Roadblock #6: “Half of all marriages end in divorce.”
Action: Don’t let fear (or mythology!) guide your decisions.
Many people cite a commonly circulated myth that 50% of all marriages end in divorce – an untrue statistic that is guaranteed to strike hopelessness into our hearts. This isn’t the place for a full discussion, but the research for my book The Good News About Marriage found that the actual divorce rate for society as a whole is not close to 50%.
It is impossible to pin down one “real” divorce rate, since that depends on all sorts of complex factors, but the overall divorce rate is probably closer to 25% than 50%. And newer data further confirms that the news is better than we think. (I’ll be doing a data update this year, so if you are not currently a subscriber to this blog please sign up to see that update when it comes out.)
As mentioned in Part 1, it is true that getting married very young does increase overall divorce risk, while marrying later improves it. Researchers theorize this statistical concern comes because young couples don’t yet know themselves or each other well and aren’t as prepared for the lifetime “for better or for worse-ness” of the commitment – which is one reason this series is focusing on exactly those questions.
It is easy to let fear guide decisions. But remember this important truth from scripture: Perfect love drives out fear. Over and over, the pages of scripture remind us not to let fear take over our thinking. It is right to take the marriage covenant very, very seriously. But if each of us succumbed to all of our possible fears about marriage, none of us would ever get married!
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