Building a Strong Marriage as a Child of Divorce

One of the biggest fears that many adult children of divorce have is that their marriages, too, will end in divorce.

Unfortunately, statistics give weight to this fear: marriages where one or both spouses come from divorced or separated families are more likely to break down, have more conflict, and are even less happy than when both spouses come from intact families. Further, children of divorce are more likely to postpone marriage and cohabitate instead; the leap of faith needed for a lifelong commitment can just seem too risky and daunting given what they’ve been through.

But statistics are not destiny and, as we wrote in an earlier piece, children of divorce are not fated to repeat their parents’ mistakes! So how can adult children of divorce break the cycle of relational brokenness and build happy, lasting marriages?

This question is not abstract to us — it’s very real. The year we got married, Dan’s parents completed their divorce proceedings, which had begun more than a decade earlier when they separated while he was in middle school. It felt ironic and deeply sad that we were beginning our life together as his parents were definitively ending theirs. And it caused some anxiety in us: Could we make it work? Would we last?

We knew we wanted to follow a different path, and we decided to inscribe into our wedding bands a reference to a short Bible verse that brought us both comfort and courage: “Perfect love casts out fear.” To us, that phrase is a rallying cry to trust that love can last, that we can marry with confidence.

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This post is excerpted from an article Dan wrote for the Grotto Network. Please continue reading this article at https://grottonetwork.com/make-an-impact/heal/how-to-build-strong-marriage-as-child-of-divorce/.