a huge irreversible revolution in personal life

This got my attention, having last academic year been part of an MA seminar group on theological anthropology in which we discussed, among other things, the history of marriage in the west since the Reformation. One of the things that became evident was that the social drivers and understandings of marriage have been changing and that some of the once acceptable reasons for it were pretty hard to square with what we now consider the Christian view, and yet they seem to have been accepted as quite compatible with Christian polity.

Stephanie Coontz, in her book, "Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage" tries to show what the changes are and how they are working out in post-modern societies. The article referenced under the title of this posting has some interesting things to say about the fact that Bible-belt Christians are as likely [if not more] to divorce as their more secular compatriots.
This is because there "is in fact a huge, irreversible revolution in personal life on the same order as the industrial revolution, is that it doesn't matter what your values are. Everyone is affected by this. Even people who want or think they are in a traditional marriage are not exempt from these changes. So that the divorce rates of evangelical Christians are the same as those of agnostics and atheists. And in fact, the highest divorce rates in the country are found in the Bible Belt. First of all, the Bible Belt is a more poor area of the country, and poverty is a huge stress on marriage and other relationships. But I also think that there's something in the values of the Bible Belt. People who are extremely traditional, people who believe that sex outside of marriage is immoral, tend to get married early. And in today's world, that is a risk factor for divorce. So that's one of the reasons that they tend to divorce more. We are experiencing a revolutionary change in the way that marriage operates, and the dynamics of marriage. It's so much more important now to meet as equals, to be good friends as well as lovers, to have values that allow you to change through your life and negotiate. And a lot of people with so-called traditional values in fact don't have those skills."
These are facts that point up that just shouting louder and telling people to try harder isn't going to work. We need to be asking ourselves fundamental questions about the skill sets that are needed in marriage in the emerging cultural milieu. We need to be wondering about the kind of discipleship we are encouraging and how we are responding to consumerist mentalities which tend to see things as 'need' fulfilments and as disposible and also see marriage through an advert-enhanced haze drawing on unhelpful romantic myths. The positive in all of this, from a Christian pov, is that the revolution that Coontz is exploring is one that plays into what should be Christian 'home territory', personal relating.

She points out in this interview, "It was only 200 years ago that people began to believe that young people could choose their own mates, and should choose their own mates on the basis of something like love, which had formerly been considered a tremendous threat to marriage." Yet now most Christians would see that as unproblematic and quite compatible with Christian values. It is interesting to see this reprised in Britain among the recently migrated south Asian populations where a defence is being mounted of the arranged marriage [which does actually have things to commend it, in favourable circumstances] and yet there are a number of young people who yearn for the "love match", spurred on, no doubt, by Bollywood. It's Jane Austen dynamics all over again. It is also another indicator of the pressures on Islam in the west.
AlterNet: The Myth of Marriage: