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Years ago, a woman asked to speak with me after the worship service. She began with a litany of familiar complaints about her husband, issues we'd discussed before. I pointed out (again!) that there are no perfect husbands and reminded her of her husband's good points. I encouraged her to continue to work on the relationship and suggested that, while she couldn't control her husband's attitude and behavior, she could control her own. She responded that she was unhappy in the relationship and wanted to get out and pursue a happier life. Maybe I was just young and dumb or maybe I'd heard it all before, too many times. Perhaps I was tired from preaching and hungry for lunch. Anyway, I impatiently responded, "Where does the Bible promise that you get to be happy?" That conversation didn't end well!
Despite my crude counseling technique that day, my point was valid. Matthew 19:3-6 (NIV) tells us that "Some Pharisees came to him to test him (Jesus). They asked, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?" "Haven't you read," he replied, "that at the beginning the Creator 'made them male and female,' and said, 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh'? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate." Those words make clear that God does not want a marriage to end in divorce, even if the marriage isn't the happiest.
It's not that God doesn't care about our happiness, it's that God knows divorce isn't likely to make us happier. Christianity Today reported that, surveyed 2 years after their divorce, between 75%-80% of divorced people admit that they are not happier and confess that they wish they had stayed and worked harder to save their marriage. Some quickly learned that starting a new life with another person doesn't guarantee happiness; approximately 60% of second marriages (to someone other than remarrying one's original spouse) and 75% of third marriages end in divorce.
Separation holds hidden landmines that often surprise divorced people.
First, since most households today have 2 incomes, there are economic consequences to divorce. Money that used to run one household must now run two. Researchers from the University of Texas, the University of Virginia and the University of Chicago studied divorced families and reported that "When parents fail...to stay married, children are more likely to experience deep and persistent poverty, even after controlling for race and family background." One wag quipped, "The secret to successfully investing for retirement is to keep your first wife."
Divorce impacts relationships. Friends are often pushed to take sides and may choose to withdraw from the friendship altogether because of this pressure; they choose "nobody" instead of choosing half of the divorcing couple. Divorced folks often find it difficult to get back into the dating scene, but the loneliness of an empty evening is difficult to face. Then there are those well-known issues of jealousy and child-custody.
Every year a million children watch their parents separate. Despite the common belief that older children will understand and younger children will adapt, studies indicate that older children struggle even more than younger children when their parents divorce; the only world they've ever known is being torn apart. The university study referenced above reports, "Children of divorced or unwed parents have lower grades and other measures of academic achievement and are more likely to drop out of high school. They also note that a marriage breakup has an impact on the health of children: "Longitudinal research suggest that parental divorce increases the incidence of health problems in children...the health disadvantages associated with being raised outside of intact marriages persist long into adulthood." The researchers remarked, "Children whose parents divorce...are more likely to become young, unwed parents, to divorce themselves and to have unhappy marriages. ...Parental divorce approximately doubles the odds that adult children will also divorce."
Good Housekeeping magazine once sponsored a contest, asking couples to share their recipe for a happy marriage. Dillon and Patti Bayes won with their submission: "We gave when we wanted to receive. We served when we wanted to feast. We listened when we wanted to talk. We submitted when we wanted to reign. We forgave when we wanted to remember and we stayed when we wanted to leave."