I cannot guarantee that a marriage will not end in divorce, no.

I do not think all marriage-ending issues are foreseeable. There are often red flags that are flagrantly ignored, but things like substance abuse and spousal abuse are not always predictable. They can begin unexpectedly well into a marriage.

I do not think you should always "stick it out". Keeping promises does not have the same moral weight as many bigger issues.

The obvious example is abuse - the victim should get out, then get a divorce (my understanding is that abusers rarely change their stripes, but are very prone to appear to do so long enough to lure their victims back).

I don't advocate for huge delays before marrying. I don't think that really helps a lot. Going really fast is not wise, but waiting for years does not magically solve problems.

Instead, I advocate for a totally different approach to dating than most US inhabitants take.

Dating should be about figuring out if you should get married, not about having fun or impressing the other person. The last two goals form a tiny, tiny subset of the first one, and I can't tell that most people I have seen dating are aware of that.

There's a phrase I love from the recent Picard show - "the way of absolute candor". When we first met, we engaged in something not unlike it (we called it "brutal honesty"), and it was a lot of what drew us to each other.

While our marriage has been full of hardships and difficulties (and, yes, plenty of surprises), we both had a decent idea what we were signing up for before we said our vows. That was largely due to the way we approached dating, and our extreme honesty with each other.

So far, we have stuck with it. At this point I have a hard time seeing what could break us apart, apart from major personality and behavioral shifts due to neurological failures (injury, mental illness, etc).

That's in large part due to how much work we did before getting married, both on the relationship and on solving difficult, ugly problems together. Marriage, especially parenting, is mostly about doing hard, unpleasant work together.

God / the universe helped us on that front, by dropping multiple hard things on us while dating. One example would be the time her apartment got destroyed in a flash flood weeks after she moved so we could live in the same area and see each other regularly.

That sucked, but boy did we get to understand each other better. Taught us a lot more about how married life might go than playing video games or going out for French cuisine.

Not saying you should destroy your girlfriend's apartment to see how she copes, but you can seek out hard, frustrating, meaningful things to do together regularly while dating, instead of a steady diet of all fun, all the time.

You can also be rigorously honest up front - my wife had as good an understanding of my failings as I could give her within weeks of meeting each other (many of the unpleasant surprises we've had in our marriage have come down to things we didn't realize about ourselves, so both parties were surprised by the discovery).

Take those approaches and add a reasonable amount of time before marriage (we dated for a year then were engaged for six months), and I think you could significantly lower the divorce rate.

Granted, you'd probably lower the marriage rate a lot too. That might not be such a bad outcome, though.