By SAM ROBERTS - NY Times October 12, 2012
... “Marriages are more likely to last for longer periods of time when people marry at an older age, have a higher education and earn more, and New Jersey scores high on these three criteria,” said Naomi Cahn, a professor at George Washington University Law School and an author of “Red Families v. Blue Families.”
“New Jerseyans are more likely than residents of most states to delay marriage until after they complete college and graduate school,” she said. “There are fewer divorces in New Jersey because there are fewer risk factors.” ...
June Carbone: “What is taking place is not necessarily age per se in sense of maturity,” she said, “but that people who tend to marry later tend to be wealthier and better educated and are more likely to marry someone wealthier and better educated.”
Nationally, 23 percent of the people who married within the previous year, according to the 2008-10 American Community Survey, were 18- to 24-year-olds. In New Jersey, only 13 percent were. Among all Americans who married in the preceding year, 31 percent had a bachelor’s degree or higher. In New Jersey, 42 percent did. The median age at first marriage in the nation in 2011 was 28.9 for men and 26.9 for women. In New Jersey, the comparable figures were 30.2 and 28.5.
... economic stability also contributes to marital stability. Those factors also place New York and Massachusetts among the states with the lowest share of divorced people. “This is the classic blue-state divorce pattern,” said W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. (Hawaii and North Dakota ranked low, too, but that’s attributed to relatively low unemployment in those states.)
“In general, the northeastern states have lower divorce rates because their citizens are more highly educated and marry at older ages than do people in other regions,” said Andrew J. Cherlin, a professor of public policy at Johns Hopkins.
... New Jersey also had a much lower marriage rate than southern states. ...
Other experts speculated that New Jersey’s low share of divorced people results from a range of factors, from the relatively large foreign-born population (immigrants have lower odds of divorce than the native-born population) to costly alimony provisions.
“Perhaps the New Jersey divorce rate is related to the unemployment rate or the low quotient of happiness people who live in New Jersey require,” said Mr. Felder.
A study of other data by Philip N. Cohen, a sociology professor at the University of Maryland, found that Delaware, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and North Dakota had the lowest rate of divorces the previous year compared with their populations — only 6 or 7 per 1,000, compared with 31 states that recorded more than 10 divorces per 1,000 residents, and Oklahoma, where nearly 14 per 1,000 said they were divorced.
The rate for men was 6.3 in New Jersey and 9.4 nationally, and for women, 7.1 and 9.7.
Over all, divorce rates peaked in the 1980s, but appear to be experiencing an uptick in the last few years.