ยป Divorce Rates are Over-rated
In response to Jared’s post.
Given divorce rates, choosing a marriage partner is not an item to cross off a list but a recurring project.
I knew this was wrong – the appeal to a large divorce rate and the implicit claim that many or most marriages end in divorce. I remembered reading in Freakonomics or some-such that the common claims like “60% of all marriages end in divorce” were misleading. The idea is that when those figures came out in the nineties, they were looking at everyone alive who was divorced and comparing it to everyone alive who was ever married. Allegedly, this is not the best way to measure the incidence of something. Additionally, it included the large number of divorces in the seventies as the pent up demand for divorces was allowed to burst as many took advantage of the liberalization of divorce laws to end many bad marriages. The divorce rate was also particularly high around the seventies as many impulsive, self-centred hippie marriages ended.
Anyway, I didn’t reply until now because I didn’t want to search out the statistics to back up my claim, but this morning I happened across an article about divorce in Salon. It quotes:
The divorce rate in America is at a 30-year low. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention1 puts the current divorce rate at 3.5 per 1,000, down 8 percent in the last five years, 16 percent since 2000, and a staggering 34 percent since its peak in 1979. Roughly 20,000 fewer American couples are divorcing every year as compared with a decade ago.
Making the gross simplification that all marriages are equally likely to end in divorce in a given year, then a divorce rate of 3.5 per 1,000 means that any given marriage has a 99.65% chance of not ending in divorce in a year and, if we simplify further and assume that the divorce rate holds steady in the future, an 81% change of lasting 60 years without divorce.
1 – That the CDC tracks the divorce rate in the US is very interesting. I’m sure there’s a funny or insightful observation that someone could make about that.
Indeed.
Don, re the divorce rate–I don’t think the divorce rate matters as much as the different sort of lifestyles and relationships that people are having. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems as though dating in your 30s comes with different expectations than the linear process that Jared outlined. It’s as though if you’re still single by the time you’re 30, you are in effect dismantling the current system….
still not really sure what that looks like, tho. I’m still 29.
nina
30 Aug 10 at 4:22 pm