3. LOL. They surely did work better. The high rate of divorce, single parent homes and disfunctional families in our times attests to that. The OP of this thread, having no satisfactory solution also attests to the blessings of Biblical family units.
And yet, the divorce rate among conservative Christians, the more biblical ones, is significantly higher than in the general population and much higher than among atheists and agnostics, who tend to be significantly
less biblical. As a conservative Christian friend who had read read Neil Clark Warren's books told me, the significantly higher divorce rate among evangelicals is what prompted Warren to found eHarmony.com and was undoubtedly what had motivated
Focus on the Family to promote it. At two local megachurches, a large percentage of their membership is single, mostly divorced, and the churches' highly biblical leadership (Baptist) don't know what to do with their singles.
Also, "til death do you part" was a lot easier to do when people did live as long and remain as active as we do now. Now we have growing numbers of women approaching and in their 50's dumping their husbands and starting over. In the "good old days", he would have just died by then from having worked himself to death (or from having fallen victim to problems that can now be treated by abdominal or thoratic surgery, such as colon perforation from diverticulitus -- I'm 58 and that just happened to me nearly 5 months ago; needless to say, I would have died from peritonitis). Or she would have been worked to death (housework used to be incredibly labor-intensive; just hauling water to the house consumed hours of a child's day, every day). It wasn't your illusion of their being so much more biblical that kept them together; they knew that if they waited long enough their spouse would die on them and that they didn't have that long to wait.
To keep a marriage together takes work and the desire
of both parties to keep the marriage together. The more biblical types think (because that's what they're taught to think) that the Bible will magically keep them together. Atheists know that they have to actually try, to make an actual effort. Could be one reason why atheist marriages do so much better than biblical Christian marriages.