So you just pulled that 45% out of your ass then? OK
It's not my fault that your lazy, imbecilic ass didn't read the ENTIRE article!
Divorce in America: Nailing Down the Numbers
That divorce rates are dropping goes against conventional wisdom, Cohen
wrote in a blog about his research. Between 1960 and 1980, the “crude divorce rate” went from 2.2 to 5.2, an increase of 136 percent, which inspired some freaking-out about the dissolution of the American family.
Other experts, however, disagree a bit about some of the reasons divorce rates were so high in the 1970s. Many point to the rise of no-fault divorces as a big reason for the spike; though changes in
divorce law during that decade might have sped up divorces, they didn’t really lead to an increase in their number, Stevenson says. What’s more agreed-upon is that divorce in America has declined since the 1980s, and in fact has fallen pretty steadily over the years.
The latest figures indicate that the overall divorce rate is the lowest it has been since 1970, at 16.7 per 1,000, in 2016. This is the “refined” rate, which looks at the total number of married women, who are thought to be better reporters of personal information than men tend to be, Payne notes.
“Using data from the ACS and calculating a rate that specifies married women, you’re looking at the risk of people who could actually divorce,” she says. The ‘first divorce rate,’ or the number of marriages that ended in divorce per 1,000 first marriages for women 18 and older, was 15.4 in 2016, according to
research by the National Center for Family and Marriage Research at the Bowling Green State University. As noted earlier, black women experience divorce at the highest rate, 26.1 per 1,000, and the rate is lowest for Asian women at 9.2 per 1,000.
Ideally, you’d get the most accurate picture of divorce risk by following married people over time, Payne says. So you’d look at, say, all the marriages that started in 1993, and then look at who’s still married in 2018. But that kind of longitudinal data is harder to come by, not to mention expensive to do
. The best estimate, based on projections, is that 45 percent of marriages will end in divorce.