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Divorce rate is 53% in the US, and higher in many countries. So only a minority of people whi marry don’t get divorced.

slededit 9y ago
That statistic allows you to say only a minority of marriages don't end in divorce. People can be married multiple times so it cannot be true that most married people experience divorce unless they rarely remarry.
- tachudda 9y ago
  I've seen 41% of first marriages end in divorce.
bzbarsky 9y ago
> Divorce rate is 53% in the US It depends on what you measure and how you measure it. Which exact measurement are you doing? For example, based on table 5 at https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/article/marriage-and-divorce-patterns-by-gender-race-and-educational-attainment.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/article/marriage-and-divor... at age 45 56.3% (48.6/(1-.137)) of people who got married at all are still in their first marriage. The other 43.7% got divorced. Some of those people remarried. Of people who married at least twice, 41.4% are in their second marriage. The other 58.6% got divorced. Note that this is much higher than the first-marriage divorce rate. The upshot is that many measurements of divorce rates (again, depending on what you measure) are highly affected by people who get married and divorced multiple times. People who can't make one marriage work are much more likely to also not make another one work... The divorce rate for first marriages is not over 50% in any data set I've seen for the US. If you have a citation for it being higher than that, I'd love to see it.
daveFNbuck 9y ago
Divorce rate is actually calculated by the number of divorces each year divided by the number of marriages each year. So if married couples flipped a coin each year to decide whether to get divorced, we'd have a similar divorce rate but almost no one would stay married for life. On the other hand, if 90% of married couples stayed married for life but the remaining 10% got married and divorced 10 times each, we'd also have about a 53% divorce rate. So the 53% number could support almost everyone getting divorces or almost everyone staying with their first marriage for life. It's a bit hard to measure this statistic, but every source I found says that a majority of Americans who get married never divorce. Even if it were only 47%, that's still a really high success rate. We're talking about people in their 20s and 30s making a commitment that lasts until they're 80 or so. That doesn't support the idea that our society no longer has long-term commitments.

That statistic allows you to say only a minority of marriages don't end in divorce. People can be married multiple times so it cannot be true that most married people experience divorce unless they rarely remarry.

tachudda 9y ago
I've seen 41% of first marriages end in divorce.

bzbarsky 9y ago

> Divorce rate is 53% in the US It depends on what you measure and how you measure it. Which exact measurement are you doing? For example, based on table 5 at https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/article/marriage-and-divorce-patterns-by-gender-race-and-educational-attainment.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/article/marriage-and-divor... at age 45 56.3% (48.6/(1-.137)) of people who got married at all are still in their first marriage. The other 43.7% got divorced. Some of those people remarried. Of people who married at least twice, 41.4% are in their second marriage. The other 58.6% got divorced. Note that this is much higher than the first-marriage divorce rate. The upshot is that many measurements of divorce rates (again, depending on what you measure) are highly affected by people who get married and divorced multiple times. People who can't make one marriage work are much more likely to also not make another one work... The divorce rate for first marriages is not over 50% in any data set I've seen for the US. If you have a citation for it being higher than that, I'd love to see it.

daveFNbuck 9y ago

Divorce rate is actually calculated by the number of divorces each year divided by the number of marriages each year. So if married couples flipped a coin each year to decide whether to get divorced, we'd have a similar divorce rate but almost no one would stay married for life. On the other hand, if 90% of married couples stayed married for life but the remaining 10% got married and divorced 10 times each, we'd also have about a 53% divorce rate. So the 53% number could support almost everyone getting divorces or almost everyone staying with their first marriage for life. It's a bit hard to measure this statistic, but every source I found says that a majority of Americans who get married never divorce. Even if it were only 47%, that's still a really high success rate. We're talking about people in their 20s and 30s making a commitment that lasts until they're 80 or so. That doesn't support the idea that our society no longer has long-term commitments.