I have always accepted this to be fact and never really thought much about it. When all my friends and I started getting engaged, I do remember thinking it was sad that statistically we may not all stay married.
This past Sunday, I was in church and the guest speaker was a woman named Shaunti Feldhahn. My disclaimer is that I was not familiar with this woman beforehand, and for all I know she may be a raging crackpot. I've done a little research and discovered that she is a Christian author, but has also worked in data collection on Wall Street and at least seems to be legitimately qualified in her research.
Anyway, her message was surprisingly not religious in nature. She explained that she has spent the last eight years trying to find a "real" divorce rate. She attempted to find it about a decade ago to mention briefly in a newspaper column she was writing because she wanted to properly cite it and figured it was probably actually 49.4 percent or something. In trying to cite it, she realized that no real number actually showed anything close to 50 percent. Since then, she has conducted tons of research and concluded that the divorce rate actually has never hit anywhere near 50 percent, and that today more than 70 percent of people are still married to their first spouse (the other 30 percent includes divorce AND widows/widowers), according to the U.S. census bureau.
This was shocking to me. Maybe you all knew this, but I found it really encouraging (this is assuming it's true and she's not a crackpot).
I just thought you guys might be intrigued by this too.