There are many misleading divorce facts out there, the most common of which is that half of all marriages in the United States will end in divorce. This is simply not true. The truth is that divorce in America is actually on the decline. After a record high divorce rate of 5.3 (per 1000 people) in 1983, divorces in the US have steadily gone down.
Divorce is a sensitive matter, and perhaps that is why true divorce facts sometimes get manipulated and misconstrued. In many of the world's religions, for example, divorce is viewed as a sin, although there are exceptions and situations when divorce is permitted. There was a time when divorce was looked upon very negatively in society, and this may have helped to keep some marriages together. Whether that is a good or bad thing is something for individuals to decide.
It does seem, however, that as divorce became more acceptable around the late 1970s, it also became more prevalent. Could it be that people felt that divorce was now a viable option to marital problems because it became more common? Perhaps the higher level of divorce rates convinced some to go ahead with the divorce instead of really trying to work things out.
If a couple was absolutely dead set against letting their marriage fail, then no change in divorce facts would change their minds. But if a couple was on the fence, they may lean more easily toward divorce as a solution after it lost some of its negative image. This is even more of a possibility when divorce became so common among influential people that were also viewed as good role models.
Church leaders may play a large part in how divorce is viewed, especially if they are divorced themselves. Marriage is usually a spiritual event, held in a church and agreed to before God and other witnesses. Divorce, then, becomes a breaking of this spiritual bond, so it should not be very common at all. Most wedding vows include the words "till death do us part," and divorce goes directly against that vow. It would seem that a self-proclaimed world leader like the US would stay far away from divorce in order to protect the sanctity of marriage and the strength of their words.
Divorce is a broken promise, plain and simple, and the root of the problem may be as basic as taking the marriage more seriously. If every married person put as much effort into their actual marriage as they do into the planning of the wedding, divorce could actually become obsolete. Weddings are planned for months, sometimes years, and divorces occur most frequently in marriages of less than 5 years. That means that in a relatively short time, the happy couple decided it just wouldn't work. Maybe they need to go back to the original drawing board and review those vows every now and then.
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