Guest Post by Ben Rossell
“Half of our marriages end in divorce.” No, they do not! The real numbers are in and it seems that little more than half of half end in divorce.
As a homeschool dad, I often refer to the “smell test” when reviewing math assignments with my sons. ‘Okay, if you multiply a big number by another big number, the answer is not going to be a small number, right?’
Well, perhaps we can do the same here. How many married people do you know? Okay, now how many divorced? This is a difficult thing to get our minds around, but try. Think about the sheer staggering number of married adults you know. It is far easier to list the unmarried adults than the married. Now think about the divorces. Do they even begin to approach half?
Jeff and Shaunti Feldhahn are Christian marriage counselors, popular conference speakers, and family enrichment authors. This Month Shaunti released The Good News About Marriage reporting the findings of an 8-year research project reviewing the statistical data on marriage and divorce in America. Her conclusions are shattering many of our most common conjugal clichés.
Among her more noteworthy findings were:
– The divorce rate in America has never even been close to half. While the actual divorce rate is impossible to establish, [the Census Bureau stopped trying in 1996] realistic estimates put the societal divorce rate as low as 27% with almost every source reporting a decline in divorces for the last 30 years!
– College-educated couples, married after their mid 20s, who stay together for their first 5 years have a general divorce rate of only 5-10%.
– Almost 80% of married couples describe themselves as “happily married”.
– A statistical majority of those who respond that they are “unhappy” or “miserable” in their marriages, when willing to hang in there, rate their marriages as “happy” when surveyed 5 years later.
– Only around 33% of remarriages end in divorce, rather than the often quoted 60-75% figure.
– The vast majority of marital problems stem from accumulated minor offenses. Small, simple changes produce significant and lasting improvements for the majority of married couples in counseling.
– Christian couples who attend church weekly have a divorce rate 25-50% lower than the average.
After hearing these results, one reviewer commented, “Wow! You’re like the Snopes of marriage!”
Well, besides being interesting, does any of this matter?
The Feldhahns insist that these things matter a great deal and that falsely inflated divorce statistics have been deeply detrimental to our national morality. If young people take for granted that they have a coin-toss-chance of succeeding in marriage, they will be much more prone to accept divorce as an inevitable outcome. They will be more tempted to cohabitate rather than marry. And they will be discouraged from persevering and fighting for their marriages. Statistics of defeat rob us of hope. And as any counselor can tell you, hope is the single most important factor in making a marriage work.
Ben Rossell is the Senior Pastor of Trinity Presbyterian Church in Valparaiso, Fl.<>
My question: why are the false statistics still readily reported and rarely challenged?
Joshua,
good question. Feldhahn and her research partner basically devote an entire appendix to that question. They offer several reasons. First off, a lot of the street-level marriage information is simply based on statistical error [analysis that is just plain mathematically false].
Secondly, the common 46-50% rate seems to originate not from actual studies but from statistical projections made by famous sociologists in the 90s.
Finally, there is some heavily-referenced statistical data that the CDC published regarding divorce, but according to these authors, the original study wasn’t a divorce study, but a fertility study … and the only divorce numbers that were included were from those respondents who had been married prior to the age of 25 [one of the highest-risk segments for divorce!].
She includes sections of an interview she did with George Barna, who gladly admits that people have been misattributing, misinterpreting, and misusing his divorce data for years.
I should add that the entire 8-year research project was kickstarted when Feldhahn repeated the ubiquitous 50% figure in an article and then asked her new research assistant to edit the article and add any necessary citations. The research assistant reported back after a while, somewhat bewildered, because although they’d both heard and repeated that figure dozens of times, she was unable after quite a while, to find the source of any actual study that had produced it.
As to why they are rarely challenged and so often repeated by lay folks … I think perhaps it reveals a pre-existing despondency and low view of marriage … we can also almost definitely find connections with the prevailing Christian view of pessimism, cultural defeat, and an eschatology of inevitable deterioration.
Thank you for the question, Joshua. Christ bless you.