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Rush Limbaugh’s Wedding Ends a Bad Week for Marriage

winston53660

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First, the Gores break up. Then our local Minnesota Congressman and first Muslim in the House of Representatives Keith Ellison files for divorce. Normally I might look to a high profile wedding as a sign of hope, but the week ended with 59 year old Rush Limbaugh’s fourth marriage, this one to a 33 year old woman whom he met during the divorce of his third wife. For his fourth wedding he went over the top, hiring Elton John, (a strange choice for entertainment given Limbaugh’s public concerns about gay marriage), who performed for 400 guests for a reported one million dollars. When asked about marrying someone 26 years her senior, the bride told the press, "I'm sometimes not able to relate to the average person my age." Age is the least of the issues.

Rush Limbaugh's multiple marriages is a 21st century American story. As sociologist Andrew Cherlin documented in his terrific book The Marriage Go Round, we Americans are crazy about both pair bonding and breaking up. In comparison to Europe, American's cohabitate and split up more easily, we marry and divorce more frequently, and we go on to remarry and re-divorce more readily. I’m not against hope or against trying again for a permanent union. But as a marriage therapist what I find depressing is people churning through multiple marriages without learning very much—except that they married for the wrong reasons or married the wrong person (but now it’s different) or that the love went away.

In his public comments about his marriages, Limbaugh seems to fall right into this conventional pattern of explanation for marital failure. For his first divorce: "I was doing what I thought I had to do. There was romance in the idea of being married. It was just the wrong reasons." For his second divorce, “The love had just vanished. We’re still friends.” (Sound like Al Gore? See my blog about the Gore divorce.)

Rush Limbaugh
 
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