decisions?

The job market. Nothing romantic about that. But it’s the truth: husbands and wives are forced to find jobs where they are available. As we have all witnessed, either first or second hand, or through the news, the regional job market is constantly in flux.

Detroit was once the car manufacturer of the world, now the market is elsewhere, in Asia and in Mexico. Chain retail stores will close in one city and reopen where they can make better returns. National corporations will have projects with a State government, only for the contract to expire, and workers will be asked to transfer with the company to another location, or quit. Most jobs in America aren’t centralized around the land, we are not farmers and most of us do not drill oil.

How often, in our culture, do we have to travel far from home to succeed in a world where we are increasingly influenced by forces that transcend our regional, national, even continental borders?

And how many of us moved to Sacramento for our education? How many of us moved here from another country in the hopes of achieving future financial stability? How many of us moved to the Sacramento areas with their families, from Thailand, Vietnam, or Russia, to see some members of the newer generations seeking to find their meaning outside the family unit, while others stay close to home and learn the traditional ways of your peoples?

Ask your classmates, you will find, in our diverse city of Sacramento, that the problem of finding success in the global market, while maintaining close ties with the family, is a problem that exists all over the world.

So there’s the rub: people can claim that secularism, selfishness, or a need to feel instant gratification is the cause of an increased divorce to marriage ratio, and true, they lie in the peripheries of the cause.

There have always been faithless people, those religious in name only, and there have always been selfish people, and those who desire to hold the world sooner than later. The cause for the prolonged death of marriage in our time is inherent in our generation’s brand of capitalism, a world that has the technology to make itself bigger, faster, stronger…ah. But not so strong in some places.