Knowing Full Well

A recent article in the New York Times on prenuptial agreements (the article calls them “marriage insurance”)  stresses that young people today know “full well” the risks of getting married. They know, for example, that: “Of the nearly 230,000 marriages that begin [this] June, more than half will end in divorce . . .” As a result, it may be time, according to the divorce lawyer Raoul Feldman, to “rethink” the entire institution of marriage, since it obviously isn’t working: “. . . people are getting married knowing there’s a failure rate of 50 percent. It’s truly amazing.”

That “more than half” of all current marriages end in divorce is probably today’s most-repeated statistic about the American family. Haven’t you heard it a thousand times? I’ve said and written it myself many times. The only problem is - or more accurately, the little-known good news is - it probably ain’t true.

U.S. divorce rates peaked in 1979, when the crude divorce rate (divorces per 1,000 persons) reached 5.7 and the refined rate (divorces per 1,000 married women age 15 or older) reached 22. Using these rates as their baseline, demographers throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s frequently projected that “more than half” of all recent marriages are destined to end in divorce.

Meanwhile, however, divorce rates have declined. From 1979 to 1997, the crude divorce rate fell by about 25 percent; the refined rate declined by about 10 percent. Today, it’s probably accurate to say that more than 40 percent, but less than half, of all recent marriages are likely to end in divorce.

But even that estimate is potentially misleading, since it includes all marriages, not just first marriages. And since second and third marriages are more divorce-prone than first marriages, the 40-something estimate exaggerates the likelihood that a first-time marriage will end in divorce. If you are a young person getting married today, what is the statistical likelihood that your marriage will last for life? Let’s call it 60 percent, maybe higher. Put differently, your and your friends’ first marriages in 2000 are significantly more likely - perhaps as much as 20 percent more likely - to last for life than was the case when your parents and their friends got married in the 1970s. This is good news! 

Why does the “more than half” estimate continue to prosper? Partly because all widely embraced statistics develop their own independent momentum. Partly because bad news usually gets more media attention than good news. Partly because there is still a great deal of divorce in our society. (The U.S. still has the world’s highest divorce rate.) But mostly, I suspect, because today’s aging baby boomers, who divorce so frequently themselves, find it hard to accept the fact that younger people are behaving differently, and better.  

But they are. A continually escalating divorce rate, it turns out, is not a permanent and inevitable fact of modern life, immune from social learning and human agency. Change for the better is not only possible; it has already begun to happen. Here’s the proposition, made up of one part evidence and one part hope: In a few years, we will understand a divorce rate of “more than half” not as a description of current reality, but as something that happened in the old days, when the sexual revolution was young and when today’s pot-bellied commentators, editors, and divorce lawyers were wearing bellbottoms and going to discos.

Sources: Joshua R. Goldstein, “The Leveling of Divorce in the United States,” Demography 36, no. 3 (August 1999): 409-414. Tim B. Heaton, “Factors Contributing to Increasing Marital Stability in the United States,” unpublished paper (Provo, UT: Center for Studies of the Family, Brigham Young University, December 1999). Sally Cunningham Clarke and Barbara Foley Wilson, “The Relative Stability of Marriages,” Family Relations 43 (July 1994): 305-310. Arthur J. Norton and Louisa F. Miller, “Marriage, Divorce, and Remarriage in the 1990s,” U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, P 23-180 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, October 1992). David Popenoe and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, The State of Our Unions: 2000 (New Brunswick, NJ: National Marriage Project, Rutgers University, June 2000), 27.

First published Summer 2000.