We live in the US, where the success of a marriage is closer to a coin toss. It's pretty abaurd to try to take the average from across the world in this case.
The simple average hides a lot of differences between demographic groups. If you’re college educated, earn a higher income, white or Asian, and get married later, then your chances of success are much higher than 50/50.
Divorce rate means the percentage of people getting a divorce every year. Your 40-50% figure must be the total percentage of marriages that end in divorce.
Now the GP said "divorce rate", so I take it they meant the former. If it's the latter, then 1% is abnormally low (and can't be simply explained with happy marriages).
FYI the divorce rate worldwide is less than 1% (it's actually much lower, around 0.4%).