Divorce Statistics and Studies Blog

U.S. military divorce rate steady around 3% per marriage, much higher for women than men

The overall divorce rate among both male and female service members held steady in fiscal 2017, marking the fourth year running that the rate has hovered between 3 percent and 3.1 percent. 

About 21,290 of 689,060 married troops divorced over the course of fiscal 2017 ...

The military divorce rate is calculated by comparing the number of troops listed as married in the Pentagon's personnel system at the beginning of the fiscal year with the number who report divorces over the year. The information is managed and compiled by the Defense Manpower Data Center.

Hidden in that larger statistic is a breakout by branch, paygrade and gender that tells an interesting story about the struggles of military marriages, said Benjamin Karney, a researcher with Rand Corp. who has long tracked the military divorce rate.

Although divorce rates among female troops continue to be much higher overall than their male counterparts -- by about 275 percent in the Army, for example -- the rates among men across the services and women in the Army and Air Force have continued a steady decline, while women in the Navy fluctuated slightly.

But female Marines continue to struggle to hold their marriages together, with a divorce rate of 7.1 percent that has increased or held steady annually since 2012. That rate saw its high-water mark in 2010, when it sat at about 9.9 percent. 

That the rate isn't declining could be a sign that family policies in the Marine Corps are not friendly toward married women, Karney said.

"When you see these changes, what's driving it is almost never changes in values or couples' abilities to talk effectively to each other," he said. "What is changing it is military policy."

The divorce rate among military personnel and the total U.S. divorce rate cannot be easily compared because they are not measured the same way.

The total U.S. divorce rate, which is measured per 1,000 residents and does not factor in six states including California, sat at 3.2 percent in 2016, the latest year for which information is available. ...

Troop Divorce Rate Unchanged; Marriage Rate Continues Fall

By Amy Bushatz on Military.com

Under 10% of us are divorced and not remarried -- 2017 U.S. census data

The annual census numbers do not count who is "divorced" as in "ever divorced;" they report current marital status.

 

Total Population 15 Years Old and Over

259,063,000

 

Currently-divorced

25,482,000

Including 3,700,000 more women than men.

 

Never married

82,912,000

Including 4,738,000 more men than women.

 

Currently married (including separated, but not widowed or divorced)

135,749,000

Disturbingly, women reporting themselves married, with husbands still alive, consistently number more than men doing so. For 2017 the difference is 415,000, but for several years before that, it was around 800,000.

 

Sources:

Table MS-1. Marital Status of the Population 15 Years Old and Over, by Sex, Race and Hispanic Origin: 1950 to Present 

Figure MS-1a. Men's marital status 

Figure MS-1b. Women's marital status

Head to the Midwest for extremes of highest and lowest divorce rates; Nevada yields century-long lead to Oklahoma.

Iowa kept up its years-long lead as the lowest-divorce state in 2016, but its rate, like the nation's, went up one point, to 0.13% from 0.12%.

Next were Louisiana and Illinois with 0.2%, then Massachusetts with 0.23% and South Carolina at 0.25%, and Wisconsin, North Dakota and Pennsylvania at 0.26%.

For highest divorce, Oklahoma beat the long-reigning national champion, Nevada, 0.44% to 0.43%. Oklahoma's has trended downward from 0.77% over the years, but Nevada's has fallen faster, from 1.14% in 1990.

These are per capita rates, i.e., compared to the entire population of all ages, whether married or not.

And they make more sense if you double them, because there are two people in every divorce and every marriage. So the U.S.'s "3.2 per 1,000" means 0.32% divorces-per-capita, but it means 0.64% of us got divorced in 2016. And in Iowa, 0.26%, or 0.88% in Oklahoma.

California, Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Minnesota, and New Mexico did not count their divorces for 2016.

The CDC's National Center for Health Statistics reports:

Divorce rates by State: 1990, 1995, and 1999-2016

Marriage rates by State: 1990, 1995, and 1999-2016

US divorce rate up: 0.32% in 2016, was 0.31% in '15. Marriage rate flat at 0.69%

The CDC's National Center for Health Statistics reports:

National marriage and divorce rate trends for 2000-2016

Divorce rates by State: 1990, 1995, and 1999-2016

 These are per capita rates, i.e., compared to the entire population of all ages, whether married or not.

These rates have always made more sense to me if you double them, because there are two people in every divorce and every marriage. So "3.2 per 1,000" means 0.32% divorces-per-capita, but it means 0.64% of us got divorced in 2016.

This was computed without any information from California, Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Minnesota, or New Mexico; those states did not count their divorces for 2016.

 

 

Nature predicts divorce more strongly than nurture -- study

We used classical and extended adoption designs in Swedish registries to disentangle genetic and rearing-environment influences on the intergenerational transmission of divorce. ... Adoptees ... resembled their biological parents, rather than their adoptive parents, in their history of divorce. In extended adoption analyses, offspring ... resembled their not-lived-with fathers and their lived-with mothers. There was stronger resemblance to lived-with mothers, providing indirect evidence of rearing-environment influences on the intergenerational transmission of divorce. The heritability of divorce assessed across generations was 0.13. We attempted to replicate our findings using within-generation data from adoptive and biological siblings ... . Adoptees resembled their biological, not adoptive, siblings in their history of divorce. Thus, there was consistent evidence that genetic factors contributed to the intergenerational transmission of divorce but weaker evidence for a rearing-environment effect of divorce. Within-generation data from siblings supported these conclusions. 

 "Genetics, the Rearing Environment, and the Intergenerational Transmission of Divorce: A Swedish National Adoption Study"

Jessica E. Salvatore, Sara Larsson Lönn, Jan Sundquist, Kristina Sundquist, Kenneth S. Kendler

 

in Psychological Science, January 18, 2018

In a study of "nearly 20,000 children adopted before the age of 10. They estimate that children with biological parents who were divorced were a little over 20% more likely get divorced themselves. As for the effect of having divorced adoptive parents? It had no impact at all."

[That last part isn't quite right, according to the study's abstract. There were correlations with both, but the "nature" links were stronger than the "nurture" links.]

A study found a link between genetics and divorce. Should we believe it?

Dan Kopf in Quartz