Many people today now see marriage as fragile and unpredictable. I often ask my students, “How many of you have heard that there is a 50% divorce rate in our society?”
Nearly every hand in every class goes up. Because they have heard statistics like this, far too many people mistakenly believe that their own chances for marriage success are a 50-50 coin toss — and there is nothing they can do about it.
Is this true? Is marriage fragile and unpredictable? My answer to this question is “What kind of marriage are you talking about?”
What I have learned from over 30 years of researching marriages is that different kinds of marriages have different profiles of strengths and risk factors, and because of this, the divorce rate varies greatly across couples with different types of marriages.
We don’t always explicitly distinguish between different types of marriages. When someone tells you they are getting married, you don’t typically say, “Oh, that’s great — what kind of marriage are you going to have?”
But the truth is that different couples marry for different reasons, have different priorities and have different patterns of interaction. Spouses also enter marriage with different values, virtues and communications skills.
In my marriage preparation course, I encourage my students to deeply consider the question, “What kind of marriage are you going to strive to have?”
While high divorce rates in our society often get the headlines, the truth is that many marriages have strong foundations that make them incredibly resilient and enduring.
Latter-day Saints and ‘temple marriage’
Strong and beautiful marriages are found in every faith tradition and in many different life philosophies.
For Latter-day Saints, their aspiration for loving and lasting marriages center around covenants a couple makes with God and with each other. We teach our young people to aspire to and seek after a “temple marriage” — reflecting our aspiration for them to marry in a temple, which is a holy sanctuary where we enter into sacred covenants with God.
Unfortunately, for some, the term “a temple marriage” has become simply a way to describe where they were married. But, a true temple marriage is meant to be a kind of marriage, not simply the location of a marriage. Such a marriage reflects a pattern or a design for creating a particular type or kind of marriage. To borrow President Russell M. Nelson’s phrase, a true temple marriage is a “higher and holier way” to be married.
Happily, the most important factors that contribute to an enduring and flourishing marriage are controllable and fall within the scope of our personal agency. As Elder David A. Bednar of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles taught a few years back: “A fulfilling and happy marriage is not found; rather, it is created by a covenant-keeping man and woman. ... You can do it with the Lord’s help.”
A true temple marriage is a different kind of marriage because it has unique preparations, unique patterns, unique priorities, and unique promises.
Unique preparation
The foundation of lasting marriage begins long before a couple is married. It begins with personal preparation by both spouses well before they have even met one another and continues throughout their dating and courtship.
For Latter-day Saints, this unique preparation involves each of us coming closer to Christ in our own lives by faithfully keeping our baptismal covenants and deepens as each of us expands our covenant relationship with God by making and honoring the covenants of the temple endowment.
Now, does this type of spiritual preparation really make a difference in everyday marriages? The answer to this question is an unequivocal yes! For example, at the Wheatley Institute at BYU we recently conducted a large study that showed that couples who live the law of chastity while dating go on to have the strongest and happiest marriages. This study fits within a broad pattern of hundreds of studies that show the benefits of gospel-centered preparation for marriage. For example, despite promising to help couples test-drive their marriage readiness, studies show that the common practice of couples living together before marriage increases future chances of divorce, it doesn’t lower them. Studies also show that the strongest marriages are the ones where both spouses completely avoid any use of pornography.
I could go on and on citing other studies with similar results. Reaching for these patterns of discipleship also safeguards couples from many of the most prominent threats undermining marriages today, such as selfishness, addictions, infidelity, materialism, digital distractions, spiritual apathy and other challenges.
Unique patterns
Another way that a temple marriage is different is that it involves unique patterns of daily living. A covenant marriage relationship invites spouses to love, serve, interact and communicate with one another differently than most other marriages in our culture today.
The Proclamation on the Family teaches that “Happiness in family life is most likely to be achieved when founded upon the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ. Successful marriages and families are established and maintained on principles of faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, and wholesome recreational activities.”
Of course, the defining feature of temple marriage is that it involves each spouse entering “the new and everlasting covenant of marriage” with God and with each other.
Elder Bednar explained: “The Lord Jesus Christ is the focal point in a covenant marriage relationship. Please notice how the Savior is positioned at the apex of this triangle, with a woman at the base of one corner and a man at the base of the other corner. Now consider what happens in the relationship between the man and the woman as they individually and steadily ‘come unto Christ.’”
The Proclamation on the Family also states that husbands and wives “are obligated to help one another as equal partners.” Speaking on the doctrine of equal partnership in marriage, President Gordon B. Hinckley taught: “In the marriage companionship there is neither inferiority nor superiority. The woman does not walk ahead of the man; neither does the man walk ahead of the woman. They walk side by side as a son and daughter of God on an eternal journey.”
The Family Proclamation also teaches that marriage covenants involve spouses honoring their marital vows with complete fidelity, and spouses faithfully fulfilling family responsibilities.
Again, do these patterns really make a difference in everyday marriages? There are literally hundreds of studies that confirm that flourishing marriages are indeed founded on patterns of shared decision making, devoted commitment, patterns of mature love, sincere forgiveness and the shared religious devotion of spouses.
For example, at the Wheatley Institute here at BYU, we recently conducted a study involving more than 16,000 people living in 11 different countries to examine how different levels of religious participation influenced their lives and family relationships. We found that religious participation has profound benefits in people’s marriages and family relationships — and the greatest benefits are experienced by those who actively engage in home-centered religious practices, such as family prayer and reading scriptures, in addition to regularly attending religious services.
Unique priorities
Compared with other types of marriage, a temple marriage involves unique priorities — centering around the formation of an eternal family, which gives marriage a deep and sacred purpose that transcends personal or worldly pursuits.
Thirty two years ago, Elder L. Tom Perry of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles sealed me and my wife, Stefani, in the Salt Lake Temple. After greeting us and our families, he turned to my wife with an unforgettable grin and said, “Stefani, what are you going to do the first time you walk into the kitchen and find a child covered from head to toe in strawberry jam?”
That may seem like a bit of an odd thing to say to a bride on her wedding day. Why was Elder Perry asking us about our children when we weren’t even married yet?
I know now that it was because he wanted us to begin our marriage with the end in mind and he was inviting us to see our marriage in an expanded and eternal way.
This apostle taught us that we were gathered that day not just to participate in and witness a wedding, but that we were gathered to create a new eternal family.
Research from the social sciences also strongly supports the ways that prioritizing having children and forming a family promotes personal and collective wellbeing. This is important to point out, because the findings from the relationship sciences about the joys and benefits of parenting are not typically shared in the media and online discussions.
As Jenet Erickson, a Wheatley Fellow, has beautifully stated, “We are not designed for isolation and pleasure-seeking autonomy. We are deeply relational beings, designed not for independence but for radical dependence and connection. … We are designed for family. We are family. The eternal family.”
Unique promises
Two years ago, Elder Jeffrey R. Holland of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostlesand shared with us reflections on his marriage with his sweet eternal companion Sister Patricia Holland, who passed away that summer. Just a mile from his wife’s grave, President Holland said: “We’ve just been out to the graveside of my beloved wife, and it’s the first time I’ve been back since she was buried, so I’m filled with a lot of emotion and a lot of happiness.”
He then continued: “I’m planning on eternity — I’m planning on the promises of this temple. … We need to try to be outside the temple the way we are inside the temple. We need to remember the pledges and the promises and the hopes and the dreams. If we could take those outside the temple, we’d change the world.”
In a recent general conference leadership training session, President Nelson said: “It is incumbent upon us that we do much more to help our people understand the power of covenants. The moral and spiritual power that our people need right now and for the days ahead is the power of God the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ.”
I am in awe of the promises connected to a true temple marriage that allow us to access the power of God the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ. This is very different from a fifty-fifty coin toss! The promises of the temple are indeed awesome — in the truest root meaning of that word.
I am also planning on eternity and planning on the promises of the temple for my marriage. And I witness that the promises and blessings of the temple can indeed “change the world” — starting with your own marriage and family relationships.
Adapted from a talk, “A True Temple Marriage” given Sept. 25, 2025, at the BYU Conference commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Family Proclamation, “Experiencing Jesus Christ Through the Family Proclamation.”