Pre-Marital Education Cuts Divorce Risk By 31%

Another study recently published shows the benefits of pre-marital education as a primary divorce prevention tool that engaged and newlywed couples can utilize to enhance marital satisfaction and stability.

In a random telephone survey of 3,344 adults published in the Journal of Family Psychology, the co-author Scott Stanley reports that couples who took a pre-marital education class reduced their risk of divorce by 31%. He concluded that taking a skill based pre-marital education class was associated with “higher levels of marital satisfaction, lower levels of destructive conflicts and higher levels of interpersonal commitment to spouses”. Impressively, benefits were consistent across race, income
and education.

This is the fourth study in the last twelve years to establish the effectiveness of skill-based programs in promoting marital satisfaction and longevity. Marriage preparation used to be the province of churches and religious organizations. Secular, non-religious, skill based workshop programs have cropped up in the last eight years and now account for approximately 50% of all pre-marital education (others include pre-marital counseling, meeting with clergy, taking relationship inventories).

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