10 facts about divorce every couple should know before getting married

Danny Moloshok/Reuters

In the US, the divorce rate has been steadily declining since the 1980s.

Research reported in The New York Times suggests that about one-third of current marriages will end in divorce — not the 50% statistic you've likely heard time and time again.

Unfortunately, that means there's still a decent chance you and your partner will split up, even after pledging lifelong devotion to each other. That idea leaves room for a lot of questions:

What makes a divorce more likely? What will happen to our kids if we do split up? What will happen to my health?

To help address some of these queries, Business Insider dug into years of research on the predictors and consequences of marital dissolution and highlighted the most intriguing findings below.

Keep in mind that all these studies offer general takeaways about modern relationships — no one can predict with 100% accuracy what will happen to yours. 

Couples who marry in their late 20s may be less likely to divorce

Research led by Nicholas Wolfinger, a professor at the University of Utah, found that contrary to a long-held belief, waiting longer to wed doesn't necessarily predict a stronger marriage.

Instead, the best time to marry seems to be between the early 20s and early 30s. If you wait until you're older than 32, your chances of divorce start to creep up (though they're still not as high as if you get married in your teens).

As Wolfinger writes on the Institute for Family Studies blog, "For almost everyone, the late twenties seems to be the best time to tie the knot."

Couples may be most likely to divorce in March and August

2016 research presented at the American Sociological Association found that March and August bring spikes in divorce filings.

The researchers say it's meaningful that March and August follow holiday or vacation periods. In the paper, they suggest that holidays represent something like "optimism cycles" — we see them as a chance to start anew in our relationships, only to find that the same problems exist once they're over.

The researchers also suspect that oftentimes our holiday experiences can be stressful and disappointing, laying bare the real issues in our marriage. As soon as they're over, we're ready to call it quits.

Married people who watch porn may be more likely to divorce

A recent study, which was presented at the American Sociological Association, found that married people who start watching pornography are about twice as likely to get divorced as those who don't.

The study, which hasn't yet been peer-reviewed, involved about 2,000 participants over the course of nearly a decade. It found that the effect was even stronger for women, who were about three times as likely to get divorced if they started watching porn during the study period.

But, as Elizabeth Nolan Brown points out on Reason, it's possible that taking up a porn habit may signal that something else is going wrong in your relationship. Maybe you're dissatisfied with your sex life or maybe you and your partner aren't communicating well.

In other words, it might not be the porn, per se, that's causing marital problems. It might be a symptom of other underlying issues.