The LDS Guide to Dating & Marriage, Part 14: The Issue of Statistics...or why you shouldn't fear divorce

[Previous posts in the series:  Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13]

"Instead of studying for finals, what about just going to the Bahamas and catching some rays? Maybe you'll flunk, but you might have flunked anyway...that's my point."  -- Deep Thoughts (Jack Handey)

As discussed in the previous section, divorce is a reality and always will be.

Still, the statistics about divorces--even among Church members--can be pretty frightening. I'll bet just about everyone can name at least five couples they know personally who are divorced without breaking a sweat, and I'll bet virtually all Church members can name at least one temple-sealed couple who is now divorced.

Like all statistics, though, there's a right way and a wrong way to interpret them...

In college I had a female friend who had been dating her boyfriend steadily for a while. They were both nice, faithful people, got along well together, and were both mature enough that they'd probably do well if they got married. The problem was her boyfriend just couldn't make the commitment. After his parents got divorced, he said, and after seeing couple after couple among others he had met fall apart, he feels afraid of getting divorced himself...and thus afraid of getting married in the first place, even to his girlfriend whom he adores. Why go to the trouble of getting married if you're just going to get divorced later?

Looking at the raw numbers (divorce rate around 50% for virtually all couples) you could see the reason behind my friend’s (and others’) anxiety about getting married. After all, 50% is like flipping a coin: heads, your marriage makes it, tails it doesn't.

The problem is: it isn't like flipping a coin at all.

While the 50% figure is probably accurate, just quoting the 50% figure as it relates to you confuses cause and effect--it assumes a certain randomness to divorces when, in fact, divorces don't happen randomly at all. In other words, just because 50% of marriages happen to end in divorce, doesn't mean my marriage or your marriage has a 50% chance of ending in divorce--and therein lies the problem with statistics.

A professor in a college class may tell you the first day that historically only 15% of the students who take the class get A's. This, however, doesn't mean your chance of getting an A is only 15% (unless the professor is using a very strict bell curve for grading..or simply pulls final grades out of a hat at the end of the year...).  The means of determining your grade is not random--it depends on your individual effort in completing the homework, class projects, and tests through the course of the year. It may turn out that only 15% of the students end up making the effort to get an A, but that does not have a causal relationship with any one individual student in the class--that student either gets an A or doesn't according to his/her own effort and ability, not according to a random distribution.

So it is with marriages--they don't end because of some random flip of a coin...they end because of the actions of one or both of the partners. Therefore, the divorce rate is misleading because the figure is merely the numerical result of all collective marriage partners' individual decisions...not a cause of them. The only effect the marriage rate being high or low has on your marriage is affecting the number of other couples you know who have been divorced. (And this might not be an insignificant factor--it's quite possible the more couples you know who have gotten divorced themselves, the more likely you are to consider it yourself, since it seems to be the normal course of things. Of course, messy divorces could also work the other way--encouraging you to try harder so you don't have to go through what Brother Jones down the street did...)

The 50% divorce rate (give or take a percent) is probably accurate for marriages in general, and non-temple marriages involving at least one Church member. The actual temple marriage divorce rate is unknown (lower, I think…). Someone at Church HQ might have the stats, but in a sense they don't matter. Since divorces are not random, it really doesn't matter to me if the divorce rate happens to be 5%, 30% or 70%--the chances of my marriage lasting remain exactly the same.

Marriage is inherently an anxiety-inducing experience—and not just from fear of divorce either. You have someone new to care—and worry—about (even more when you have kids), plus you have a sense of vulnerability from knowing someone is going to get to know you—the good and the bad—better than anyone else alive, even your parents.  Still, to be afraid of trying because there's a chance of failure is just the kind of fear that we're here to overcome in this mortal life (see the "Deep Thought" above...).  Part of the marriage journey is being brave enough to make the jump in the first place and being willing to risk much for the sake of greater rewards...

Next: A wrap-up...for now.