Scott Stanley, Ph.D.

With divorce rates running at 50% or better, the thought of marriage can be scary. Some couples deal with this fear by choosing to live together to “see if we are compatible.” Others get married and just hope it works out.

If I could teach you how to predict whether your marriage would fail with 85-90% accuracy, would you be interested? Scott Stanley, Ph.D., from the University of Denver, has been doing research on marriage for over ten years. For one of his research projects, he tested one hundred and thirty-five couples before they got married. Years later, he looked at who was still married and who had divorced. What he learned from his data was that the seeds of divorce were present in these relationships before these couples were married.

The seeds of your divorce are in your relationship before you get married. Knowing these predictors of divorce will not eliminate all divorce, but it could reduce the rate of divorce.

In the five predictors of divorce, there is good news and bad news. The bad news is that knowing the first two predictors will not help you once you are married, it is too late for them. The good news is that even after you get married, you can change or correct the next three predictors of divorce.

All five of the following negative behaviors, when exhibited before marriage, predicted a couples’ future divorce at 85 to 90% accuracy!

The first predictor of divorce will come as no surprise to you. Getting Married at 16 years-of-age gives you better than 90% chance of getting a divorce. No surprise; so then the question becomes,what is the best age to get married that will give your relationship a chance of being successful? There is no correct answer. It depends on both of the individual’s emotional maturity and communication skills. However, research seems to point to the age of 25 as an average age when most people have had a chance to grow and learn the skills needed to be successful in a relationship. Age itself is not the key here. There are many people who are thirty, forty, fifty and beyond who are still not equipped to handle a marriage relationship.

The second predictor of divorce, which you can do nothing about, is Major Cultural and/or Religious Differences. Race is not as important a factor as are the cultural differences. Years ago, I had an African-American friend from Connecticut. He married an African-American lady from the South who had come up North to go to school. Growing up, he had never really experienced discrimination and could not understand some of the attitudes and prejudices of his wife. What they enjoyed doing for fun was very different; even the foods that they liked were different. For many years, their marriage was a constant struggle. Another example could be a fundamentalist Jew marrying a West Bank Arab; now there is a sure ticket for another war of the Roses. But differences do not have to be this pronounced. People living next door to each other and going to the same church may have equally pronounced differences in their families. One person might have a major fear of abandonment, and the other person might have major control issues and loves skydiving. Even something as little as one person loving scuba diving and the ocean, and the other person hating the ocean, but loves the desert.

With these two predictors, once you get married, you are stuck. If you marry at sixteen, you can not go back and not be married. If your values, cultural, religious and personal interests differ significantly, then you might question how important this person is to your eternal happiness, because people are very reluctant to give much in these areas.