CLAIM:
My parents got divorced, and I had to suffer through their terrible marriage my entire childhood. Why would I put myself in that situation?

REBUTTAL:
Witnessing or experiencing something terrible tends to make us very anecdotal. That can lead us to greatly distort reality. Consider this example:

A restaurant boasts that 99% of its diners gave it a 5-star rating and said they would come back. In contrast, your experience was terrible. The food was cold, the service was poor, and you may have even caught a little food poisoning. Regardless of what 99% of the diners indicated, your 1% experience felt like 100%. You would never eat there again.

When you view experiences in this way, you recognize that even when the odds are in your favor (99%), you can still be the 1%.

Marriage is not the only place where you can run into trouble. If you had a bad experience in school, it does not mean that education is bad for everyone, although it may have been a challenge for you at that time.

You witnessed a horrible marriage that ended in divorce. Others would claim they have a wonderful marriage. Are they wrong or are you wrong? More likely, you are both correct.

All human relationships have conflicts and challenges. You do not need to be married to have disagreements. There are stories of childhood friends unexpectedly differing over an issue as adults and never speaking to each other again. Surely that is not a cause to give up friendships!

Anecdotal Experience
Anecdotal experience (making a judgment mostly or entirely based on one’s own experience) is real and can be very valuable. People who have cared for a dying loved one are often beneficial to others who walk a similar path. In business, individuals with experience are usually favored over those who are new.

Anecdotal experience can also be a problem. In business, when you need fresh eyes on an issue, the one with experience is likely not the one to rely on. Soldiers who have traumatic experiences in battle often “carry a lot of baggage” with them as they get older. It has a name: post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Their experience was not the norm in battle, but it affected them in such a way as to hinder their judgment.

The anecdotal experience of having the front seat to a terrible marriage can often leave emotional scars, making one afraid not only of marriage but of other kinds of relationships. Their experience watching a terrible marriage is not the norm, but for them, the reality was overwhelming.

In the claim, anecdotal experience has created a bias against marriage, and as far as the claim goes, that bias is entirely dependent on the anecdotal experience. In other words, there was no research to support this claim. The judgment is that the parents had a horrible marriage, so the claimant likely would have an awful marriage, so marriage should be avoided.

The problem is that what the claimant does not want is a “horrible” marriage. Perhaps he does not have experience seeing a “good” marriage, but they do exist.

What often skews judgments made simply on anecdotal experience is that they tend to be oversimplifications and overgeneralizations. It is not true that because your parents had a bad marriage, you will have a bad marriage, which leads me to my next point.

You are Your Own Person
Anecdotal experience is powerful. It carries with it the weight of firsthand witnessing, which is often emotionally fortified. While the adage is true that the “apple does not fall far from the tree” (Jeremiah 31:29) in that we usually learn a lot from our parents, there are important exceptions. A parent who robs, kills, and molests does not mean the children will do so (Jeremiah 31:30). Anecdotal experience, while often modeling bad examples, also provides us with examples to avoid. Ultimately, we are responsible for our own actions (Ezekiel 18:20; Romans 14:12).

Marriage is From God
One of the sad things that has happened in our society is that marriage has become secularized. It is no longer rooted in our spiritual convictions, which focus first on glorifying God (Isaiah 43:7; 1 Corinthians 10:31), but on our selfish ambitions. In a secular marriage, both parties come into it, each seeking their own pleasure and happiness. When circumstances interfere, the marriage begins to disintegrate. At that point, there is a strong emphasis on fault-finding and blaming the other person for the failure in the marriage relationship.

Society’s solution to these situations is either to avoid making any marriage commitment or to allow for easy divorce so people can move on with their lives. Such a view denigrates marriage to little more than a casual friendship or business relationship.

God’s view of marriage begins with Him. If we are all created to glorify Him, then marriage is to glorify God. This is most evident in how marriage is used as a model for the relationship between Christ and the Church (Ephesians 5:25-33). As the husband and wife focus on their calling in life to glorify God in all things, they mutually submit to each other in that effort (Ephesians 5:21). The emphasis is not on who is right and who is wrong, but instead on how together the husband and wife can glorify God in their marriage.

What the claimant witnessed in the marriage of his parents was how not to do it. What he saw was an indictment of his parents as individuals, not the estate of marriage as established by God.

Honest About the Challenges
Every human relationship is tainted by sin (Genesis 8:21; Romans 3:23). We observe it between children and their parents, employers and employees, neighbors, and even among friends. We must be honest in acknowledging that in marriage, we have two imperfect people committing themselves to each other before God for the rest of their lives. It leaves little room for error – but errors will still occur.

One of the first strategies a married couple could consider is how to handle problems before they arise. It is not enough to ask each other what to do. Even secular marriages will do that. Instead, start by remembering God’s place in your lives, and accordingly, in your marriage.

When we sin in marriage, it is often against our spouse’s best interests. I suggest, however, that you don’t start there in trying to “fix” things. All sin first violates our relationship with God (2 Samuel 12:13).

We have an incredible illustration of this when Potiphar’s wife tried to seduce Joseph. Even though this would have been a grave affront to Potiphar, Joseph had a higher standard to which he appealed:

No one is greater in this house than I am. My master [Potiphar] has withheld nothing from me except you, because you are his wife. How then could I do such a wicked thing and sin against God?” (Genesis 39:9)

Most veterans of a happy and successful God-pleasing marriage will tell you how central it is to think of everything within the marriage relationship as reflecting your allegiance to God. You love your spouse as God loves you. You sacrifice for your spouse as God sacrificed for you. You think of your spouse ahead of yourself, as Christ had you in mind when he paid the price for your sins.

Conclusion
The problem with a broken marriage is that it reflects a deeper, fractured relationship between people and God. Because both parties in a marriage are inclined toward sin (Romans 7:19), it is not a question of whether there will be a problem in marriage, but when. The marriage that survives rests not on the willpower or even the compatibility of the couple, but on their allegiance to God.

Even though the claimant sadly witnessed the implosion of what God intended for the good of his people when his parents’ marriage ended in divorce, it does not make what God intended for good to be now bad. Instead, learn from the mistakes of others. Focus on your first love, God (Matthew 22:37-38; Revelation 2:4). Being rightly calibrated towards God enables you to overcome the challenges that have destroyed other marriages.