Review:The Good News about Marriage

Many of us have heard about the depressing 50% divorce rate for marriages outside and inside the church. But Shaunti Feldhahn believes the rates are actually much lower! After years of investigative reporting and research, she offers paradigm-shifting, rigorously supported information that reveals marriages as stronger, happier, and more committed than most people think. 

I read, and loved The Surprising Secrets of Highly Happy Marriages, so when I saw this book by Shaunti Feldhan, I was keen to read it.  The premise sounded interesting; that the state of marriage is not in as much trouble as we are led to believe.

This book was just as interesting as the last one, but in a different way.  While the last one focused on how couples have happy marriages, this one is full of facts and statistics to tell us just how many marriages are happy. 

This is a very important book, for a number of reasons.  Firstly, if marriage is not the doomed institution we often believe it to be, maybe couples who were considering marriage will be more likely to actually get married, and not just live together.  Secondly, it offers hope.  Hope to couples already in a marriage that (1) their chances of success are better than they think and (2) if they feel like things are going badly, a lot of couple feel this way for a while, but manage to make it work.  One of the statistics that the book quotes is that couple who feel like their marriage is doomed, and yet persist, often change their mind within 3 years.  This means that if you feel like there is no reason to carry on, there is a light at the end of the tunnel that it might not last forever.  

The book relies very heavily on statistics, and quoting reports and explaining why research and figures might not mean what we think.  If you are not keen on that sort of technical information, this one might be too heavy for you.  There are a lot of tables and lists, and each point is repeated a number of times.

I will probably not be returning to this book to read it again, because it is not that sort of book.  However I will probably be pulling it out to quote and look up facts and figures in future when I have discussions with people about the implications.

You can learn more about the book here, or download the first chapter here.  I received a free e-book copy from WaterBrook Multnomahin exchange for this review.  They are currently running a promotion where if you purchase a copy of this book from anywhere, they will send you another copy for free.