Marriage is also a great arrangement for perpetuation of human race. It provides an ideal atmosphere where children can grow up in the loving and protective shadow of father and mother. People also want to get married because of intimacy, social status, emotional support and staking life-long claim over a person they love and admire.



However, it is one thing to get married; it is quite another to make it a success. Making a marriage work is an art that has to be painstakingly learnt by both the partners as the years roll by. The trick is to get rid of one's ego and be understanding and compassionate of your partner's faults. ?Don't sweat the small stuff? should be the mantra of the spouses.

Other things that go a long way in making a marriage work include giving individual freedom to each other, respecting each other's privacy and not to have an eye on your neighbour's wife or husband. Trust is the foundation on which a marriage is built and you should not undermine it.

However, it is also a sad fact of life that many marriages are not successful and end in separation of the partners. In fact, in some Western societies, the divorce rate is already touching a whopping fifty percent or even more. Divorce can happen due to many reasons. The top five ones are given below.

Extra-marital Affairs

In today's world, it is easy to have extra-marital affairs because of modern lifestyle. These days, both men and women get many opportunities to meet each other regularly. In an office, employees mingle daily and interact closely. Office romances are very common and frequent, especially when travelling together to far-away locations on business meetings.

Due to increased mobility and ease of driving from one place to another, people have also become more social. They can afford to meet each other every weekend and spend some leisure time together. Then there are the gyms, sports clubs and charity meets. In any of these interactions, sparks may fly and an affair may bloom between two people. Having an affair is a serious business that strikes at the root of marriage. Indeed, few martial relationships are able to outlast extra-marital affair of a partner.

Physical Abuse

Physical abuse includes violent behaviour and hitting a partner's body through beating, slapping and pushing around. A violent and abusive partner is any married person's worst nightmare come true. It is not essential for physical abuse to be direct. It may be indirect too, such as inflicting vicarious pain on the mother by beating a child or by hurting the victim's favourite pet. It is better to take a divorce than suffer physical abuse for years in a marriage.

Emotional Abuse

Physical abuse deals with one's body. Emotional abuse damages you emotionally and psychologically. The scars of physical abuse heal with time, but those inflicted by emotional abuse take a very long time to heal. Sometimes they never do.

Emotional abuse may involve behaviour such as restrictions on a person's out-of-home movements, forcing the victim to do things against his or her wishes, imposing a financial embargo, non-stop criticism and ridiculing one's every move, and so on. Partners trapped in an emotionally abusive relationship either become nervous wrecks or escape while they can by filing for divorce.

Infertility

For many people, one of the main aims of getting married is to have children and start a family. Indeed, there is a feeling that a man or woman remains an incomplete individual until he or she has experienced giving birth to or rearing a child.

Biological infertility of a partner jeopardizes this arrangement. It comes as a shock to a partner that due to infertility of the other, he or she cannot experience the joys of fatherhood or motherhood. Infertility in a marriage is one of the major reasons why people file for divorce.

Incompatible Personalities

Two people get married because they like and love each other. There is certain body chemistry between them that forms a mutual bond, pulls them toward each other and encourages them to become life-partners. When they get married, things remain hunky-dory for the first few months or years. Gradually though, as they get to know each other better, the partners realise that there are many things about the partner they had not known about. Familiarity breeds contempt and divorce is the result.