Byzantine Catholic Family Matters

Marriage Family and Community II

Divorce, Marriage Rates, and Attitudes

The National Marriage Project’s annual report for 2005 on the State of Our Unions makes a very interesting point about the risk of married couples divorcing: "If you are a reasonably well-educated person with a decent income, come from an intact family and are religious, and marry after age twenty-five without having a baby first, your chances of divorce are very low indeed." This is to say that there are some significant risk factors that will increase the likelihood of a couple divorcing:

Where one or both partners have no more than a high school education. Roughly one third of all American youth do not complete high school.
Where one or both partners come from a broken home. As reported in the first of this series only sixty-three percent of all children live with both parents in the home.
Where the couple's annual income is low. The nation's poverty rate hovers around twelve and one half percent.
Where the couple have their first child before marriage or no more than seven months after marriage. About one in three babies is born out of wedlock.
Where the couple have no religious affiliation. One in five Americans reports having no religious affiliation; and this is not even taking into account those who are nominally affiliated to a church.
Where at least one partner is below the age of twenty-five, but especially when one is below the age of eighteen. The Census Bureau findings for 2000 show that a shade over four percent of all married women are between ages fifteen and twenty-four.

Many married couples in our country who fall into one or more of these categories and who therefore are clearly at risk for divorce. As significant, the data show that the marriage rate in our country has gone down by nearly fifty percent between 1970 and 2004. To begin to see what is going on, it is important to get a handle on the young.

The National Marriage Project looked at the attitudes toward marriage of young people, specifically high school seniors, who have grown up in a society where divorce has been so rampant and where the marriage rate has been cut nearly in half. The findings are interesting. While about three quarters of the high school seniors believe that having a good marriage and family life is "extremely important," only about one third think that this would result in happier, fuller lives than staying single or simply cohabiting. Only about sixty percent believe that they will stay married to the same person for life. And more than half see having a child without being married as a viable lifestyle. So while young people think it's important to have a happy marriage and family life, they also see marriage as one of a few acceptable lifestyles; and those who do marry do so implicitly "knowing" that there is a good chance that they will not spend their lives with the same partner. Our society's understanding of marriage, having children and divorce has changed. The question is, can and will the mystical body of Christ - that is you and I - more completely live and be witness to the sacrament of marriage and Christian family life?