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• Married people not only have far more sex than singles, but they enjoy it more, both physically and emotionally. "One reason married people have more sex," the authors state, "is that any single act of sex costs them less in time, money, and psychic energy. They have already made the huge investment in establishing and maintaining a sexual relationship and can lie back and enjoy the dividends." And, the long-term emotional commitment of marriage brings more sexual satisfaction than found with cohabiting couples.

• Even in bad, "high-conflict" marriages (excluding when there's abuse), divorce generally creates more problems than it solves. That's especially true when children are involved, since they on average become worse off educationally, financially, and psychologically, from the time their parents get divorced all the way into adulthood. This concept's difficult to accept, and seems illogical to someone "stuck" in a bad marriage. Yet it's borne out. One of the book's keystone pieces of research shows that high-conflict marriages—where partners fight a lot—usually turn good if the couples don't give up. In fact, 86 percent of unhappily married people who stuck it out for five years reported that their marriages became much happier.

What's more, the worst marriages showed the best turnarounds: 77 percent of people who rated their marriages "very unhappy" reported a change to "very happy" or "quite happy" five years later. Waite sees more than just statistics to prove this. "People will come up to me and say, 'My husband and I were really unhappy ten or fifteen years ago, and we thought a lot about getting divorced. I decided I was not going to kick him out, that we were going to stick with it. Now our kids are grown and we're really happy and I'm so glad we stayed together.' That is really news that ought to get out to married couples," she adds. "Just because you're not getting along now doesn't mean that if you get divorced things will get better. And, it doesn't mean if you stay together things will stay this bad. The chances that they'll get worse are low, and the chances that they'll get better are almost overwhelming."

All of this begs the question: What about abuse? Waite's divorce research doesn't specifically address marriages where the arguments become physical, other than to point out that—contrary to media images—they're very rare. While 13 percent of cohabiting couples reported having fought physically during the past year, 4 percent of married couples had. That's still deadly serious, of course, but it throws cold water on earlier research, embraced by progressive culture, that marriage is a "hitting license." It also shows that an overwhelming majority of divorces have nothing to do with physical violence. More than two-thirds of divorces don't even end marriages where the partners argue a lot.

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