By JANE GLENN HAASThe Orange County Register more News

My kids all seem happily married to their first spouses. And I’m wondering if I’m to blame.

Well, not blame but … according to statistics quoted last month in a new York Times article, the divorce rate is going down among college-educated adults. only 11 percent of these adults divorce within the first 10 years today, compared with 37 percent for the rest of the population.

I’ll admit, when I got divorced it was “trendy.” OK, not trendy, but an example of what women could do when they earned economic independence.

I remember the day I told my mom I was getting a divorce. she asked me “Why?”

“I’m not happy, Mom,” I said.

“Whoever told you that you were entitled to be happy?” she responded.

Mom believed wives had a “duty” toward their husbands. not to mention their children.

Indeed it is those children of a divorced generation — now grown up with children of their own — who are working harder at staying together. Today, there is nothing liberating about splitting up.

“Divorce was freedom,” says Stephanie Coontz, author of “A Strange Stirring: the Feminine Mystique and Women at the Dawn of the 1960s.” she has become an authority on marital expectations, and she notes: “Many of these marriages in the ’70s were fundamentally unequal. With the women’s movements, they learned that there were alternatives and that made divorce kind of a liberation.”

This is no time to talk about the failings of my ex-husband. He is deceased, but his children don’t need to hear my whines and finger-pointing. Suffice it to say, I felt I did the right thing then, and I still believe that I did.

But this is an era of peer marriages. the National Marriage Project study concludes, “Highly educated Americans have moved in a more marriage-minded direction, despite the fact that, historically, they have been more socially liberal,” the Times article notes.

I did a little surveying among my friends and found this to be true.

“it is as if there is an unwritten rule,” Mary G. tells me. “I think my daughter works very hard to keep her marriage together. she is lucky in one way, I guess. she has a good job, and her husband lets her do what she wants. In fact, they rarely do anything together.”

Now, that’s interesting. Makes me wonder if women in their 30s and 40s today are hanging on while kids are at home? Will the statistics change dramatically when the youngsters are gone and the marriage relies on nothing but the two people in the partnership? What, indeed, is the glue?

My children turned out just fine, in spite of divorce. I know they turned out better than if I had stayed.

And my mother was wrong.

We have a “duty” to each other in a marriage, but we also have a duty to ourselves to provide our children and ourselves with the best possible future. A “martyrdom marriage” isn’t a viable option for the couple or their kids.