Mediate Michigan

It was the best of times, it was … short and kind of sucked.

Why do so many young people these days decide to divorce after such seemingly brief marriages? We asked several women and men in their early 30s and their answers were what you might expect. They got married because their biological clock was ticking, the fear of being alone, they had just come off a bad relationship, they had marriage envy, all their friends were doing it, the usual reasons.

They left for the usual reasons, too: cheating and lying, physical and emotional alienation, what they wanted in life had changed, whom they thought they married turned out to be somebody else. For all of them, the day-to-day living, the trying to make it work, the self-blaming and finally the self-awareness that led them to pack it all in was like watching time-lapse photography — a marriage and divorce editing down for the perfect You Tube video.

via Randi Small and Jen Schwartz: The Time-Lapse Divorce.