Why Marriages Fail By Anne Roiphe

In her paper “Why Marriages Fail” by Anne Roiphe published in Rites of Passage, the author describes the main reason that marriages fail. Roiphe claims that marriages fail because when choosing a partner people subconsciously choose someone like their parents. Whether the relationship people see growing up is one to admit or one that people realize they do not want, people find partners like their parents. Finding someone like their parents can either lead to a successful marriage similar to their parents or a not so successful marriage similar to the parents. When finding someone like their parent people tend to encounter the same problems. Although many couples overcome the pressures of marriages, Roiphe argues that marriages fail because …show more content…
“These and other realities of life erode the vision of marital bliss the way sandstorms eat at the rock and the ocean nibbles away at the dunes” (Roiphe, 2002). Roiphe simply states that once reality hits and the fairy tale is over that people struggles to remember the image and the dream of how they expected the marriage to be like in the first place. Reality ends up being nothing like the fairy tales that the children grew up watching and hoping to have a life like one day. When some people realize that a marriage is nothing like the fairy tale they struggle to keep the marriage together and working. People simply get married and live happily ever after, the reality of this is that does not work for most people. Marriages are hard work and need communication and work. Fairy tales do not account for this. Therefore, people grow up with unrealistic expectations about marriages and how they work. Which means that fairy tales are setting up people to have unrealistic goals and ideals about marriages, and therefore people blindly go in marriage and are set up to fail. Carter talks about Frye and how the end of romance and nationhood would be the same. “It is a reference to the