If you want to strengthen marriages in your community and drive down the divorce rate, Mary Rose Verret has a simple piece of advice: “Start with your own marriage.”
Verret and her husband, Ryan, have for years run the marriage ministry Witness to Love; in 2024 Pope Francis named them as consultants to the Dicastery for the Laity, the Family, and Life.
Since 2012 the Verrets have used that ministry to reach both engaged and married couples in a variety of formats. And their work has occurred amid an encouraging shift in U.S. marriage culture: declining divorce rates for new marriages.
Data compiled by the Institute for Family Studies shows that couples who married in the 2010s have markedly lower divorce rates than couples who married in earlier decades.
That trend has been part of an overall decline in divorce since roughly the 1980s onward: While 30% of first marriages in the 1970s ended in divorce after 10 years, just 18% of first marriages from 2010–2012 did so, with the divorce rate for the rest of the latter decade remaining roughly similar so far.
Mary Rose Verret told EWTN News there’s “not a lot of data” to indicate reasons why that rate is trending downward. Yet some of the explanations, she said, could be that people “are taking marriage a little more seriously” and are entering into the institution more prepared.
She said that half of the work of their ministry involves engaged or recently married couples, while the other half is with couples who have been married longer and who serve as mentors of younger husbands and wives.
When looking to keep divorce rates low, Verret said, ministering to those who have been married for years is just as critical a component as preparing couples for marriage.
“The more we can do to strengthen existing marriages, that’s what going to lower the divorce rate and increase the number of happily married couples that are really being witnesses,” she said.
The beginning point, meanwhile, is close to home, she said: “Start with your own marriage. Start with investing in your church community. Invest in your diocese.”
“There’s nothing more important than preparing the next generation of couples and families,” she said.
The 50% divorce myth
A pop culture talking point for years has been the contention that half of all marriages will end in divorce. Yet the Institute for Family Studies argues that that statistic is outdated, having been popularized “during the heyday of hippies through the MTV era” amid massive shifts in the institution of marriage.
Decades of data, on the other hand, indicate that only first marriages that began in the 1970s had a more-than-50% likelihood of ending in divorce by their 50th anniversary. In the 1950s the rate hovered around 30%; in the 1960s it was slightly over 40%.
Other decades thus far have trended higher or lower, though none have topped 50%.
Grant Bailey, the deputy director of the Get Married Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, told EWTN News that the decline of divorce rates from their peak in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s can be explained in part by “later marriages.”
“The divorce revolution of the 1960s and 1970s saw rising divorce rates across the board, with the highest divorce rates among couples who married in their early 20s,” he said. “Adults began marrying later, bringing lower divorce risks, and as a result we saw the aggregate divorce rate fall from the 1980s onward.”
Yet more recent data show divorce rates trending downward “regardless of what age couples marry.” Later marriages, he said, “no longer explain why divorce rates are falling.”
Peter and Sheila Oprysko, the North America secretariat ecclesial team of Worldwide Marriage Encounter, said declining divorce numbers are in part due to a greater “intentionality” about marriage among younger people.
“We know that people are getting married later in life,” Peter told EWTN News. “So when they make a decision, they’ve spent the time living with it, thinking it out, and coming out in the end with it. So there’s a more permanent decision there.”
Sheila said many young Catholic couples getting married today are “coming back to the Church” with a greater awareness of its implications.
“They’re understanding what our faith is, and they’re beginning to understand marriage is a sacrament,” she said.
Marriage Encounter advertises itself as a “marriage enrichment program.” Peter said the program itself is “not a crisis hotline” for marriages but one that helps husbands and wives develop a “lifelong communication framework” that actually prevents crises from arising in the first place.
He said that the statistics of successful marriage “don’t happen by accident.”
“They happen when couples invest in their relationship and learn the skills to communicate deeply,” he said. Marriage advocates in recent years are “seeing a greater intentionality in nourishing that commitment,” he said.
Sheila said the program teaches not just communication but prayer as a couple. “They also have a community (of married couples) afterward, too, so they realize they have even more support.”
Though divorce numbers are promising, overall marriage rates remain anemic in recent decades. A Heritage Foundation report in May found that over the past 50 years, marriage rates have declined from more than 90% of Americans having married by ages 30-35 in 1962 to 55% as of 2025.
In October, the Vatican will host a meeting of bishops focused on marriage and childbearing, among other issues. The Dicastery for the Laity, the Family, and Life said discussions will include “walking with families in complex situations” such as “abandonment, separation, and divorce.”
Worldwide Marriage Encounter was recognized by the Vatican this year as an official international association of the faithful, Peter Oprysko told EWTN News. Peter and Sheila attended the reading of the decree in Rome and afterward had an audience with Pope Leo XIV.
At the event, both Cardinal Kevin Joseph Farrell and Pope Leo XIV “talked about the importance of marriage, for the family and for the Church,” Sheila said.
Though the decline in divorce is a welcome development for marriage advocates, Bailey said the “at least some of the decline in divorce rates is due to a more select population,” which he called “the admittedly dark side to an otherwise positive finding.”
“Fewer adults are getting married today, but couples who do marry appear to be more committed than those from recent decades,” he said. He said the public should be taught that “a successful marriage is not a coin toss and that it is possible to form a stable and happy family life in the present day.”
Ryan Verret argued that in his extensive writings on the topic, Pope John Paul II positioned marriage and family as a counterrevolution to destructive modernist tendencies.
“Maybe in some ways we’re in the counterrevolution now,” he said. “There definitely seems to be a substantial movement of young people coming back to faith and things that are transcendent.”
Sheila Oprysko said that married couples should treat their marriage like anything else that needs regular upkeep to stay healthy.
“You bring your car in for maintenance,” she said. “Priests go on for retreat once a year. You do something for yourself spiritually. You’ve got to do something for your marriage as well.”
Peter Oprysko argued that marriage advocates “can’t be complacent” even as divorce trends look promising. “We have to keep reaching out,” he said. “We’re trying to change the narrative.”
Mary Rose Verret, meanwhile, stressed that husbands and wives in happy, thriving unions need to serve as vital witnesses to a culture in need of healthy marriage.
“If you don’t see happy married couples around, you’re not going to want to get married,” she said.
“If we get it right, the marriage rate will go up and the divorce rate will go down,” she said.