How many times have you heard the statistic, "One out of every two marriages ends in divorce"? It's simply not true. It's more like one out of every FIFTY. The statistic comes from bad math. The number of divorces filed every year are being compared to the number of new marriage licenses, but it doesn't factor in all the marriages from previous years that are still intact.

Consider this evaluation from Bible.org:

How many times have you heard or read that 50 percent of U.S. marriages end in divorce? It’s not true. Yes, the number of divorces each year is about half the number of marriages that same year. But that’s like computing the death rate by comparing the number of people who die with the number of people who are born.

That ignores those who neither were born nor died during that 12-month period. The 50-percent divorce figure ignores the number of intact marriages from years and decades earlier.

The truth is that about one of 50 marriages ends each year, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Pollster Louis Harris maintains that 90 percent of marriages survive until one partner dies.

Daniel Lynch, American Journalism Review, quoted in Reader’s Digest, p. 90

As tragic as divorce is, not everybody's doing it.

Tags: divorce