I really liked the "divorce calculator", it was fun.

I do not really share, however, your fascination with being able to give someone a statistical predictor of whether or not they will stay married based on very little data. As you know, what the divorce calculator gives you is the percentage of people of your sex, of roughly your age, who got married at roughly the same age as you, who have roughly your education level, who got divorced within 5 years.

Let's say the divorce calculator gives you a figure of 10%. This is not, as you characterize it, "precisely" YOUR risk of divorce. This is, as should be obvious, statistically the risk of divorce in people who share those 4 data variables roughly with you. In order to know if your relationship shares more in common with the 10% who don't make it more the 90% that do, one WOULD in fact have to know those "uncomfortable" details about you.

Long story short, if you share everything in common, personality-wise, with the 10% who get divorced and nothing with the 90% who do not get divorced, your risk is actually much higher than 10%. It's just that the behavioral economist who devised this test has no interest in being that "precise".

Furthermore, the future has more to do with present belief than with past actions, such as how much education you have, how old you were when you get married, etc.

If you take a silly test on the internet that says you have a 25% chance of divorce, if you actually are silly enough to believe that, then yes, you probably have a roughly 25% chance of divorce. However, if you and your spouse have the firm belief that such data cannot relevantly compare to you because your relationship is based on a more-solid moral basis than the people used in this statistical research, and if you are not merely deluding yourselves with false notions of superiority but have in fact made a true and binding moral commitment, then that says so much more about you as a couple than this internet test could ever determine.

If you have seen the Land Before Time, with Little Foot marching towards the Great Valley while all his companions get discouraged and wander off and lose their belief that what they are doing is what they SHOULD be doing, then you understand the shaping power that belief has on our behavior. What matters in Little Foot's quest is how he was raised, and what he chooses to believe in as the most important thing in life. For him, it is staying true to what his mother taught him, that he WILL reach the Great Valley if only he follows, for his whole life, the instructions that she gave him. It does not really matter at what age he was when he started marching toward the Great Valley, whether he is a boy or a girl, or whether he went to school and learned a dinosaur profession or merely got a dinosaur high school diploma. What matters is his morals and value heirarchy, and his character, which is his willingness to cling to his ideals despite peer pressure and even when common sense tells him he should give up.

Thanks for your reply.

And I agree with you, the statistical information you get does make a difference. It is just that I think that your readers should clearly understand that the difference that is made is the correlation between these data variables and the things that truly matter, not that these data variables somehow cause you and your spouse to do something contrary to everything you believe in.

P.S. I came up with a low risk too. :)

I fear this calculator could have a substantial Heisenberg effect -- that is, taking it might affect marital outcome. Might a result showing a likelihood of divorce increase that likelihood? Methinks Yes. I'm sure as heck not taking the thing.