Your pastor might preach it. Your friends talk about it. But it's a lie. Fifty percent of all marriages do not end in divorce. Because, truth be told, no one can come up with the right statistic.
Recent research suggests that one marriage in four is closer to the true divorce rate.
The 50-percent myth originated a couple of decades ago when someone looked at marriage and divorce numbers reported by the National Center for Health Statistics. The number of divorces in one year was precisely half the number of marriages. Half of all marriages end in divorce. With this kind of math, we also could reason that everyone born this year also will die this year. After all, the number of births each year roughly equals the number of deaths.