I learned a lot about human behavior while working at a convenience store during high school. Each day I served customers at 7-11 I learned a new lesson on the peculiar habits of people. Like the day I sold a winning $100 lottery ticket to one of our regular customers. I watched him scratch off the ticket, realize he won and then stand upright in a winner’s pose. Then I watched him get back in line, buy 100 more tickets and lose on every one.
Although the odds of winning a lottery are stated on each ticket, some people are comfortable subjecting their hard-earned money to the inevitability of probability. The $100 lottery guy was like that. He willingly gave himself over to the odds, hoping that he could play a game of chance and consistently win. I think the next guy in line just bought a gallon of milk and went home. The milk guy knew that the only way to consistently beat a game of chance is to not play the game.
The stated odds of winning at marriage are much better than lotteries. The odds aren’t really written but people will tell you that they’re somewhere around 50/50. You’ve probably heard people of authority say that couples who marry have a 50% chance of staying married. Or they’ll say that 50% of all marriages end in divorce. The recurring theme is what I call the “Marriage is 50/50” myth, the belief that every marriage is subject to the odds like a roll of the dice or the purchase of a lottery ticket.
The lie behind the “Marriage is 50/50” myth is believing that the success of your marriage is based on a chance, that there is a predetermined ratio of random events that could end your relationship. The people who spew this myth would have us believe that, out of all the couples that take the plunge into marriage, 20% will get divorced because of money issues, 15% will divorce due to problems on the job, 10% will divorce due to health issues and another 5% will divorce due to sexual dissatisfaction.
The occurrence of these issues may appear random but marital success isn’t random at all. Consider the “job issues” which hit me and my wife a lot during our marriage. During our first year of marriage I worked over sixty hours a week in retail and eventually resigned the day before Thanksgiving (for my sanity and peace of mind). Robin, at one point, needed to resign (for her sanity and peace of mind) then I was laid off from a job when my department was eliminated then I got another job and was laid off again when that company was sold.
There have been ups and ups and downs and downs. I think it was the poverty of college life that taught us the existence of a job needn’t affect the success of our relationship. When we face financial challenges now, I often think back to our first college break when Robin and I were in my dorm room sharing a box of KFC chicken and a half gallon of Citrus Fruit drink. We had no car, no money and we were running out of food. But we were happy.
Of course we were happy in a bubble and I’m not sure what would have happened if we had been kicked out of our campus cocoon onto the mean streets of Williamsburg. I only know how I think we would have responded but the thought does beg some interesting questions. Was our love greater than an eviction? Is our current love more stable than the economy? Will our future love be stronger than our aging bodies and able to overcome any physical failings?
I believe love, God’s love, is stronger than all of those things. More importantly, I believe that staying married is more dependent on your current choices than on trailing statistics. In the end, every couple has the same choice – the choice to stay together or to separate and divorce. We chose to stay married and, despite the chances of running into marital, physical or economic trouble, we continue to choose to stay married. And that choice is why our marriage is not subject to the odds, not reliant on percentages and not based on a “marriage is 50/50” myth.