Among all adults who have been married, 33 percent have experienced at least one divorce. But among married Catholic adults, the rate was 28 percent and evangelical Christians had an even lower 26 percent rate of divorce.

It makes sense that faith would play a role in marriage and divorce. After all, God frowns on divorce (he frowns on broken relationships of all sorts). And who wants to disappoint the creator of the universe? Not his followers.

People of faith also often attend a church. And when marriages start to suffer, they have a lot of like-minded people to call on to help them through. Many churches are like cheer squads for marriage. In good times, they offer marriage-strengthening resources, retreats and various types of outings that can keep couples close. In bad times, churches come alongside hurting couples and try to keep them together. They form a pyramid, and hoist ailing marriages on top, ready to catch them if they fall.  

Maybe it’s my age or maybe it’s because I witness more divorces these days than I attend weddings, but it’s getting harder for me to celebrate statistics that applaud a lower divorce rate, for the general population or for any subgroup. It’s not that I don’t want the divorce rate to diminish. Divorce hurts individuals. It devastates families. It breaks up friend groups. It can cause economic uncertainty. Worst of all, it’s often a negative, grief-inducing event for children.

But statistics on marriage survival offer a small part of the marriage picture. I’m more interested knowing something much harder to quantify: which married people are most happy. It doesn’t really matter if a couple is able to stay together if the pots and pans are flying and the kids are in the corner crying, does it? 

Happiness factor hard to measure

Research on who is happily married, rather than simply staying out of the divorce column, is hard to find. But I did find some and I urge researchers to conduct more of it. If we want a nation full of happily married people, rather than just married people, it would help to know who exactly is happy. Then we can interrogate them to discover the reasons why their love works. (E-mail success stories to ehovde@earthlink.net, by the way.)

In some of the only research of its kind, W. Bradford Wilcox and the late Steven L. Nock, from the University of Virginia, were able to conclude which women are most happy in marriage. Their findings, based on surveys of more than 5,000 couples, were published in 2006. (I found no similar studies on what makes for a happily married man, only consistent studies saying married men are generally happier than single men and married women. Wilcox made me feel better about this lack of happy husband research, telling me that typically a man and woman are either sharing marital happiness or are miserable together.)

The top predictor of women’s marital happiness was having an “emotionally engaged” husband, one who listens to his wife, is affectionate on a regular basis and prioritizes quality time with his wife. Next up was fairness. Women who felt household chores were divided fairly were significantly more happy. Women with breadwinner husbands also reported greater marital satisfaction (sending feminists into a panic, even though one could argue that the feminist movement made fair division of household chores, the previous predictor, possible).  A strong commitment to marriage, a woman’s stay-at-home status and attending church services together were the next predictors of happy wives. The last predictor was somewhat controversial: If a woman held traditional views about gender roles, she was happier in her marriage.

Who knows if these predictors will hold over time. But it seems to make sense that close attention to time and teamwork will bring better results. And that’s what we need — better marriages, not just fewer breakups.