Why do some marriages unravel within a decade?

We have a personal stake in the question – three of our own children are newly married – but there’s a bigger reason too: research suggests that what eventually breaks a marriage often takes root in the first five years.

Long before a marriage formally ends, it quietly begins to come apart. The shared dream dims and conversations turn to conflict, or to silence.

There may be a temporary separation, and another – and a great deal of family pain – before one or both spouses conclude that the situation is unbearable and unrecoverable.

In Australia, one of the few countries that records this measure, the median time from wedding day to permanent separation is around nine years. The divorce isn’t final until later, but for many couples, the final separation is the point at which the marriage relationship, for all practical purposes, ends.

That nine-year figure hides something important. The distress usually builds for years beforehand, and its roots can reach right back to the beginning. It is in these early years that a couple’s foundations and relational patterns are laid down – for better or for ill.

And here is the hope we want to hold out from the start: the very season that makes a marriage fragile is also the season in which it can be made strong.

The Marriages That Thrive

Of course, decline isn’t every couple’s story. Even in countries where divorce is common, many marriages – often the majority – endure, and do so with grace.

Thriving marriages have just as much to teach us as the ones that don’t; we can learn as much from a success story as from a cautionary tale.

That conviction sits behind a research project we’ve begun on the gifts and challenges of newly married life in the Catholic context. We’ve hosted a roundtable with colleagues and surveyed them for their insights, and a survey of newly married couples themselves will open in the coming months.

A Scarcity of Role Models

One theme keeps surfacing in discussion with colleagues: healthy, visible examples of lifelong married love are becoming scarce. Where once a young couple could look to their extended family and parish and see marriages that had weathered the decades, many now find few.

Part of this is simple arithmetic. A great many couples approach the altar as survivors of family fracturing.

In Australia, just under half of all divorces involve children under eighteen, and the rate is higher again in USA. Many more were raised in families where parents never married or formed permanent partnerships.

Those who lived through their parents’ divorce did so not as impartial bystanders but as vulnerable children, directly affected.

If they remember their parents together at all, what they often recall most vividly is marriage at its worst – the arguments, the tears, the desperation, the loss of parental attention as the adults struggled to cope.

A generation that grew up amid marital dysfunction or absence has fewer firsthand models of how two people stay, struggle and flourish together over a lifetime.

The Village that Raises a Marriage

Marriage breakdown is something nobody wants but is all too common. For the spouses it can mean the loss of a dream, of financial security, of friendships and family ties.

For the children, unacknowledged grief, unresolved frustration, unhealed wounds can surface years later in their own marriage. Sometimes it undoes them, but it doesn’t have to.

For someone carrying a fractured family history, marriage can be difficult and redemptive at the same time. It is a demanding journey, and not one a couple should walk alone.

This is where the rest of us come in. As a community of faith – couples especially – this is our moment to step up. Newly married couples need living examples of married love, and they need mentors willing to walk beside them.

They don’t need speeches and grand gestures. What they need is everyday exposure to real couples who are serious about their own marital health. An encouraging word after church, and an invitation to dinner, meaningful conversations and empathetic support.

It takes a village to raise a marriage. Let’s not leave our newly marrieds to do it alone.

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Republished with thanks to SmartLoving.

Image via Adobe.