The Good News About Marriage Part 5

In the study "Spiritual Beliefs and Marriage," coauth.o.r.ed with Peter Larson, Olson examined various religious activities (like Bible reading and prayer) to measure and evaluate how much couples agreed with each other spiritually. In all twelve dimensions of the evaluation, the more couples agreed with each other on personal spiritual beliefs and practices, the better were their scores in areas such as marital satisfaction, conflict resolution, and couple closeness. For example, those who had a high spiritual agreement scored a 71 on the couple closeness scale, almost double the score of those marriages that experienced a low spiritual agreement (they scored 39).

Study 3: Marriage Oneness a.s.sessment-Couples Who Pray Together Are Likely to Be Connected and Close in Their Marriage, Whereas Those Who Don't Are Much More Likely to Be Disconnected

As a part of an eight-week small-group FamilyLife DVD study called Marriage Oneness,83 3,850 couples took a marriage a.s.sessment called the "Marriage Oneness Profile," administered online by PREPARE/ENRICH. Based on the couples' answers to the a.s.sessment tool, PREPARE/ENRICH ranks couples by how close and connected the marriage is.84 This survey found a link between frequency of prayer and how connected spouses are. Fully 68 percent of highly connected couples agreed or strongly agreed that they pray together regularly. Only 19 percent of highly connected couples reported not praying together regularly. By comparison, most highly disconnected couples (73 percent) reported no regular prayer with their spouse. Among those taking this a.s.sessment, it was unusual for a couple who prays together to feel highly disconnected in their overall relationship. (See table.) Note that this a.s.sessment was probably offered primarily through churches and taken primarily by churchgoers, and thus these percentages are not necessarily the same as what we would see in the general population. However, the bottom line that prayer is highly a.s.sociated with connectedness is very likely to be the same.

"My Partner and I Pray Together on a Regular Basis"

Source: "Marriage Oneness" surveys, tabulated by PREPARE/ENRICH for FamilyLife. Due to rounding, columns may not total 100%.

"Keep On Rolling"

In addition to the speaking engagements I do for corporations, community groups, and other events, I speak at thirty or forty churches a year. For the last few years, I have often asked the senior pastor and/or the marriage pastor of those churches if I can brief them on the good news I have been finding. Universally they are encouraged ... and sometimes chagrined. The pastor of one large church told me, "I have quoted every one of those bad statistics you just mentioned."

"I have too," I said. "I think most of us have."

"I think as pastors, we sometimes feel like we have to create a crisis of awareness to draw attention to something," he continued. "Just a few weeks ago when we started this current marriage series, I asked people, 'Think right now of your friends having trouble in their marriage. They need this upcoming message. Look around you ... Half of us are struggling. We have to take this seriously.' " He paused for a minute. "We try very hard here to instill hope in every other area, but in talking about marriages, we are putting a seed of doubt into people. And that isn't something we should be doing. Hope is what you want to give as a leader. We say G.o.d is a redeemer. He takes what is broken, fallen, and seems unfixable and makes all things new."

"What difference will it make to you, knowing the real data?" I asked him.

"Well, I can't use my old stats, that's for sure!" He laughed. "But more than that, we own up to things here, and I think I will want to own up to this one-to tell the congregation we were wrong and didn't realize it. We would actually say, 'This may have had a negative effect on you or discouraged you, and we're sorry. Because the truth is better than fiction. Even if your marriage isn't in a happy place, realize happy doesn't mean perfect. Happy means you put the marriage in front of the issue, and the commitment overrides everything.' "

As I have spoken with other pastors, I have often heard relief as well. One pastor who has seen marriages in his church thriving in recent years put it this way: I think to some degree pastors feel like I need to preach a special marriage sermon every three months, and if I'm not, I am not doing my job. But this data confirms what I have seen: that pastors don't have to preach "marriage" sermons all the time. We do need to be intentional as leaders to ensure our church is supporting marriages and is bringing couples together in community. But that doesn't mean we have to cover the main marriage scriptures every week from the pulpit. Instead, we can keep emphasizing that ultimately it is about just living out these "one anothers" of the Bible, just being a disciple. That is the best thing you can do for your marriage. The key for us is to keep on rolling, keep on showing our people how to be fully obedient followers.

Another pastor summed the sense of relief up well, saying, I have long wanted to tell people, "Bring your friends to church; you'll get support for your marriage here." But I kept stopping myself because if we have the same divorce rate as everyone else, how can I make that claim? Hearing this is freedom. Freedom to say that not only can you believe in marriage, but you can believe in Christian marriage. It is freedom to say that the Bible does work, that what G.o.d says does make a difference. It is freedom to say what most of us have felt but second-guessed before: married people need a supportive community, and the church is the best place to get it.

Summary * The notion that "the divorce rate is the same in the church as in the general public" is not true. That is a fundamental misunderstanding of Barna Group data.

* In the study that is misquoted, Barna was researching the divorce trends based on faith-based beliefs, not faith-based practices like worship attendance, and in fact actually excluded consideration of whether the person went to religious services.

* New tabulations of the Barna data that include church attendance, as well as the findings of several other studies, show that when a person attends church, it lowers their chances of divorce by roughly 25 to 50 percent compared to those who do not attend.

* A special run of Brad Wilc.o.x / National Marriage Project survey data for The Surprising Secrets of Highly Happy Marriages book found that among couples where both the husband and the wife agreed that "G.o.d is at the center of our marriage," fully 53 percent were at the highest possible level of marital happiness!

* A FamilyLife survey of more than fifty churches found an average overall divorce rate in those churches of 22.4 percent, and because this survey had a higher-than-normal sample of high-risk baby boomers, the actual average divorce rate for churchgoers is likely to be lower.

* A FamilyLife and PREPARE/ENRICH a.s.sessment of 7,700 married people found that 68 percent of highly connected couples said they prayed together regularly and that 73 percent of highly disconnected couples said they didn't.

Good News #3 The rate of divorce in the church is 25 to 50 percent lower than among those who don't attend worship services, and those who prioritize their faith and/or pray together are dramatically happier and more connected.

5.

Why Remarriages Are Much More Successful Than You Thought

In my interviews for The Surprising Secrets of Highly Happy Marriages, when I spoke to those in a second marriage, I often heard comments like this woman's: "I know we've got an uphill battle. Sixty percent of second marriages fail, and we are both determined we're not going to be in that group."

Or these comments, from a couple explaining their very difficult first few years in what was a second marriage for both of them: Her: We are very excited that we've defied the odds. One of the reasons is that we intentionally chose not to have children together because we learned that having a child together would have brought a harder dynamic. We wanted to feel that all three of the children were our children.

Him: Also, we went into the relationship with the right expectations, knowing that it was going to be a struggle. We understood that it would be hard, so we were resolved to do whatever it took to make it as easy as possible on each other.

Her: There were times we thought we weren't going to make it and were going to be one of the statistics. But we had promised our commitment before G.o.d, and we are both stubborn and don't like to quit. There were plenty of times where if we'd lacked determination, it would have been so easy to throw in the towel. But believing that G.o.d can redeem anything, we had a vision of what it could be like if we chose to press on. And that gave us hope, although sometimes it was literally the last thread we were holding on to.

As I spoke to those who were in highly happy second marriages, it was wonderful to see this type of commitment and determination. But I was struck by how commonly I heard these couples talk about "the incredibly high failure rate of second and third marriages," which is popularly believed to be at least 60 percent and 73 percent, respectively.

I couldn't help being concerned, especially since I suspected that (as with all the other divorce numbers) those ratios might not be the full story. After all, if the feeling of futility adds pressure in first marriages, which are believed to have a "flip a coin" 50 percent failure rate, it must be smothering for those in second and third marriages to feel they are so unlikely to succeed! For every couple that was motivated and determined by the statistics (such as the ones I was interviewing), how many were discouraged?

Although eight in ten marriages that exist today are first marriages (among women), it is still painful to think about the others, about those in a second or third marriage who believe that they have a better chance of winning at roulette than of keeping their marriage intact.

What Percent of Marriages Are Remarriages?*

First marriage 80.5% Second marriage 15.8% Third marriage (or more) 3.8% *Among women. (Remarriage is more common among women, in part because women tend to live longer than men.) Source: US Census Bureau, SIPP table 10, 2009.

Fueling the Legend

Because there are far fewer studies on remarriage in general, it is hard to get a handle on the right divorce statistics for those marriages-which is probably one reason why the wrong ones get so much traction. It appears that remarriages do face a moderately higher divorce rate (more on that below), but the ultra-high rates commonly cited and spread via the Internet appear, as far as we can tell after years of research, to be pure urban legend.

The ultra-high rates commonly cited and spread via the Internet appear, as far as we can tell after years of research, to be pure urban legend.

Like everyone else, though, we didn't realize that at first. But since what we saw on the Internet was the opposite of the actual studies we were looking at, we set out to trace the numbers quoted in books, magazine articles, blogs, and news stories, expecting that we would find at least some good sources worth discussing. For example, an online search of "divorce rate second marriages" turned up dozens of seemingly solid statements, like the opening of this 2012 online article from Psychology Today: Past statistics have shown that in the U.S. 50 percent of first marriages, 67 percent of second, and 73 percent of third marriages end in divorce. What are the reasons for this progressive increase in divorce rates?85 What we noticed very quickly was that most of the articles and books we looked at either cited no sources or cited articles (such as the Psychology Today piece above) that themselves cited no sources. We did find a few writers who had in good faith cited and re-cited more solid-seeming data sources, only to discover, when we dug further, that those sources either didn't exist or didn't say any such thing. We saw three such examples over and over.

Dozens of reporters and other writers had referenced Jennifer Baker of the School of Professional Psychology at Forest Inst.i.tute in Springfield, Missouri, as being the source of those high divorce numbers. We contacted Dr. Baker to ask about her findings, and she quickly e-mailed us: "Unfortunately, these statistics are not mine, and even though I have asked the website to remove my name as a source, I've been unable to get them to do so."86 Other writers referenced a particular 2006 Census Bureau table as the source for a 60 percent and 73 percent divorce rate for second marriages and third marriages, respectively. (Yay! An actual citation!) But when we dug into the Census Bureau reports to find the table in question, we discovered it didn't contain those numbers. Perplexed, we called the relevant department at the census (they knew us well by now) and asked for their help. After hours of experimenting with the data to see whether there was some obscure way to come up with those percentages from that table, the census folks confirmed the percentages simply didn't exist.87 One of the long-tenured census staff members (who adhered to the census policy of not being quoted by name) said emphatically, "Those aren't our numbers. We did look, but they're just not there. The Census Bureau is quoted as being the source for a million things incorrectly." This source said that there is always the possibility that someone may have somehow estimated those numbers on their own and used census data in some way, but the numbers themselves are not from the Census Bureau. They simply may have spread because they looked official.

Finally, we saw several times the citation "US Bureau of Statistics, 1995" as showing what percent of marriages each year are remarriages, but there is no such agency in the United States (although there is in Australia). Even among the US government departments that do keep vital statistics, we have found no such numbers.

It is possible that the 60 percent / 73 percent redivorce rate myth could have been fueled by misunderstandings about studies that were a.n.a.lyzing issues other than divorce rates and looking at high-risk groups on purpose.88 It is also very possible that people have looked at the alarming projections some concerned researchers made back in the high-divorce years of the 1980s and believed that those studies were reporting actual divorce rates for second and third marriages.89 And finally, it is also quite possible that despite our efforts there are other studies we are simply missing. But as of this writing, Tally and I have not been able to locate a single actual data set or study that has researched the matter and concluded that the remarriage divorce rate is in the 60 percent / 73 percent ballpark.

Circling Closer to the Truth

One of the premier marriage and divorce researchers, Andrew Cherlin of Johns Hopkins University, captured the difficulty in understanding remarriage divorce trends in a 2010 Journal of Family and Marriage article when he commented, "Few demographic a.n.a.lyses of trends in remarriage were published in the 2000s, so it is not known whether it became more or less common among the divorced population."90 The truth is that not only are recent data sets spa.r.s.e, but remarriage research in general is meager. A few studies, however, give us solid-enough data to debunk the doom-and-gloom bad-news myths. Yes, remarriages appear to have a somewhat higher divorce rate (especially in the first five years), and yes, it makes a lot of sense for those who have already experienced a divorce to be particularly careful about avoiding another one. But the evidence also shows that remarriages (especially second marriages) can be expected to last a lifetime.

Let's take a quick look at three of these studies.

Study 1: Census Bureau, 2009-Just as 71 Percent of Women Are Still Married to Their First Spouse, 65 Percent Are Still Married to Their Second Spouse91

One of the most telling statistics for remarriages is the percent of them that are still intact. According to the 2009 US Census Bureau SIPP survey that we looked at earlier, 71 percent of women (and 72 percent of people overall) are still married to their first spouse.92 And the percent for second marriages isn't dramatically different: 65 percent of women in their second marriages are still married to that spouse. Among the 35 percent who aren't, those marriages are even more likely than first marriages to end in the death of a spouse because these marriages often started at older ages.93 When we look at this data, there is no way to know the numbers for the rate of divorce rather than death, but it will certainly be significantly lower than 35 percent. And it is good news that at most the divorce rate for second marriages is only six percentage points higher than the divorce rate for first marriages. (This is similar to the finding of a well-regarded, older study by Professor Emeritus b.u.mpa.s.s.)94 Although this is pure speculation, because second marriages are so much more likely than first marriages to end in death, it is a.n.a.lytically even possible that the actual long-term divorce rate among remarriages could be lower than for first marriages. Especially, as referenced below, once you get past the first few years of the second marriage. (See also endnote 94 about Larry b.u.mpa.s.s's study.) Even among third marriages, the marriages-not-intact numbers are not the majority, as 59 percent of women on their third marriages are still married to that spouse (meaning 41 percent aren't, due to widowhood or divorce). For the full breakdown, see the table.

Intact Marriages Women Men First marriage intact 71% 81% Second marriage intact 65% 78% Third marriage intact 59% 75% Source: US Census Bureau, 2009 SIPP, calculated from table 6.

Study 2: Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2013-Even Among the High-Risk Baby Boomers, the Second-Marriage Divorce Rate Is 36 Percent95

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) studied the second-marriage divorce rates of a specific group of high-risk people: those born between 1957 and 1964-the end of the baby boom generation. What the researchers discovered resembles the SIPP numbers, that 62 percent of second marriages are still intact. But unlike the SIPP numbers, they studied which marriages ended due to divorce and which to widowhood, and discovered that an average of 36 percent of those second marriages had ended in divorce.

In this study, the divorce-rate difference between men and women is barely two percentage points (35.2 percent versus 37.4 percent), suggesting again that the big difference between men and women in the SIPP data is mainly due to widowhood of more women. This is encouraging, given that this group is one of the highest-risk cohorts, and thus other age groups are likely to have lower divorce-rate numbers for second marriages.

In other words, the reality is essentially the opposite of the 60 percent myth.

Study 3: CDC Report, 2002-in Second Marriages, the Divorce Rate by the Tenth Anniversary Is Only Six Percentage Points Higher Than That of First Marriages96

In chapter 2, we mentioned the CDC's highly studied National Survey of Family Growth, which heavily surveyed those who married young. Although the raw divorce rates from this group aren't nationally representative for age, as with the SIPP, it is one of the few studies that breaks out divorce rates of first and second marriages, and the difference between those groups within the study is still valuable, even if the actual divorce-rate numbers are not. Among women who divorced within ten years of getting married (the longest period available), the second-marriage divorce rate was only six percentage points higher than that of first marriages.97 This study also shows that just as with first marriages, the greatest divorce risk for remarriages comes in the first five years. Another well-respected demographer named Joshua Goldstein points out that, specifically, "divorce rates peak during the fourth year for both first marriages and remarriages."98 Those who have made it to their second marriage's fifth anniversary have a much greater chance of their marriage lasting a lifetime.

So beyond the baby boomer numbers found by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and other than the CDC numbers of those married young, what might the actual divorce rate be for a more representative cross section of remarriages? A "Family Profile" published by the National Center for Family and Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University, under codirectors Wendy Manning and Susan Brown, found that when lumping all remarriages together (including second, third, fourth marriages, and more), the divorce rate for first marriages is 35 percent lower than for all remarriages.99 In chapter 2, we estimated that roughly one in four first marriages have ended in divorce. A 35 percent increase would imply that on average about one in three of all remarriages would end in divorce.

This implies that on average about one in three remarriages would end in divorce.

Determined to Be Different

About a year after I first started this research, I learned something about one of my close friends that stunned me. She and her husband (I'll call him Brady) had been friends with Jeff and me for years. They had been married for more than thirty years, their kids were grown, and we often turned to them for advice and prayer on many issues of life.

One night over dinner, we were talking about this research and the myth of the remarriage divorce rate, and I saw my friend and her husband exchange a look that I couldn't read.

"What?" I asked.

"Well ..." She smiled ruefully. "Did you know that I was married before?"

I must have looked stunned. "I had no idea."

"I was married for all of eighteen months. We were so young. We made every mistake you can make. I wasn't going to church. It just fell apart. I really thought I would be secondhand goods forever. And then a few years later, I met Brady."

To my consternation, suddenly her eyes filled with tears. "Every day I thank G.o.d for Brady. I cannot imagine life without him. The pain of having done it wrong, and seeing how good it can be when you do it right, when you do what G.o.d asks ... It is the greatest possible reason for us to know that in this marriage we will be together forever."

A marriage and family pastor I was briefing on this shared something similar. He said, A first marriage is optimal, is G.o.d's intent for marriage. But G.o.d is also so kind to those who have been young and stupid and done everything wrong. By G.o.d's grace I see so often that He gives those on their second chance a rich and wonderful marriage.

I meet people all the time who have been married twenty or thirty years and have a great marriage. And when I get to know them, I learn that "Well you know this was my second marriage. I was married at twenty-two and divorced by twenty-five."