Why 1/3 of Marriages End in Divorce

One in three marriages ends in divorce. One in three, failing. If you turn on almost any movie, listen to pop music, or scroll through social media, you'll see the same message. Romantic love and physical attraction are the keys to happily ever after. Find the right person, feel the chemistry, and everything will just work out, right? Well, the research tells a different story. There's one factor that predicts marital satisfaction, intimacy, and even how well couples survive during hard times. And it's not about better communication skills, or having the same hobbies, or even similar interests. It's something much more fundamental. The answer might surprise you. Now, let's start with the landscape. About half of U.S. adults think that dating is more difficult than it used to be, according to a 2020 Pew Research report. And you can see this playing out in real time. There is a rise of situationships, that is, relationships that exist in a gray area between casual and committed, and this has exploded. You can look at Tinder's 2022 year review, and they reported a 49% increase in people adding the term to their bios. Casual encounters have largely replaced traditional courtship, likely to normalize popular culture, and I would guess, pornography consumption. Check out our previous video to see why this might be. A survey published in the Review of General Psychology found that 70% of romantically involved young people reported engaging in intimacy, but without commitment. But here's a paradox. That same survey found that 65% of women and 45% of men secretly hoped their casual encounters would turn into something deeper. So they are privately hoping it becomes something real. They want depth and something meaningful. So they're acting one way, but then feeling another. So we have this dating market that promises freedom, that is, casual encounters, but often delivers emptiness. And even, let's say, in the best case scenario, when people get married, when they finally get that commitment they seek, again, the divorce rates are between 30 to 40%. But why? What's happening? Or what's missing? Research out of BYU conducted in-depth interviews with more than 300 married couples across 33 states. About 20% have been married before, and there was a clear pattern. Those who said their first marriage was lacking a spiritual foundation mentioned it was built primarily on physical attraction and romance. And when those went away, well, so did the relationship. Before their second marriage, they decided to make a change. They began practicing a faith. They then looked for a partner with a similar commitment. And those couples described the difference as profound, with the marriages lasting more and often being happier. Now, I'm not telling you to go to church. The point is about transcendence. The practice of connecting to something bigger than your own life. That could be a faith. It could be a philosophy. It could be meditation, contemplation, or even just deep engagement with nature. Now, it's really not as far-fetched as you might think. A 2025 Pew Research Center report found that 40% of Americans feel a deep sense of spiritual peace at least once per week. Again, these aren't monks in monasteries. These are regular people like you and me with jobs, mortgages, and Netflix accounts. And this inner resource, this sense of being connected to something larger, it actually turns out to be one of the strongest predictors of relationship health that researchers have ever found. Here's the logic. If you enter a relationship feeling spiritually empty, you'll unconsciously expect your partner to fill that void, to be your source of meaning, purpose, of everything. Truth be told, no human being can take that responsibility. It's an impossible burden to place on another person. But if you come into a relationship already feeling whole and connected to something bigger than yourself, well, you're not looking for someone to complete you. You're looking for someone to grow with. In psychology, there is a concept called sanctification, the perception that some aspect of your life has sacred or divine significance. You don't have to be religious to experience this. It can simply mean viewing your relationship as having ultimate value, transcending convenience, or emotion. A longitudinal study published in the Journal of Family Psychology followed newlyweds and measured how much they perceived their relationship as having sacred significance. Couples who scored higher on sanctification early in their marriage reported greater marital satisfaction and intimacy one year later. But here's what those results held even after controlling for how often the couples attended religious services, how important they rated religion overall, and also standard demographics such as age and income. In other words, it wasn't religion itself driving the outcome, it was the specific perception that their bond carried weight beyond themselves, that it mattered in some transcendent way. When you believe your relationship is sacred or even just deeply meaningful, research shows you're more likely to protect it, invest in it, forgive within it, and fight for it when things get hard. You're also more likely to communicate effectively and resolve problems during conflict. The relationship stops being something you consume and starts being something you invest in. A study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family surveyed over 1,000 couples across racial and ethnic groups and looked at different kinds of religious engagements. Attending church together was linked to higher relationship quality. Being part of church activities pushed it still higher. But the strongest effect came from couples who practiced shared spiritual activities at home—prayer, meditation, reading sacred texts, and reflecting together. The closer the practice was to the couple's daily life, the more powerful the benefit. Again, don't get me wrong, going through religious formalities had a powerful effect, but making it personal, making it part of your daily life with that person, had a dramatically larger effect. And you can't ignore the downstream influence. A study tracked over 19,000 married Americans from People who rated their marriages as very happy or pretty happy had roughly 20% lower odds of dying early compared to those in unhappy marriages. The researchers noted that the magnitude of this effect is comparable to the mortality risk of physical inactivity, meaning the quality of your marriage may matter as much for your longevity as whether or not you exercise. And a separate study found that one standard deviation increase in a spouse's life satisfaction was associated with a 13% lower mortality risk for the other spouse. So your partner's happiness literally protects your life. So when we talk about what makes relationships work, we're talking about something with measurable consequences for how long you live. Okay, one more interesting finding. A 2023 study examined families during the COVID-19 pandemic and found that those who increased or maintained their spiritual practices reported higher family closeness, and they perceived the pandemic as having a positive long-term effect on their relationship. Just think about the context. This was a period of forced proximity, financial stress, fear, anxiety, isolation, pretty much everything that tears relationships apart. And families with a shared transcendent practice survived and grew closer. They found meaning in the difficulty itself. And this aligns with the broader concept of post-traumatic growth. That is, adversity, when met with a form of transcendent engagement, can lead to positive transformation. The question shifts from why is this happening to me to what can we learn from this together? And couples without that shared framework of values tend to experience hardship as purely destructive. Couples with it tend to see hardship as material for growth. Imagine a triangle. Two partners are at the base in a horizontal relationship with each other, but they're also both in a vertical relationship with something greater, whatever that means to them. As each person grows upward individually, they naturally grow closer to each other. Now, it's up to you to choose what that higher point in the triangle is, but I will offer a humble suggestion. Based on experience and data, relationships built solely on attraction and romance tend to be fragile. On the other hand, relationships anchored to something transcendent tend to be more resilient, more satisfying, and associated with longer lives. I know it might be counterintuitive, but you need something bigger than the relationship itself to sustain the relationship. So maybe the first step isn't finding the right person. Maybe it's getting your own inner life in order first, building that vertical connection. Because when both partners are growing towards something larger than themselves, they naturally grow closer to each other. That might be the most uncommon yet powerful relationship advice anyone can give you. If you like this video, make sure you let me know by liking it, and let me know what you think in the comments. Do you have any other relationship advice that might be uncommon? Also, share the video with maybe someone that's looking at the wrong person or in the wrong place. And as always, I'll see you next time.