Divorce Statistics and Studies Blog

Sweeping claim based on virtually nothing: "US Divorce Rates Skyrocket Amid COVID"

"Divorce rates have spiked in the U.S. during the coronavirus pandemic as couples have been stuck at home for months. The number of people looking for divorces was 34 percent higher from March through June compared to 2019, according to new data collected [by] Legal Templates, a company that provides legal documents. ... The data showed that 31 percent of the couples admitted lockdown has caused irreparable damage to their relationships."

"US divorce rates skyrocket amid COVID-19 pandemic"

By Elizabeth Rosner in the New York Post.

 

(To be fair to the author, it wouldn't be surprising if the headline, the lyin' first line, and the decision to run a story based on the "Legal Templates" peddlers' cheesy press release, were all the handiwork of editors.)

 

And that 31%? They were among those responding to a survey sent to the "My Ex Back Coach" mailing list. (Which was later updated and conclusively found that the lockdown had no effect on the respondents' relationships -- see further down.)

"These couples surveyed were married at the time the survey was conducted.
The survey was conducted April 25, 2020.
The survey/poll asked the following question:
How has the COVID-19 lock-down affected your relationship? Get your ex back with Coach Lee's Emergency Breakup Kit!

The following options were provided:

• The lock down has not changed my relationship.
• The lock down has harmed my relationship.
• The lock down has been good for my relationship." 

So wait . . . ONLY 31% of people who were on the "My Ex Back" mailing list, and chose to answer a survey from it, said the lockdown had harmed their relationships???!!! I guess most of the rest of them answered "no change" because their breakups happened before COVID. Also, we were only six weeks into the lockdown then. And I can't even begin to ponder the immense statistical implications of the survey's designers not knowing how to spell the main subject of their survey, the lockdown, but misspelling it TWO DIFFERENT WAYS!

And let's pause to flag a flagrant misuse of language in this and many other writings about divorce: The "My Ex Back" survey was not answered by "couples," it was answered by individuals. 

"My Ex Back" re-ran the survey in January, 2021, and the results (less than half of which are from the U.S.) seem pretty conclusive: The pandemic had had no effect on the great majority of the respondents' relationships: 

"The following are the results of a survey/poll sent to members of our mailing list. These couples surveyed were married as of January 19, 2021. The survey/poll asked the following question: 'Has the lockdown and other changes to life from the COVID-19 pandemic affected your marriage relationship?' The following options were provided:

Get your ex back with Coach Lee's Emergency Breakup Kit!

• • The lock down has not changed my marriage.
  • The lock down has harmed my marriage.
  • The lock down has been good for my marriage.

2429 people responded to this survey conducted January 19, 2021 to our email list. Of the 2429 respondents:

• • 17% answered that the pandemic had been good for their marriage
  • 72% answered that the pandemic had not changed their marriage
  • 11% answered that the pandemic had harmed their marriage"

The 2021 results get more interesting:

"Women were more likely to say their marriage had improved than men.
Men were more likely to say that their marriage had become worse.
21% of women said that their marriage had improved compared to 14% of men.
15% of men said that their marriage was worse compared to 7% of women."

Respondents were also asked if they were considering divorce as of January 19, 2021. Of the respondents, 19.98% (284) said that they were considering divorce. This number is down 29% from our 2019 survey of 1277 married couples where 357 or 28% responded that they were considering divorce.

Demographics of Respondents:

• 48.7% of respondents were from the United States.
• 21.4% of respondents were from the United Kingdom
• 5.8% of respondents were from India
• 5.2% Canada
• 4.6% Philippines

Sex of Respondents:

• 54% female
• 46% male

Age of Respondents:

• 18-24 years 10.6%
• 25-34 years 23.7%
• 35-44 years 37.5%
• 45-54 years 14.9%
• 55-64 years 9.1%
• 65+ years 4.2%

"It appears that some married couples experienced trauma induced limerence from the uncertainty and fear of the lockdowns of 2020-2021 and that such a spark fueled them to work out their issues and improve their marriage relationship."

 Limerence? It's nice to learn a new word, but it's a ridiculously overblown claim.

Limerence is a mental state of profound romantic infatuation, first defined in the 1970s by the psychologist Dorothy Tennov. It is characterised by an initial period of elation and intense emotional arousal that can progress to an involuntary, obsessive craving for another person.

-- From "Living with Limerence" by "Dr. Limerence". Oh. Uh, I can't wait to see what ads I start seeing after visiting Coach Ex-Back and Dr. Limerence. But it fairly matches the straight dictionary definition.

20-somethings drove most of the 1960s divorce revolution

The Rise in Divorce Rates, 1960-1974: Age-Specific Components

By Robert T. Michael in Demography

Divorce rate rose fast for older people, while falling overall since 1990

In 2015, for every 1,000 married persons ages 50 and older, 10 divorced – up from five in 1990. ... While the divorce rate for adults 50 and older has risen sharply over the past 25 years, it has remained relatively steady for this age group since 2008...

Among those ages 65 and older, the divorce rate has roughly tripled since 1990, reaching six people per 1,000 married persons in 2015. ...

During their young adulthood, Baby Boomers had unprecedented levels of divorce. Their marital instability earlier in life is contributing to the rising divorce rate among adults ages 50 and older today, since remarriages tend to be less stable than first marriages. The divorce rate for adults ages 50 and older in remarriages is double the rate of those who have only been married once (16 vs. eight per 1,000 married persons, respectively). Among all adults 50 and older who divorced in 2015, 48% had been in their second or higher marriage.

The risk of divorce for adults ages 50 and older is also higher among those who have been married for a shorter time. For example, among adults 50 and older who had been married for less than 10 years, the divorce rate was 21 people per 1,000 married persons in 2015. By contrast, the divorce rate is 13 people per 1,000 married persons for adults ages 50 and older who had been married for 20 to 29 years.

... Gray divorcees tend to be less financially secure than married and widowed adults, particularly among women. ...

Led by Baby Boomers, divorce rates climb for America’s 50+ population

BY RENEE STEPLER at Pew Research Center

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

The Divorce Surge Is Over, but the Myth Lives On: CUMULATIVE Stats Tell a More Relevant Story

"About 70 percent of marriages that began in the 1990s reached their 15th anniversary, up from about 65 percent of those that began in the 1970s and 1980s.Those who married in the 2000s are so far divorcing at even lower rates. If current trends continue, nearly two-thirds of marriages will never involve a divorce. 

"The decline in divorce is concentrated among people with college degrees. For the less educated, divorce rates are closer to those of the peak divorce years. Of college-educated people who married in the early 2000s, only about 11 percent divorced by their seventh anniversary, the last year for which data is available. Among people without college degrees, 17 percent were divorced."

Condensed from:

The Divorce Surge Is Over, but the Myth Lives On: Cumulative share of marriages ending in divorce

 

By Claire Cain Miller  in the New York Times, 12/2/14

 

But I heartily disagree with Justin Wolfers's explanation for this (or what looks like his explanation after the reporter and editors get through with it): 

“It’s just love now,” Mr. Wolfers said. “We marry to find our soul mate, rather than a good homemaker or a good earner.”

Being a good earner has always been important in the marriage market. Just ask the President.

Spain: Divorce jumped 85% after 2005 "Express Divorce Law"; then fell 17% by 2010

Some reasons for the decrease were the financial crisis, female unemployment, and immigration, according to "Explicando los determinantes de la tasa de divorcio en España," by Dolores Jiménez Rubio & Virginia Rosales, University of Granada (UGR), & Nuno Garoupa,Texas A&M University School of Law. Cited in "El 'boom' del divorcio exprés se diluye con la crisis y el desempleo femenino, según la UGR"., on 20minutos.es via EUROPA PRESS, 2/254/16. 

Young Unmarrieds More Marriage-Pessimistic, Pro-Divorce than Married People

Wendy Jessen writes in the heraldtimesonline.com:

Why do so many marriages end in divorce? Could our attitudes and views have something to do with the success or failure of our own marriages?

A study from the National Center for Family and Marriage Research explores the views of Generation X and Millennials on marital success rates. Based on the study, two out of five people (men and women) said that marriages have failed for most of the people they know. Forty to fifty percent of those who chose to cohabit at some point in their life or who are currently cohabiting, see marriage pessimistically. Interestingly, the number is much less for those who are currently married without prior cohabitation -- 22 percent.

Additionally, the majority believe that cohabiting before marriage reduces the risk of divorce, while among those who are married, only about one-third agree that cohabiting prior to marriage helps the marriage last.

Finally, those who have never been married also see divorce as a reasonable solution when a couple can't seem to work through problems. Conversely, married couples are more likely to seek other solutions to marital problems rather than use divorce as an answer to problems.

... Our perceptions are only based on our own reality -- the sum of what we have experienced throughout our lives. It's easy to make a rash judgment based on things you have heard or observed, with limited knowledge on the matter.

... If you get married with the idea that your marriage will eventually fall apart and fail, there's a good chance it will. Why make such a glum self-fulfilling prophecy? Why not go into marriage believing it will last and with the attitude and understanding that marriages take work? If your view of marriage is pessimistic, you'll likely find many reasons to support your theory. The opposite is also true.

Are you pessimistic about marriage success?

By Wendy Jessen of FamilyShare at heraldtimesonline.com via the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts

Based on "Generation X and Millennials Attitudes Toward Marriage & Divorce" (2015) by Kasey J. Eickmeyer at the National Center for Family and Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University.

White working class turns away from marriage, other cultural institutions - WSJ

This is the marriage-related part of Charles Murray's Wall St. Jnl. article, "The New American Divide" (1/21/12) -

Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America's core cultural institutions.

To illustrate just how wide the gap has grown between the new upper class and the new lower class, let me start with the broader upper-middle and working classes from which they are drawn, using two fictional neighborhoods that I hereby label Belmont (after an archetypal upper-middle-class suburb near Boston) and Fishtown (after a neighborhood in Philadelphia that has been home to the white working class since the Revolution).

To be assigned to Belmont, the people in the statistical nationwide databases on which I am drawing must have at least a bachelor's degree and work as a manager, physician, attorney, engineer, architect, scientist, college professor or content producer in the media. To be assigned to Fishtown, they must have no academic degree higher than a high-school diploma. If they work, it must be in a blue-collar job, a low-skill service job such as cashier, or a low-skill white-collar job such as mail clerk or receptionist.

People who qualify for my Belmont constitute about 20% of the white population of the U.S., ages 30 to 49. People who qualify for my Fishtown constitute about 30% of the white population of the U.S., ages 30 to 49.

I specify white, meaning non-Latino white, as a way of clarifying how broad and deep the cultural divisions in the U.S. have become. Cultural inequality is not grounded in race or ethnicity. I specify ages 30 to 49—what I call prime-age adults—to make it clear that these trends are not explained by changes in the ages of marriage or retirement.

In Belmont and Fishtown, here's what happened to America's common culture between 1960 and 2010.

Marriage: In 1960, extremely high proportions of whites in both Belmont and Fishtown were married—94% in Belmont and 84% in Fishtown. In the 1970s, those percentages declined about equally in both places. Then came the great divergence. In Belmont, marriage stabilized during the mid-1980s, standing at 83% in 2010. In Fishtown, however, marriage continued to slide; as of 2010, a minority (just 48%) were married. The gap in marriage between Belmont and Fishtown grew to 35 percentage points, from just 10.

Single parenthood: Another aspect of marriage—the percentage of children born to unmarried women—showed just as great a divergence. Though politicians and media eminences are too frightened to say so, nonmarital births are problematic. On just about any measure of development you can think of, children who are born to unmarried women fare worse than the children of divorce and far worse than children raised in intact families. This unwelcome reality persists even after controlling for the income and education of the parents.

In 1960, just 2% of all white births were nonmarital. When we first started recording the education level of mothers in 1970, 6% of births to white women with no more than a high-school education—women, that is, with a Fishtown education—were out of wedlock. By 2008, 44% were nonmarital. Among the college-educated women of Belmont, less than 6% of all births were out of wedlock as of 2008, up from 1% in 1970. ...

 

30% of Divorced Women Knew He Was Mr. Wrong All Along!

"The Shocking Truth for Thirty Percent of Divorced Women" by Jennifer Gauvain on Huffington Post

More discussion of the study, by the same author: "Why So Many Of Us Marry The Wrong Person"

 

 

Egypt: Watching soccer drives divorce up

Jennifer Weiner posits that while watching soccer is gay in one sense of the word, it is not prima facie evidence of a husband's homosexuality per se, unless accompanied by "multitasking". But it increases the divorce rate, especially when he likes it, she doesn't, and he lives in a country where men possess the power of unilateral divorce, according to a study by Hamdi Abdul Azeem and Mona el-Sayyed Hafez of Ain Shams University in Cairo. It said "divorce rates tended to spike during the Premier League season ... soccer-addicted husbands were in need of psychological help, which they seldom sought."  It cites household tensions over differences in interest in soccer, support of different teams, and husbands' expenditures of money and family time on soccer, to the extent of canceling family vacations.

Soccer loving spouses 'up divorce risk' - The Egyptian Gazette.
Soccer is at the root of high Egyptian divorce rate - Al Arabiya -- this story by Mideast Soccer blogger and former Wall Street Journal writer James M. Dorsey says that in Egypt, "discussing divorce has long been taboo even though it has one of the Arab world’s highest divorce rates."