I’ve been watching, from an appropriate distance, the collapse of still another marriage. Neither the husband nor the wife thinks there’s any future. They’ve tried hard, they say, and they’ve listened to all sorts of counsel from pastors, therapists, friends, and family. But their motivation has vanished.

So is it really true that 50 percent of all marriages in the United States—including those of self-professing Christians—end in divorce? That’s what we’ve been told by the social scientists and statisticians. Other professionals say the actual record’s not quite that bad, but “only” a third instead of half.

By anyone’s standards, but especially from the perspective of the children hammered by such breakups, it’s way too many.

How can it be that something most of us once thought of as permanent (“till death do us part”) has become so fragile? Why have our expectations been so radically lowered that we’re scared, when we meet someone we haven’t seen for 10 years, to ask how the family is doing?

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