How stable a same sex relationship is?

[princealbertofb]

Ultimately, not that different, especially once people get older.

However, it might seem so because of 2 things: one, many older het people find it not worth the trouble to separate after an older age even if they have and may even live under different roofs (but things from social rep to marriage benefits to family dynamics won't let them make the decision to divorce) to older gay people who are separated by medical and other conditions and the law and/or family erases any record of their being together as their relationship was never officially recognized and thus not protected legally (and many hospitals and homes will even deny the right of gay visitation or any part of the process on general principle and as part of their policy).

I don't have figures to justify my thinking on this, but it seemed to me that more and more older people were getting divorced after the kids are out of the coop, maybe when they hit their 50s and 60s. It is also a time when couples are reaching ill health issues and possibly have drifted from each other. It used to be that such older couples would stay together, for the family's sake, for the sake of keeping a semblance of dignity etc, for financial and economic reasons, but this is no longer so much the case. Men live longer and women even longer than before, there haven't been wars to deprive women of their men and make them unwilling widows...

Life changes and one or both in the couple want out to take advantage of those post child-rearing years...

I'd like to think that a same sex relationship has as much likelihood to last as a hetero situation, for all the reasons that opposite sex couples stay together. Issues of trust and fidelity are human rather than they are attached to a gender. I daresay that with more same sex couples tying the knot, we may soon see that they are every bit as stable as (if not more than) hetero couples.

After all the rate of divorce among married (therefore straight) couples is already really high... How many of those hetero marriages were actually forced (by societal pressures, by circumstances, etc...)?

Same sex marriages probably don't have to deal with such pressures, making them, in effect, more likely to thrive. As I said, this is an opinion, nothing based in research or statistics (hard to come by for the moment).