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.'"
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."
Maybe this is just paranoid thinking on my part...
BUT, could it be possible that the 50% Divorce Rate Figure has been planted into our media and popular culture by those who want to discredit marriage and family?
Why else would we be fed such a lie?
And, when arguing for “Same Sex Marriage”, its proponents OFTEN cite this figure to justify their own position.
The 50% figure has been bandied about for at least as long as the push for the destruction of the Traditional Family has.
Has anyone else thought of this?
This fact doesn’t fot the progressive agenda ergo it can’t be true. The MSM now calls marriage “civil unions” so homos can say they’re “married” to make it “official”. Marriage between a man and a woman is so old school and outdated you know...
Yep. Satan hates marriage because it embraces fidelity, loyalty, and love...
Amen.
Actually, the research was out there to suggest all along that 50% was way on the high side. Extrapolating from different data, my own personal conclusion was that about a third of marriages putatively end in divorce. I’m happy to see that it’s lower still.
Any lie, repeated often enough, will eventually be accepted as the truth.
Thanks for this post.
Even relying on the “old understandings”, there was always the difference between saying half of all marriages end in divorce, and half of all people who marry will get divorced. There are a lot of serial marrieds that push the divorce rate up.
From what I’ve seen? I bet further study would show that homosexual marriages end in divorce at a FAR HIGHER rate.
> From what I’ve seen? I bet further study would show that homosexual marriages end in divorce at a FAR HIGHER rate.
Any marriage that begins with two animals being attracted to each other by sniffi g each other a$$es won’t end well...just my opinion...
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard that first marriages last 75% of the time. And the 25% who get divorced and remarried tend to get divorced again and mess up the overall statistics.
I wish they included some of the raw numbers in this article though.
Another point to consider is that the researchers appear to be looking only at first marriages. The divorce rate for people who have multiple “marriages” is likely higher.
In my own family, between my wife’s and my siblings, there are a total of nine siblings, 13 marriages, and five divorces. That’s a divorce rate of nearly 40%. But among the nine siblings, there are only two persons who have been divorced at all. That’s 22%. Of eight first marriages, there were two that ended in divorce. That’s 25%.
That’s consistent with other “statistics” homosexuals have been trumpeting, namely the lie that 10% of the population has this mental illness.
Statistics are always unreliable.
“”But the divorce rate has been dropping,” Feldhahn said. “We’ve never hit those numbers. We’ve never gotten close.” “
The marriage rate has been dropping too. That means only those who want to get married are doing it which is probably good.
The other consideration is regarding Catholics. Do the divorce statistics count catholic “annulments” ?
Medved has been harping on this for decades. It is one of those pop-culture parroted myths.
An annulment must be preceded by a legal divorce. So, only the divorce is counted whether the person gets an annulment or not.
Another liberal myth being shattered ??
This is such wonderful news, I wonder if anyone besides a few here at FR will hear about it. I would love for the MSM to pick this up, but really doubt that they will, because it doesn’t fit in with the left’s agenda of destroying families.
There are roughly 2.2 million marriages every year.
There are roughly 1.1 million divorces every year.
That is how they come up with the statistic of 50% of marriages end in divorce.
But to find out the RATE of divorce, you need to put the number of divorces over the total number of marriages that exist in the country.
If there are fifty million marriages that exist in America, then that is 1.1 million divorces over 50,000,000 marriages, or a rate of 2.2% that end in divorce in a given year.
I am using WAG estimates to prove a mathematical point, as government statistics do not include all states, every year, for divorce and marriage.
The rate of divorce in a given year is nowhere near 50% or even 25%.
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