The Crisis of Marriage

In Russia, 70 percent of marriages break up.

The worst, by the way, are in the Caucasian republics. In purely Muslim Ingushetia, there are two and a half divorces per registration, it seems that everyone there has decided to divorce everyone.

Traditional marriage is not in crisis there, but in collapse. In Chechnya and Dagestan, Ossetia, the situation is little better. It is not about religion, Ossetia, for example, is not very Muslim. Russian Armenians also used to have quite strong marriages. What I see now is a disaster. The initiators are usually the wives: “I didn’t like it, I’m going back to my parents.”

The problem is that marriage in the Caucasus used to be ensured by tradition, and when it stopped working, the peoples who cannot live outside of tradition suffered the most, and turned out to be completely unprepared for the new situation. The Russians (Chuvash, Mordvins, etc.) have a much better situation, that is, extremely bad, but not terrible — 60-65 percent of divorces, because they have trained a lot in the last half century.

Things are about the same in the West, in China, and so on. Almost everywhere where people have a choice, and where there is none — it is temporary, and will explode one day no worse than in the North Caucasus. In this regard, here is what I am personally interested in.

Democratization, which is impossible to resist — it flows into the brain from TV screens, through the Internet, chatter with friends and girlfriends, provided people with the desire, and then the opportunity to decide a lot for themselves. And it turned out that on average two thirds, sometimes more, do not know how to decide. I am not talking about divorces themselves, I am talking about marriages.

People get together after getting to know each other, which lasts not a day or two, several months, or even years, constantly communicating, studying each other. And then it turns out that they don’t know each other at all. So how, one wonders, do they elect deputies, presidents, whom they practically don’t know at all.

That is, we are dealing with a fiction that resembles democracy no more than the sand planes that Pacific natives build, imitating more advanced peoples. If the marriage rate is two-thirds in marriages, given that people know each other personally, then what is it during political elections? I would say that it is several times more, but one hundred percent is the limit.