Marriage, Divorce and Poker

When I lived In Chicago the last time I was part of a farily regular poker game. Now that I'm back, I'm back in the same game with mostly the same group of players. We're older now, and they are all married - most of them married with children, so the games are less regular, but we still try to get together at least once a season. The spring, summer, fall and winter seasons - not the basketball, baseball and football seasons, which in a sports town are sometimes more vibrant (although in Chicago, not so much - not counting last fall with the Sox).

We had a game a few weeks ago, and after it struck me how this group (not counting me) is bucking the odds. The marriage/divorce odds. Almost all of them have been married for 10+ years and they are all still going strong. Sure we can never really know what goes on in a marriage, but from the outside looking in, they all seem pretty together.

And I was trying to figure out why. By the national average, at least two of them should be kaput by now. I was thinking that maybe it's because most of them got married after 30 - so they had a slightly better grip on things, or maybe it's that the group of them hold each other together with some kind of a social network glue where no one wants to be the first to jump ship.

Or maybe it's the poker. I'm thinking it's the poker.