Two-thirds of divorces after age 40 are initiated by wives, debunking the myth of an older man divorcing his wife for a younger woman, a new survey shows.
...
The survey found that women over age 40 seemed more aware of problems in their marriages, while men were more likely to be caught off-guard by their divorces. Twenty-six percent of men said they "never saw it coming," compared with 14 percent of women.
...
The AARP study found that most women said they filed for divorces because of physical or emotional abuse, infidelity or drug and alcohol abuse. Men said they sought divorces because they fell out love, they had different values or lifestyles or infidelity.

The symbolic danger that gay marriage poses to such an arrangement is obvious. It alters the public meaning of the word by further draining it of its power to reinforce traditional expectations of behavior. What does it mean to be a husband in a world where a man could have one of his own? This is up to each individual couple, one is tempted to say. Fair enough; but the words we use to describe our relationships are shared cultural property. There is no private language. In this sense, granting the word "marriage" to gay couples will eventually affect everyone.

The mistake is to consider the change in meaning particularly drastic. After all, undoing customary expectations for how a husband and wife behave toward each other has been one of the goals of the women's movement since its inception. Rather than an abrupt departure, same-sex marriage is the culmination of a larger and ultimately more consequential change in the nature of marital relations between men and women.

Which is one of the reasons that the opposition to it is so fierce. It has come to symbolize what is, historically speaking, radical about contemporary marriage: the decline of the patriarchal legal structure and the rise of the goal of self-fulfillment. Gay marriage is unsettling, to many, not because it departs from modern meanings of matrimony but because it embodies them.

Many legal battles still lie ahead. But on May 17, reality said to fair-minded heterosexual Americans: Gay marriage is here to stay. The sky didn't fall. It's no threat to you....

Less than a quarter of Hoosiers say gay couples should be allowed to marry, while almost half say there should be no legal recognition of their relationship, according to the latest Indianapolis Star-WTHR (Channel 13) poll.The poll found 19 percent of the state's adults support same-sex marriages. Thirty-one percent said gay couples should be allowed to form civil unions to obtain some rights that married partners automatically have.But 46 percent said they were opposed to any kind of legal recognition, whether it involved civil unions or same-sex marriages.