Oklahoma is No. 1.

That is not unusual. The Oklahoma Sooners’ football team, for the 10th time in the history of the Associated Press college poll, begins the 2011 season ranked No. 1. That is more than any other team, ever.

It is good to be ranked No. 1 in football, for those who care about that sort of thing. It is better, of course, to be ranked No. 1 in median household income, average annual pay, personal income per capita, teachers’ salaries, gross domestic product by state, persons 25 years old and over with at least a bachelor’s degree and doctors per 100,000 population. Oklahoma is No. 1 in none of these categories, and, in fact, is ranked no higher than 29th in any of them.

This week Oklahoma learned it is No. 1 in yet another significant category. The Sooner State, it seems, is No. 1 in divorce.

The divorce rate for women in our state is 14.1 percent, second highest in the nation only behind Alaska’s 16.2 percent. For Oklahoma men the divorce rate is 12.8 percent, third highest, giving our state the distinction of being No. 1 overall in terms of splitting the sheets. Oklahoma Marriage Initiative, a public/private partnership providing services and support to help couples strengthen their marriages, says 32 percent of all Oklahoma adults who have ever been married have been divorced.

Analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau by the website 24/7 Wall St. found that states with higher divorce rates also have lower incomes and a higher percentage of people living below the poverty line.

Money talks, it seems, and when it doesn’t talk loudly enough, spouses tend to walk.

OMI, which has been working to support marriages in our state since, the late 1990s, says financial troubles are one of the leading causes of divorce in the state.

Financial woes certainly can put a strain on a marriage, but having a lot of money is certainly no guarantee of wedded bliss. The entertainment industry is a prime example of that, not to mention Tiger Woods.

There are any number of reasons marriages end — infidelity; abuse, whether physical or emotional; or that catch-all, incompatibility.

But, in the end, marriages end because one or both parties decide they can no longer imagine spending the rest of their lives together.

People fall out of love, or perhaps they never were truly in love in the first place, but merely in love with the idea.

Some unions dissolve when the going gets tough and one partner decides their lives will be better if they continue on alone.

More than one marriage has crumbled because one or both partners had unrealistic expectations of what a successful marriage is. They were looking for the perfect marriage, for happily ever after, for being fitted with a glass slipper and whisked off to a gleaming tower high above the castle walls.

As the OMI points out, a successful marriage doesn’t mean a perfect marriage. The standard marriage vows mention “for better, for worse, in sickness and in health,” they say nothing about tripping along arm-in-arm down the long, straight road of wedded bliss.

Rest assured there will be “for worse” days, when everything your spouse does gets on your last ragged nerve. There will be lean days, when grilling hot dogs seems like an extravagance, when you hate to get the mail because the bills seem to be multiplying like rabbits. The kids will get sick, the plumbing will leak, the car will break down, the toilet seat will be left up. Marriage is not a game of perfect.

There are those wonderful days, as near as you can get to perfect on this earth days, and they are to be savored. But people are not perfect. People make mistakes. People can be selfish, thoughtless, inconsiderate, unfeeling and downright thick in the head, whether or not those people are married.

They say marriage takes work, and it does. It also takes flexibility. To have a successful marriage it helps to follow the credo of a fellow I know. “Semper Gumby,” as he likes to say, Always Flexible.

Couples in successful marriages share many common traits. They talk over everything, and are honest when they do so, but they also know how and when to listen. Their value systems are similar and they share a sense of trust.

They tackle problems together. They feel free to express their feelings. They feel safe when they are together, but don’t mind occasionally spending some time alone. They support and respect one another.

Successful marriages come down to two words, to my way of thinking — commitment and love.

Couples must be committed to each other and to making their marriage work.

Then there’s love, which doesn’t necessarily mean having your heart do flip-flops every time you look at your partner. After all, you will see him coming out of the bathroom first thing in the morning, in his underwear, scratching himself, with a little fleck of drool drying at the corner of his mouth, and vice versa.

Just as struggling marriages end because one or both partners decide they cannot imagine spending the rest of their lives together, successful marriages endure because both partners decide they couldn’t imagine spending their lives apart.



Mullin is senior writer of the News & Eagle. E-mail him at jmullin@enidnews.com.