Divorce Statistics and Studies Blog

Couples staying married longer

"Census: Married couples staying married longer" - Matthew Clark, Pittsburg, KS Morning Sun.

More than half of currently married couples have been married at least 15 years and 35 percent have been married 25 years - a slight increase since 1996, the Census Bureau reports.

 1% of couples have both spouses married three or more times. 72 percent of couples have both spouses in their first marriage. 6% have the wife in her second marriage and the husband in the first; 8%  have the husband in his second and the wife in her first. 

 

The article cites increased pre-marital education offered or required by churches as a possible reason, and also that people are now older when they first marry, and "31 percent of women who have recently married have a bachelor’s degree", up from 21% in 1996.

 

Why is divorce in China up 17% in 1 year? - China Radio Int'l

2011-06-16 China's Rising Divorce Rate.

Why class, education increasingly & inversely predict divorce, multiple mates, illegitimacy

Family Law Prof Blog: Carbone: "The Growing Relationship between Class and Family: Should We Be Talking About Evolutionary Analysis?".

The Family Law Prof. Blog writes: June Carbone (UMKC School of Law) has posted "The Growing Relationship between Class and Family: Should We Be Talking About Evolutionary Analysis?" on SSRN. ... Today, the likelihood of marrying, staying married and raising children within a two parent family corresponds directly with class. Divorce rates, which seemed to plateau in the nineties, in fact diverge sharply by women's education - the better educated have seen divorce rates decline back to the levels before no-fault divorce while they have continued to increase for everyone else. ...

 The college educated have continued to hold the line on non-marital births at the same time they have risen sharply for everyone else. Today, 41% of all births are non-marital; yet, the figure remains at 2% for white college grads and 6% for college graduates overall.

... evolutionary explanations. The most recent data finds that the greater the male income inequality in a region, the lower women's marriage rates and the lower the socio-economic status of the woman, the more likely she is to have children with multiple men. These ... seem to bear out evolutionary predictions that 1) women will prefer access to "better genes" from multiple partners if fidelity does not secure a mate who can meaningly invest in the children and 2) women who can secure a significant investment from a long term partner will become pickier as the variance among potential mates increases. ...

Survey: Recession delays divorce plans, deepens marriage commitment for some

New Survey! Recession Brings Greater Commitment to Stay Married. This is from the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, a pretty legit outfit, I believe the same one that conducted the long-running study of the effects of covenant marriage in Louisiana. It says 38 percent of couples considering divorce or separation have now put off those plans due to the recession, and  29 percent of all couples studied say that the Recession has deepened their commitment to their marriage; 58 percent say it had no effect.

I hope some of the 38 percent are able to hear about resources to improve and save their marriages, and aren't merely enduring until they think they can afford to divorce.

Roundup of recent studies on divorce causes, predictors and correlations

In Family Lore: Why marriages fail... and why I don't care, English family lawyer/writer John Bloch reviews, and links to, stories on many recently-reported studies correlating divorce with shared housework, IQ, red vs. blue states, sex of offspring, and the gap between husbands' and wives' happiness; and lists of factors predicting divorce identified in various earlier studies.

New book debunks 50% divorce stat, unpacks it by age & education

"Are Marriage Statistics Divorced from Reality?" TIME Magazine reports on Tara Parker-Poe's new book, For Better, which has a chapter on the legendary "50%" divorce rate. (This blog and its predecessor, the Divorce Statistics Collection, have periodically addressed what the 50% projection is and isn't, and how it has been adjusted up and down over the years. See also this NY Times article,   and Stanley and Amato's discussion on SmartMarriages.com.)  Some specific statistics reported in the TIME review:

About 23% of college graduates who married in the '70s split within 10 years. For those who wed in the '90s, the rate dropped to 16%.

The '80s: ... 81% of college graduates who got hitched in that decade at age 26 or older were still married 20 years later. Only 65% of college grads who said I do before their 26th birthday made it that far. But just 49% of those who married young and did so without a degree lasted 20 years.

... the 50% stat is a myth that persists because it's something of a political Swiss Army knife, handy for any number of agendas. ... all the talk about grim marriage stats becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. "It makes us ambivalent and more vulnerable to giving up when problems occur."

Good overview of the recent history of divorce

"The Evolution of Divorce" by Brad Wilcox in National Affairs  is a really good, thoughtful history that brings together some very relevant but rarely-seen statistics, along with analysis of how cultures, attitudes and beliefs have changed over time.

It includes stats based on the numbers of marriages, which are considerably less common and more informative than purely per-capita stats. Some of them are:

From 1960 to 1980, the divorce rate more than doubled — from 9.2 divorces per 1,000 married women to 22.6 divorces per 1,000 married women. This meant that while less than 20% of couples who married in 1950 ended up divorced, about 50% of couples who married in 1970 did. And approximately half of the children born to married parents in the 1970s saw their parents part, compared to only about 11% of those born in the 1950s.
...
The divorce rate fell from a historic high of 22.6 divorces per 1,000 married women in 1980 to 17.5 in 2007. In real terms, this means that slightly more than 40% of contemporary first marriages are likely to end in divorce, down from approximately 50% in 1980. Perhaps even more important, recent declines in divorce suggest that a clear majority of children who are now born to married couples will grow up with their married mothers and fathers.

There is much more -- stats and sophisticated analysis on marriage quality, attitudes, low-conflict vs. high-conflict marriages and divorces, the effects on children, out-of-wedlock birth, cohabitation, social class, and the connections between all these phenomena.

Chinese breakups skyrocket along with individualism

Chinese Slough Off Old Barriers to Divorce

Breakups Skyrocket Alongside An Embrace of Individualism

Additional info on topics of divorce rates and correlations with other factors

Divorce Rates: U.S. | International | State & Local | Why they increased | When children present | Change Over Time/Historical | Length of marriage before divorce |  Military | Understanding divorce rates
Correlations with Other Factors: Age | Alcoholic parents | Children of Divorce Getting Divorced
| Cohabitation | Current Events| Gender of Children | Laws |  Marriage education programs | Occupation | Poverty | Race | Region | Religion |  Smoking | Unrealistic Expectations