And this

that is part of the problem Piscesmoon, the parents should be doing that

I will give you an example, my parents when I was younger taught as a lot, do you know why I dont do drugs, my parents at an early brought us down to where druggies hang out and made us watch them how they react and all, it scared the crap out of us.

My folks had the sex talk with us and of course they went to the extreme to show us pregnant teens, young folks with HIV, HPV, Cancer you name it

a lot of this stuck with me and my siblings , even though the profile name suggest differently we grew up in the neigborhood where la cosa nostra was a part of the community and we saw what they did and the life they have and the death and destruction that follows.

Who taught my parents all that? their parents, the community, the church, and not school.

they have 4 normal kids, two married with kids and the other two as normal as normal can get.

Some people value family more than others.

Society does sometimes appear to be sexist sometimes, but it also strange sometimes where the 'power behind the throne' really lies.

Kids rebel, it's seen as cool. I saw a programme where they sent a few unruly British kids to Holland to live and go to school they couldn't believe their luck. But the Dutch kids and their peers didn't think knocking off school and getting drunk and stoned was cool, quite the opposite. Cool it has a lot to answer for

Your story is interesting but a bit sad, however, more men should take the commitment of marriage Seriously as You did. The divorce rate would not be as High and marriages would last longer.

That's still happening today!

And Catholic church didn't allow divorce! But I. Heard they have changed that tune, in Some cases now.

That is an Eye opener!!!

The person that is unhappy usually is the woman and she's free to end it at any time. Aren't most women completely, absolutely and positively, 100% independent of any and all men, but daddy? Women say they are superior to men so why hang in a LTR that isn't working for you? It would seem more satisfying to find a sugar daddy who is local.

^^^AGREE^^^

Not in my Catholic Church they haven't. You can't use an "annulment" as a form of "Catholic divorce". Bishop Campbell told me that in all his decades of priesthood he had seen only a handful of truly legitimate cases of annulment. Of course with the present Pope, Francis, who knows? He may just toss the Bible and turn us all into Unitarians! He seems extremely liberal for a Pope.

I think the cucumber was the problem.
Many girls must have been very disappointed when it came to it!
Should have used gherkins

My parents taught me nothing about relationships. I guess I was supposed to watch theirs for answers, although they didn't even tell me that I should. About the only sex talk I got was my dad telling me to keep it in my pants. At no time did they ever encourage me to date, or how to go about it. Actually, they really didn't promote me to be sociable with other people. My guess was that they assumed that I would be. But they did tease me about showing any interest in girls. Since I didn't like it, I made it a point to never let them see that side of me. They didn't even know that I went so far as to never speak with girls- at all. They may have suspected that I was gay, but I highly doubt that they actually knew what gay people were, or what they did.

Do I blame them for what they taught me? (Or didn't) Not really, they could only teach what they knew. If people aren't teaching their kids how deal with relationships, its because they don't know themselves. I know kids learn best by example, but if they don't see it in their parents, then we can hardly expect them to learn it on their own.

While I understand your frustration I don't agree with your reasoning.
As a parent I knew it was my responsibility to teach my children how to interact with society and basic life skills. Basic life skills include how you progress thru the mating rituals. It also includes how to interact with the opposite sex. I can't count the number of times I lectured my 3 boys on gender etiquette, respect for the opposite sex and how to know if love is there.
I also took time to assist my X in teaching moral imperatives to my daughter. I was an active dad. My children and their well-being was extremely important to me. Part of that well-being was how they interacted with he people around them. It was MY JOB to teach them what they needed to know about life.
My parents did not teach me. They were both alcoholics with serious coping problems due to losing 3 previous children to blue birth. I made it a point to give my children what I never had, a loving, caring parent. Luckily, my X agreed with me.
You can make up any excuses you want but it all boils down to one thing. They didn't care to teach you what you needed to know.
Now, get over it and make sure you make a point of teaching your children what they need to know and break the chain.

Over the past 50 years or so expectations have changed greatly. women never used to work etc
I don't think you can blame the parents for not teaching it, imo, most of it is common sense and knowing right from wrong.

Why gretting married in the first place? It is not two signatures on a sheet of paper, or saying 'Yes' in front of a priest, that guarantee a working relationship. JMO

I WAS going to laugh about the "sneak in" of somehow even failed relationships are a fault of liberals, but now am laughing how liberals have cucumbers as compared to gherkins.

I've come to various conclusions and made a variety of observations about this during my life.

In no particular order:

* although it feels right to say "parents should teach their children thus and such," that requires ignoring all sorts of things, in order to generalize it like that. Yes, in an ideal world, parents would themselves already know how best to behave, and how best to use imagination to choose their future. But existence doesn't work that way. Life in general is unstable. The solutions a given society puts into place in one stable era, can prove to be useless, or even self-destructive when the world around that society inevitably changes.

And more simply, it's actually rare that a given set of parents, THEMSELVES had life experiences which taught THEM how to raise children well, far enough in advance, that they knew what to do BEFORE their own children arrived.

* it can seem like a brilliant idea to use the power of government to take a short cut to good social order. History is PACKED with people who had the most ideal intentions, marching to put people in power over everyone, who would force everyone to "behave well and logically" with each other.

It ultimately fails every time, even when the leaders DON'T turn corrupt with their power, and abuse it.

It fails, because of one fundamental problem: WISDOM, that is, the PERSONAL "KNOWING" kind of understanding that each person must have, in order to find satisfaction from doing things right, is actually PREVENTED from occurring, when people are FORCED to behave in certain ways.

* most observers I know, seem to miss the DYNAMICS of how children and societies learn from each other.

Look at the stories people are telling here in this thread, for example. Some of situations where parents tried to teach their children about the dangers around them, and those lessons worked. But for any example like that, I have seen lots of other examples where parents tried to teach EXACTLY the same lessons in exactly the same way, but it failed spectacularly.

Part of this has to do with things like class structure, and accidents of the mistakes made in the construction of the ECONOMIC system you live with. That is, when children are surrounded mostly by people very much like them, and their parents, the teaching is more likely to work, because the reality the children experience, REINFORCES THE LESSONS.

Take something like drug use, for example. If your parents tell you and show you the dangers of illegal drug use, and you see that they are showing you facts, you are likely to internalize the lesson, and not do drugs. But if you instead chance to live in an area where you are surrounded by people who are doing drugs and having MORE apparent fun than you are, it's likely that the lesson will seem like oppression, or at least, bad advice.

When it comes to love and marriage, the same dynamic problem exists. Take a look at the classic scenarios in the past, when one or another social construct was commonly seen to be "the way to live," by the society at large. When marriage was seen to be a forever thing, with both societal and government support for holding it in place, people who were not happy in the officially approved construct, found other ways to do as they desired.

Marriages lasted for everyone's lifetime, when divorce wasn't permitted, or was made expensive and time consuming, but the people who were unhappy, also had affairs on the side (thus damaging many OTHER people's relationship lives), others turned to physical abuse of each other or of their children, to vent their emotions, and so on.

In general, for any universal solution anyone can name, there will always be situations where the solution directly CAUSES other problems.

I finally concluded overall, that I have to deal with the world as an ever shifting place, where the great ideas of today, invariably become tomorrows horrifying problems. So I try to look for the good, but be prepared to change tacks, when things don't go as hoped.

Interesting take Igor, but the reality is everyone situation is different
I know what my parents did worked for me, yet Ive known a few people who it didn't work for, now on the surface it may seem one can make a case for it but if you look beneath the surface other things played a major part.

I was lucky because my parents and grandparents encouraged open dialogue , where as some parents don't encourage that.

socio-economics doesn't really factor in because there are many rich folks kids that has drug problems as well, the only difference is they can go to a fancy rehab center where the poorer people end up in jail.

It really depends on the family dynamics in my opinion, I can only talk about my experience and a few friends experience, I was lucky because our mom worked from home, my dad business was thriving so we ( my siblings and I) had our parents around, who spend time with us along with my grandparents who lived a few blocks away.

But that is me, I know other friends in a two parent family whose parents worked all the time just to put a roof over their heads and couldnt spend the quality time needed,some kids turned out productive and some didn't.

There really isn't a magic formula.

As for marriage, well you're a historian, you should know that Divorces happened and it was up to each state, there was no federal statue when it came to divorce, of course all that changed after LBJ great society speech and the second wave feminists lobbied and the result of that the " Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act" which made divorce a lot easier to obtain and of course we witness the rise in divorces.

And you cant blame some women for wanting to leave, because who wants to stay in an abusive relationship? that is the only thing the feminists of that era did that I agreed with , they showed women that they dont have to put up abuse in a marriage as it was common back then for some.

It's more than That!!!

Yeah, it is. Been on both sides