Most of the statistics get thrown off because Baby Boomers divorced like crazy (and still do), and young people don't get married as often and wait longer to get married. And those old baby boomers remarry and divorce repeatedly (see Donald Trump, Newt Gingrich, Larry King, etc.). So the baby boomer divorces drown out the younger people marriages. But when you look at actual generations and when people get married, the first-marriage divorce rate has actually been dropping for nearly 40 years.
If you see people posting a divorce statistic that says 40-45% or so, and you don't see them account for what generation the person is or whether it's a first marriage, then you know they're just letting all those repeat Baby Boomer divorces skew their results. Old people getting divorced repeatedly has no bearing on what under-50 people have been doing with their lives the last 30 years.
From the New York Times:
"Despite hand-wringing about the institution of marriage, marriages in this country are stronger today than they have been in a long time. The divorce rate peaked in the 1970s and early 1980s and has been declining for the three decades since.
About 70 percent of marriages that began in the 1990s reached their 15th anniversary (excluding those in which a spouse died), 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, according to data from Justin Wolfers, a University of Michigan economist."
The Divorce Surge Is Over, but the Myth Lives On
From Psych Central:
"It is now clear that the divorce rate in first marriages probably peaked at about 40 percent for first marriages around 1980 and has been declining since to about 30 percent in the early 2000s."
"The key is that the research shows that starting in the 1980s education, specifically a college degree for women, began to create a substantial divergence in marital outcomes, with the divorce rate for college-educated women dropping to about 20 percent, half the rate for non-college educated women. Even this is more complex, since the non-college educated women marry younger and are poorer than their college grad peers. These two factors, age at marriage and income level, have strong relationships to divorce rates; the older the partners and the higher the income, the more likely the couple stays married. Obviously, getting a college degree is reflected in both these factors.
Thus, we reach an even more dramatic conclusion: That for college educated women who marry after the age of 25 and have established an independent source of income, the divorce rate is only 20 percent."
The Myth of the High Rate of Divorce
And that number looks like it's dropping further as year-to-year divorces as a percentage of all married couples keep going down. Now only about 1.7% of marriages end in divorce in any given year, even accounting for old people marriages and repeat marriages.
From Bloomberg:
"Americans under the age of 45 have found a novel way to rebel against their elders: They’re staying married.
New data show younger couples are approaching relationships very differently from baby boomers, who married young, divorced, remarried and so on. Generation X and especially millennials are being pickier about who they marry, tying the knot at older ages when education, careers and finances are on track. The result is a U.S. divorce rate that dropped 18 percent from 2008 to 2016, according to an
analysis by University of Maryland sociology professor Philip Cohen."
. Its a lot more people who wanna get married and a lot more that is going get a divorce. What you think about open relationships?
