12 Years of Beating the Odds

Today, April 27 2014, is our 12th wedding anniversary. Even though I usually love coming with reasons a particular number is important, and twelve is an easy number to do this for (important to ancient cultures, smallest number with 6 divisors, lowest abundant number, its a sublime number, its a super factorial, and duodecimal is the basis for time), I have none the less found myself focused on a very different matter to do with our marriage in the past few weeks; how incredible it is that we have stay married for as long as we have because we have been and continue to be hugely at risk for divorce.

Here is a list of the risk factors we had before our marriage even started - things about our background that are known to greatly increase a couple's chances of divorce:

• Margaret is 5 years older than me (I suspect this causes marital problems because the wife starts running out of years she can have children before the husband wants them at all, which is exactly what happened in our marriage)
• Both of us come from families that got divorced.
• We have different religions. 
• We both suffer from depression.
• We lived together before marriage. (Admittedly we were engaged before we moved in together, but I've never seen anything that says this lowers the impact on divorce rate)
• We knew each other less than 2 years before marriage.

But in addition to our backgrounds, a lot of things have happened in our years married that are additional risk factors towards divorce including:

• We have been under constant financial stress for pretty much our entire marriage
• We have both had long bouts of instability in our employment
• We lost a child (particularly in the five years following the loss, this sends divorce rates through the roof)
• There has been constant tension between Margaret and her in-laws

For fun I ran through the questions on a divorce probability calculator and it told me this:

Sean your score is 82 which puts you in the Very Strong Probability category.

Very Strong Probability

The news is not good. You're amongst a demographic of people that have the lowest long term marriage success rate. What that means is that based on the factors that you indicated, there are many things in your life that significantly contribute to divorce and very few, if any, factors that contribute to a long term successful marriage.

So I guess we've been beating the odds, and continue to do so every day. I feel like in the last 6 months a lot of things in our lives have taken turns for the better; hopefully that will continue and all these risk factors will continue to be little more than curiosities.