Cynicism, thy name is Satyricon, lol. Seriously, just because other people may fail at marriage, or are unhappy in their marriage does not have any bearing whatsoever on whether or not an individual may be successful and happy in marriage. Any person can get married no matter how ill equiped.
The problem for most is not the institution of marriage, but what the people themselves bring to the marriage. For example, there was a study quoted in Time magazine in '06 in response to the "more than one out of every two marriages end up in divorce" statistic you hear so much in the media. This study showed that if both the man and the woman had not been married before, were at least 25 years old, were both college graduates, made over $125,000 combined income, had both sets of parents still married and happy, had some religious faith (defined as going to church, ect. at least once a week), waited to have children until at least four years after being married, had no children prior to marriage, were and remained healthy/physically fit, own pets, and a few other factors, the divorce rate dropped to below 10% and of those who met those criterion, over 92% stated that they were happy to very happy.
Now there is the old saying that statistics can be made to say anything, and there is truth to that, however I think this study is a strong indicator that marriage can work, it just depends on *who* is getting married. I daresay, few marriages meet all or even most of the criteiron stated above.
