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August 5, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Generation X married couples prefer monogamy to divorce, according to a recent Baltimore Sun article. The article’s author Susan Reimer cited a survey by the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project, including its continued confirmation that the number of divorces has been in decline since it peaked in 1980.

Reimer declared that children of the divorce boom of the 1970s would “rather put chocolate syrup in the baby bottles than put the children through a family break-up.” The decline in divorce is particularly true among highly educated couples, only 11% of whom divorce during their first 10 years of marriage compared to 37% of the rest of the population. The study indicates, although absent from Reimer’s coverage, that religious practice is an even better predictor than a college degree of happiness in marriage and low risk of divorce.

In an interview with LifeSiteNews, the author of How to Find Your Soulmate without Losing Your Soul?,  Jason Evert described the report as “promising.”

Evert stressed that coming to marriage with a proper outlook is essential in lasting unions. Evert suggested that many single men are under the impression that marriage will be “a fulfillment of pornographic wishes,” when in reality “porn is the distortion of human love.” “When such individuals enter marriage, their self-absorbed and immature view of relationships and their jaded and incomplete notion of fidelity surfaces almost immediately,” he said. “It’s difficult to conceive of a better way to cripple a future marriage.”

Evert recalled the words of Blessed John Paul II in his book “Love and Responsibility” that married love “is put to the test most severely when the sensual and emotional reactions themselves grow weaker, and sexual values as such lose their effect. Nothing then remains except the value of the person, and the inner truth about the love of those connected comes to light. If their love is a true gift of self, so that they belong to the other, it will not only survive but grow stronger, and sink deeper roots.”

“But,” Evert noted, “if the union is based merely upon an affective love, it will be unable to sustain itself.”

Evert observed that when love is tested, its value is revealed. He suggested that this “love” is not a separate, mysterious entity that the couple may or may not possess. “Rather,” he remarked, “it’s the measure of their daily willingness to make the other person’s happiness their personal priority.”