Posted on 05/06/2014 5:41:56 AM PDT by xzins
Most people believe only half of U.S. marriages make it. But a leading researcher is announcing the true divorce rate is much lower and always has been.
Shaunti Feldhahn received her research training at Harvard. She and her husband Jeff help people with their marriages and relationships through best-selling books like, For Women Only and For Men Only.
This Atlanta-based couple often quoted in their writings and at conferences what they thought was accurate research: that most marriages are unhappy and 50 percent of them end in divorce, even in the Church.
"I didn't know," Feldhahn told CBN News. "I've stood up on stage and said every one of these wrong statistics."
Then eight years ago, she asked assistant Tally Whitehead for specific research on divorce for an article she was writing. After much digging, neither of them could find any real numbers.
That kicked off a personal, years-long crusade to dig through the tremendously complicated, sometimes contradictory research to find the truth. The surprising revelations are revealed in her new book, The Good News About Marriage.
The Real Divorce Rate
"First-time marriages: probably 20 to 25 percent have ended in divorce on average," Feldhahn revealed. "Now, okay, that's still too high, but it's a whole lot better than what people think it is."
Shaunti and Jeff point out the 50 percent figure came from projections of what researchers thought the divorce rate would become as they watched the divorce numbers rising in the 1970s and early 1980s when states around the nation were passing no-fault divorce laws.
"But the divorce rate has been dropping," Feldhahn said. "We've never hit those numbers. We've never gotten close."
And it's even lower among churchgoers, where a couple's chance of divorcing is more likely in the single digits or teens.
Hopelessness = Divorce
As the truth about these much lower divorce rates begins to spread, Feldhahn said she believes it will give people hope, which is often a key ingredient to making marriage last. She said hopelessness itself can actually lead to divorce.
"That sense of futility itself pulls down marriages," Feldhahn said. "And the problem is we have this culture-wide feeling of futility about marriage. It's based on all these discouraging beliefs and many of them just aren't true."
Christian psychotherapist Angel Davis has also written about marriage in her book, The Perfecting Storm. The Athens, Georgia-based therapist agreed with Shaunti Feldhahn's warnings about hopelessness.
"The Bible says hope deferred, it makes a heart sick," Davis said. "And we are so influenced by numbers and by culture."
Jeff Feldhahn said anytime he tells people about his wife's findings about how incorrect the 50 percent divorce rate actually is, they're stunned.
"Their mouth drops open and they're just shocked," he said. "They go, 'I can't believe I believed this all these years. And I've heard it so many times. And I've heard it from the pulpit so many times.'"
Shaunti added, "This is a great chance to stand up and say. 'We were all fooled. Not anymore.'"
Spreading the Good News
To that end, Feldhahn has been working to spread the news to pastors and other leaders as fast as she can. The news is changing Pastor Daniel Floyd's counseling because he had bought into fictional research, he admitted to Feldhahn.
"I told her, 'I've said this. I've taught this,'" the pastor at Lifepoint Church in Fredericksburg, Virginia, recalled.
Floyd said he's sure this news will change a generation of marriage counseling.
"I think it's significant," he said. "And (it) could change the conversation from one that is 'Wow, it's just the way it is, and half of you are going to make it, half of you are not,' and change the conversation to know historically, an overwhelming majority have made it and you can make it."
Psychotherapist Davis said this belief can change lives and marriages.
"We know in psychology that what you believe affects how you feel, and then it leads to action," Davis stated. "So when other people are accomplishing something we think is hopeless, it gives us hope. And then we start feeling different and start acting different."
Feldhahn has more shocking research: four out of five marriages are happy. That number flies in the face of the popular belief that only about 30 percent of marriages are happy.
"Most people think most marriages are just kind of 'eeh'…just kind of rolling along," she said. "And they're shocked when I tell them that the actual average is 80 percent: 80 percent of marriages are happy."
Not knowing the true statistics often leads couples to avoid marriage and just shack up instead.
A Game-Changer?
Feldhahn said that couples who avoid marriage do so based on wrong assumptions.
"Like, 'if I'm just going to get divorced and I'm not going to be happy, why bother getting married, right?' And it's based on a lie," she said. "That feeling is based on a lie."
Pastor Floyd said these new facts can be a game-changer for married couples.
"I think it really helps people in the challenging moments to say, 'If I'll just stick with it, then there's a good chance I'm going to make it the distance,'" he said.
"With hope you feel you can make it through, even though you're in a tough patch," Jeff Feldhahn said.
His wife also pointed to other research that proves most of the unhappily married can turn it around.
"The studies show that if they stay married for five years, that almost 80 percent of those will be happy five years later," she said.
The Good News About Marriage also reveals the divorce rate among those active in their church is 27 to 50 percent lower than among non-churchgoers. Feldhahn's hope is that once people learn the truth that they will spread it far and wide.
"We need to change the paradigm of how we talk about marriage -- from marriage being in trouble and all this discouraging stuff to saying, 'No, wait. Most marriages are strong and happy for a lifetime,'" she told CBN News. "That makes a total difference to a couple who can now say, 'You know what? Most people get through this and we can, too.'"
This isn’t really news. The ‘1 in 2 marriages end in divorce’ has never been true, despite being repeated on tv and other media frequently.
I don’t know about others, but I’m 43 and have been married for 22 years. My Depression-Era, Christian grandparents who raised me were married for 60 years. They taught me that life and marriage can be hard and that when you’re going through hell, you cry out to God and push on, because a) you said you would and b) the end result is so worth it.
The numbers I have seen are:
85% of people who get married stay married.
15% of people who get married have three or more spouses in their lifetime.
The math just about matches that 50% divorce rate lie that has become so common.
The above number as well as the author’s numbers match my own experience over 60 years or so.
We’ve been lied to for a century. The question is can we turn it around? The government school system continues to indoctrinate our children. That’s the key.
There are 5 siblings between my family and my husband’s. Of the 5, only one marriage has survived. (My husband’s brother has been divorced twice and married 3 times, don’t know how you figure that.)
The only marriage that has stayed together is ours, and if we make it till December we will be married for 57 years.
You’re spot on. The whole deviant sex thing is a theme of the Left as well. If everybody is having queer sex, then what’s so queer about it?
bookmark
This is what I was thinking. You can send me all the statistics you want - it’s like the lies coming from the White House and the murder rate in Chicago. Use your eyes, look around, and see for yourself.
I know probably as many married couples as I know divorced individuals. Some of the married are on second marriages. And also, I know many people living together with a long term partner that don’t want to get married - for whatever reason. These are people that may have gotten married in the past and then divorced. Another fact lowering the rate. The other thing easy to see? Plenty of Divorce Attorneys with full client rosters and plenty of cases on the docket.
Divorce also doesn’t carry the stigma that it used to. And if you’re in an unhealthy marriage that comes with a lot of conflict - especially with kids in the picture, it’s not a good environment to raise and teach kids in. Kids are not stupid. My friends children were relieved when he got divorced.
Each and every case is different, and if there were an honest show of hands here I bet we’d see more than a 25% divorce rate.
Yes, and liberals do love their myths.
They’ll probably enlist people to go out and get divorced or married-and-divorced just to keep the numbers up and their myth going.
Do I think they’re that fanatical? Yep. (Although I am being a bit sarcastic.)
Your family's experience illustrates an important point. In constructing divorce statistics, you can count the fraction of all marriages that end in divorce or you can count the number of ever-married people who are or have been divorced. The former will give a larger fraction because divorced people who remarry are more likely to divorce again. A good website is http://nationalmarriageproject.org/
A bigger problem is young people deciding to cohabitate without the benefit of marriage in the first place.
Strangely much of this is driven by young women, using pretzel logic that if they never get married, they’ll never know the pain of divorce.
Though they might know the pain of their baby daddy picking up and running off with a younger woman, leaving them high and dry.
I'd say that's much more than likely. Pewrpetrated by the same people who tell us that 10-20% of the population is gay. They're working for the enemy.
In modern times, the statistic is bound to improve even more, because, I suspect, those more likely to divorce are less likely to marry in the first place (since no-commitment shacking up is the cultural norm now).
My experience has also told me the often quoted 50% number was bogus. My guess was always that those who divorce and remarry over and over skew the numbers, but it turned out the numbers were completely bogus to begin with.
My experience says that these researchers are probably right...that the rate of divorce is about 25% for first time marriages.
The frequency of divorce over a specified period of time is generally the method used in researching divorce rate. The period of time is often 5 year increments.
So, the rate of divorce for first marriages at the cohort 5 year mark compared with all cohort marriages at the 5 year mark.
(or 10 years)
Yep. Even when the 'married' fag in question is a bishop. The divorce for fag married bishops is 100%!
If the calculations are done correctly the statistics are reliable. It's the conclusions are often incorrect.
I agree with that, and I think that women, in particular, are beginning to see that poverty awaits them if they get pregnant outside of wedlock.
Poverty is a huge negative, and the story of poverty is beginning to spread.
In my experience, couples I know who have divorced experienced one of two scenarios:
a) The man was not willing to keep to his marriage vows and engaged in adulterous behavior
or
b) The woman bought into a bunch of Oprah-esque pop psych philosophies that she had a “right” to be absolutely happy. Something that is utterly unattainable on this Earth, and which no man is able to provide.
During the Reagan administration a guy by the name of Mitch Snyder claimed that there were three million homeless people in the U.S. and the press ran with it for years. Turns out he made it up.
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