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Is the 50% Divorce Rate a Myth?
You’ve probably heard this your entire life:
“50% of marriages end in divorce.”
It’s repeated so often that most of us don’t even question it.
But what if it’s not actually true?
I recently interviewed social researcher and bestselling author Shaunti Feldhahn, and she shared something I think every married person should hear.
Years ago, Shaunti went looking for the actual divorce rate because she wanted to cite it accurately in an article.
She assumed she’d find something around 50%.
Instead, she started looking through Census Bureau statistics and other major data sources and realized:
The numbers weren’t matching the story we’ve all been told.
And this isn’t just an interesting statistics lesson.
Because what we believe about marriage matters.
It can be the difference of giving up versus working towards what scripture teaches.
Shaunti explained that one of the most important differences between couples who make it through difficult seasons and those who don’t is often something surprisingly simple:
Hope versus futility.
If you believe:
“This is hard, but we can get through it,”
you keep trying.
But if you believe:
“Marriages usually fail anyway. Ours probably will too,”
eventually you start wondering why you should keep fighting for it.
That’s why inaccurate marriage statistics can actually be dangerous.
In this conversation, Shaunti and I also unpack:
• Where the “50% divorce rate” idea actually comes from
• Why some legitimate studies can still create misleading conclusions
• Why a huge sample size doesn’t necessarily mean a study represents everyone
• How the wording of a survey question can change the answers people give
• What Shaunti’s research found about how happy most marriages actually are
• One simple mindset that shows up again and again in the happiest marriages
That last one was particularly powerful:
Learning to believe the best about your spouse’s intentions.
Your spouse may genuinely hurt you or get something wrong without actually wanting to hurt you.
That distinction can change an enormous amount.
If marriage has felt discouraging—or if you simply want a more accurate picture of what the research actually says—I think this conversation will give you a tremendous amount of hope.
And remember:
Your marriage is not doomed because of a statistic.
By God’s grace, transformation may be far more possible than you think.
God bless,
Belah Rose
Delight Your Marriage
(AI helped write this email)
PS – Want more insight into the health of your marriage? Take our free Marital Health Assessment to find out your Marital Health score.
PPS – Ready to start your healing journey? Schedule a free Clarity Call and see if our programs are the right fit for you.
PPPS – Here is what (another) recent Coaching Graduate had to say:
[after coaching], “In intentionality, choosing to make deliberate decisions to act lovingly, even when I don’t feel like it. In gratitude, finding so many reasons to be thankful for my husband that I never saw before. In communication, putting the duct tape on is one of my new sayings to myself, trying to not complain and mother and control (my 3 biggest assets LOL) Growing In appreciation for the effort he is putting forward for me gives me a whole new appreciation that is hard to put in words.”
Here is an AI-generated summary of today’s episode:
Is the 50% Divorce Rate a Myth? What the Research Says About Hope, Marriage, and the Stories We Believe
You’ve probably heard it countless times:
“Half of all marriages end in divorce.”
It gets repeated in articles, sermons, conversations, social media posts, and even marriage resources. Eventually, it can start to feel like an unquestionable fact.
But what if it isn’t?
Social researcher and bestselling author Shaunti Feldhahn has spent decades studying relationships, marriage, men, women, intimacy, and the little things that can make an enormous difference between couples.
And one of the most surprising conclusions from her research is this:
The idea that 50% of marriages end in divorce is not an accurate description of marriage in America.
That matters for more than statistical accuracy.
Because what we believe about marriage affects how we behave inside our own marriage.
Why the “50% Divorce Rate” Matters So Much
When Shaunti first began investigating divorce statistics, she wasn’t actually planning to write a book about them.
She was working as a newspaper columnist and simply wanted to accurately cite the divorce rate.
She assumed the number would be somewhere around 50%. Maybe 48%. Maybe 49%.
But when she began looking through Census Bureau data, vital statistics, and other sources, something didn’t add up.
The numbers she was finding simply didn’t match the cultural narrative.
That discovery eventually led to her book The Good News About Marriage and a much deeper investigation into how divorce statistics are calculated and communicated.
Why did she care so much?
Because during years of relationship research, Shaunti had noticed an important pattern:
Hope matters tremendously in marriage.
Couples can encounter serious problems and still make it through them when they believe:
This is difficult, but we can get through it.
The danger comes when couples begin thinking:
This marriage is probably doomed anyway.
Once futility sets in, effort begins to disappear.
If you believe the ship is inevitably going to sink, why keep bailing water?
That’s why repeatedly telling people that marriage has essentially a 50/50 chance of surviving can have consequences far beyond an inaccurate statistic.
It can help create the very hopelessness that makes couples stop trying.
So What Is the Divorce Rate?
Part of the confusion is that there isn’t actually one simple number called “the divorce rate.”
Researchers can measure marriage and divorce in multiple ways.
Are we looking at the percentage of people who have ever divorced?
The number of divorces occurring during a particular year?
The percentage of first marriages expected to eventually end?
Divorce among people marrying at a certain age?
Projected lifetime divorce?
Those are different questions, and they can produce very different numbers.
When Shaunti researched the issue for The Good News About Marriage more than a decade ago, she reported that 71% of people were still married to their first spouse.
And importantly, the remaining 29% didn’t represent divorce alone.
That category also included people whose marriages ended because their spouse had died.
Based on the various statistics she examined at the time, Shaunti described something closer to roughly a 25% divorce rate as a reasonable approximation—still far higher than anyone would want, but dramatically different from the idea that every marriage essentially faces a coin toss.
During our conversation, Shaunti also referenced more recent Census Bureau numbers she had seen indicating that approximately 77% of people were still married to their first spouse, although she emphasized that there are multiple legitimate ways researchers measure divorce.
Her larger point wasn’t that there is one magical statistic everyone should quote.
It was this:
The evidence does not justify telling every married couple that half of marriages inevitably end in divorce.
How Can Smart Researchers Get Such Different Numbers?
One reason is something most of us rarely consider:
The population being studied matters enormously.
Shaunti gave the example of the National Survey of Family Growth, a major CDC dataset that researchers have sometimes used when projecting divorce rates.
It is a large and valuable dataset.
But there is an important limitation when using it to make sweeping claims about marriage.
The survey historically focused on people in a relatively young age range. Shaunti explained that one version included people approximately ages 17 to 44 and consequently included a disproportionately high percentage of people who had married very young.
That matters because people who marry extremely young have historically experienced substantially higher divorce rates.
So imagine taking a population containing far more very-young marriages than the general population, observing high divorce rates within that population, and then applying those findings broadly to everyone who gets married.
You could end up with a technically sophisticated analysis that still creates a misleading impression.
The lesson extends far beyond divorce statistics.
Whenever someone says:
“Studies show…”
it is worth asking:
What study?
And perhaps even more importantly:
Who exactly did they study?
A Large Sample Size Doesn’t Automatically Mean a Good Study
Suppose someone surveys 10,000 people.
That sounds impressive.
But imagine all 10,000 respondents came from an online community specifically created for people struggling with painful marriages.
Those responses could provide incredibly valuable information about hurting spouses.
But they would not necessarily tell us what all married people experience.
Researchers call this type of group a convenience sample.
There is nothing inherently wrong with convenience samples. The problem comes when researchers—or people sharing the research—generalize the results beyond the population that was actually studied.
Shaunti gave a simple example.
Imagine surveying men attending a fatherhood conference.
You might legitimately conclude:
“Among men who care enough about fatherhood to attend this event, we found…”
But you could not automatically say:
“This is what men believe.”
Those are very different statements.
Good research requires humility about what the data can—and cannot—tell us.
Even the Way We Ask a Question Can Change the Answer
There is another problem most people never think about:
Survey design itself can influence the results.
Early in Shaunti’s research career, she and her husband Jeff worked with Chuck Cowan, who had served as chief of survey design at the Census Bureau.
She described him as extremely rigorous about how questions were written.
A seemingly innocent question could accidentally put respondents on the defensive or steer them toward a certain answer.
For example, a question beginning with:
“Why would you do…?”
can immediately communicate judgment.
The respondent may begin defending themselves rather than simply describing what they think.
A more neutral question might describe a hypothetical situation and ask how the person would respond.
Same basic subject.
Potentially very different data.
That’s why a study shouldn’t automatically become unquestionable simply because someone attaches the word research to it.
We should ask:
Who participated?
How were they selected?
How were the questions written?
What was actually measured?
And are the conclusions broader than the data allows?
The Danger of Turning Pain Into a Universal Narrative
There is another important nuance here.
If a study gathers information from people who have experienced serious pain, coercion, abuse, or unhealthy marriage dynamics, we should listen.
Their experiences matter.
Pain should not be dismissed simply because a sample isn’t nationally representative.
But there is a difference between saying:
“This group of people experienced something painful, and we need to understand it.”
and saying:
“Therefore, this represents marriage generally.”
Those conclusions are not interchangeable.
This distinction is particularly important for Christians.
We should be willing to acknowledge when teachings have been communicated poorly or when people have genuinely been hurt.
At the same time, acknowledging those failures does not require discarding everything Scripture teaches about marriage or assuming that traditional Christian marriage teaching is inherently damaging.
We can hold two truths simultaneously:
People can sincerely try to follow biblical principles and sometimes communicate them poorly.
And:
Biblical truth itself is still worthy of being pursued.
Grace allows us to correct what needs correcting without destroying what is good.
Most Marriages Are Not What You Hear About Online
Perhaps one of the most encouraging insights from Shaunti’s research is that the marriages requiring the most attention are not necessarily representative of marriage overall.
People who seek marriage coaching are usually seeking it for a reason.
People who participate in online conversations about marital trauma are often there for a reason.
People posting about terrible marriages are more visible precisely because something extraordinary or painful has happened.
But that can distort our perception.
Shaunti’s broader research has repeatedly found something far more hopeful:
Most married people are generally happy in their marriages.
She and Dr. Michael Sytsma conducted a nationally representative matched-pair study for their book Secrets of Sex and Marriage.
Rather than surveying random husbands and random wives separately, researchers surveyed 501 actual married couples—1,002 individuals—and could anonymously match each husband’s responses with his wife’s responses.
One of their conclusions?
Most couples were generally happy not only in marriage, but also with their intimate relationship.
That doesn’t mean marriage is effortless.
Couples still misunderstand each other.
They still argue.
They still have differences in desire, personality, expectations, communication, and emotional needs.
But difficulty is not the same thing as doom.
One of the Most Powerful Choices in Marriage
Shaunti’s research into the happiest marriages uncovered one particularly powerful pattern.
Couples who transformed difficult marriages often learned to:
Believe the best about their spouse’s intentions.
Your spouse may genuinely hurt you.
They may say something insensitive.
They may forget something important.
They may completely misunderstand what you needed.
The hurt can be real without the worst interpretation being true.
Instead of immediately concluding:
They don’t care about me.
They wanted to hurt me.
They’re selfish.
They’ll never change.
there may be another possibility:
This person loves me and still got this wrong.
That assumption does not excuse abuse, manipulation, or genuinely destructive behavior. If someone is experiencing abuse, safety and qualified support are essential.
But Shaunti’s point is that most marital problems are not situations where one spouse is deliberately trying to destroy the other.
Often, two people who genuinely care about each other are simply missing each other.
And that is something couples can change.
Your Marriage Is Not a Statistic
Perhaps this is the most important takeaway.
Your marriage is not doomed because someone told you half of marriages fail.
Your marriage is not doomed because you are struggling right now.
Your marriage is not doomed because you and your spouse have misunderstood each other for years.
And your marriage is certainly not doomed because the internet has convinced you that happy lifelong marriages barely exist.
They do.
The research is far more hopeful than the cultural narrative would have us believe.
And hope matters because hope changes behavior.
Hope says:
Maybe I can learn something I don’t know yet.
Maybe my spouse’s intentions are better than I assumed.
Maybe I can change my part of this.
Maybe God can transform something that currently feels impossible.
That doesn’t mean ignoring reality.
It means refusing to surrender to a story of futility that may never have been true in the first place.
As Shaunti prayed at the end of our conversation, may God help us see our spouses clearly, believe the best where we can, allow Him to renew our minds, and become marriages that are a light to a world that desperately needs hope.
Because marriage is not broken beyond repair.
And neither is the possibility of transformation in yours.
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