What you don’t know about divorce might surprise you

We’ve all heard a stereotype about divorce that has affected how we thought about the dissolution of marriage. For some people it may have been statistics about the divorce rate. For others, it may have been how troublesome the process can be. And in a large number of those cases, it has caused people to associate a negative stigma with divorce in general.

But according to the author of the book “The Good News About Marriage,” what we think we know about divorce and what’s actually going on could be two very different things. Let’s take for example the divorce rate in the United States. Most people, if you ask them what the divorce rate is for first-time marriages, they would probably tell you that it is close to 50 percent. But after doing some research, the author of the book found it was actually closer to 20 to 25 percent.

But this isn’t the only divorce myth society believes, the book points out. Have you or someone you known worried about the prospect of future relationships after divorce? A lot of people assume that a divorced person will have a harder time finding love again and getting remarried. Those who are divorced with children may lament even more. But as is pointed out by the book, thanks to online dating sites, this isn’t the case anymore and 74 percent of people said that they would consider marrying someone who had children from a previous marriage.

But if new research is proving these old myths wrong then where did the myths come from in the first place? Much of it has to do with decades upon decades of anecdotal evidence and other information that might not necessarily apply nowadays. According to the author of “The Good News About Marriage,” much of what we believe about the divorce rate may have actually come from “projections of what researchers though the divorce rate would become after studying escalating divorce rates from the 1970s and early 1980s.”

Source: The Huffington Post, “Could the Way We Think About Divorce Be All Wrong?” Laura Seldon, June 23, 2014