We are approaching wedding season! April, May and June are filled with shopping the registries, excitement for friends, and final preparations for an awesome day for a beautiful bride and groom.
And yet . . . even as they prepare for a lifetime together, how many times will that bride and groom (or the rest of us) hear those sneakily discouraging statistics that make them wonder whether a lifetime together is possible? (Even, perhaps, at the wedding, the well-meaning officiant might say something like, “You need to work hard! Half of all marriages end in divorce!”)
Or how many times have we, ourselves, been shocked and saddened to hear that friends we know are suddenly getting a divorce? It looms large in our eyes that a seemingly normal husband and wife with kids, a dog and a mortgage could end like this. It makes us (and that bride and groom) think, subconsciously: “If they’re getting a divorce, what chance do we have?” Or “half of marriages end in divorce anyway so it shouldn’t surprise us.”
Many brides and grooms today are subconsciously going into their marriages believing they have a flip-the-coin chance of making it—when that is not true at all!
Just recently I had a series of all-day meetings with my Senior Researcher, Tally Whitehead, who flew down from Ohio. We were pulling together an update on the latest good news data about the state of marriage in our country, which has always been better than we think . . . and has only gotten better as new studies have been released!
We detail a lot of this in our book, The Good News About Marriage: Debunking Discouraging Myths about Marriage and Divorce. But I’m going to repeat some of it here, because we must spread the good news far and wide, reassure those brides and grooms we know, and uphold the fact that as we head into “marriage season,” the idea of love for a lifetime is not old fashioned and it’s also not mythical.
Here are the few important key facts about marriage we’d like to share with you—and have you share with those who are getting married this year!
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