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The divorce rate has fallen because the demographics of marriage have changed
- alfromspace 7y agoThe biggest factor in America's high divorce rates is, by far, the advent of no-fault divorce starting in the 70s. I think there's also something to the cultural tropes and propaganda we've seen since then portraying marriage as dull, monotonous, and oppressive while lifting up devoting one's life to an office job, travel, and 'exciting' flings as the path to self-fulfillment. When nothing could really be further from the truth - there's a reason millennials and gen-zers are horribly depressed and dying enough deaths of despair from drugs and suicide to bring down the average lifespan.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y ago> there's a reason millennials and gen-zers are horribly depressed and dying enough deaths of despair from drugs and suicide to bring down the average lifespan. Are you saying marriage is happiness? I was cohabitating with my partner for 5 years before we married. There was really no difference in quality of life.
- alfromspace 7y agoNot necessarily. I'm more criticizing the alternatives I mentioned. And more broadly their lack of stable relationships, either with romantic partners or families.
- dr_dshiv 7y ago"Marriage is miserable. But not as bad as divorce or never getting married." Is that the idea?
- alfromspace 7y agoWhy is marriage miserable? Maybe it wouldn't be if people hadn't been conditioned to seek the next dopamine hit instead of trying to make it work.
- strikelaserclaw 7y agoThe order goes 1)Happy marriage 2)Being Single 3)Shitty marriage
- dr_dshiv 7y agoHmm. I thought marriage was fundamentally miserable but still better than the alternatives. Actually, please don't disrupt my worldview, thanks k bye.
- mikeash 7y agoIf so, that seems to reveal a pent-up desire for divorce that was suppressed by making it legally difficult. Having the government force people to stay together when they don’t want it seems like a bad thing.
- icebraining 7y agoAccording to Gallup[1], the vast majority of millennials expressed the desire to get married, so the propaganda/trope reasoning seems poorly supported to me. [1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/163802/marriage-importance-dropped.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/163802/marriage-importance-drop...
- alfromspace 7y agoIt could be - but it's also important to note that number is lower than it's ever been, not many do succeed in getting married, and only 14% of respondents had financial reasons for not being married. I think there's a lot to do with the modern zeitgeist in the "too young/not ready" and "looking for the right person" categories.
- kmcb 7y agoCould part of the reason be that online dating pairs people who are more suitable for each other? There are less people just settling, to start a family. Some of those who, in the past, found someone who had just settled for them. May find it more difficult to find someone, willing to do that.
- docbrown 7y ago>Could part of the reason be that online dating pairs people who are more suitable for each other? I’d want a source on this because an algorithm matching people does not seem to be the most effective. yes there are special occasions where lifetime partners have met online but I don’t think online dating is the sole purpose behind the decline of marriage. Currently waiting for class to start so I can’t search for a link right now but iirc, the economy health is one of the main driving force behind marriage numbers dropping. In a healthy economy, more people are willing to marry, start a family, purchase land, etc. When economy is bad, all of these extra costs become more of a risk than before.
- akavi 7y agoThe algorithm used doesn't need to be any good at matching people for online dating to increase your chance of finding a suitable partner. A system which showed people to each other in a totally randomized way would still drastically increases the number of people you can superficially evaluate, and even a tinder style photos + blurb profile is rich in personality/cultural clues to base evaluation on.
- docbrown 7y ago>A system which showed people to each other in a totally randomized way would still drastically increases the number of people you can superficially evaluate Is this really the ultimate goal for online dating? To expose us to a plethora of options in order to choose which one is best fit. It reminds of how Hot or Not could be seen as an early type of online dating that exposed us to randomized people, although without the option of being able to communicate with them beyond.
- telesilla 7y agoIt's been explained to me that in the United States you pay less taxes when you are married, thereby resulting in a higher marriage rate than otherwise. I'm surprised this hasn't been contested - doesn't it seem discriminatory to those who don't want to institutionalise their relationship? I don't know any other country that has this tax aspect. edit many seem to presume there are not alternatives to marriage: a de facto partnership should offer the same legal protections/restrictions without the concept of a couple registry needing to get involved.
- benjohnson 7y agoIt also works in reverse if one of married people is a high earner - the lower earner could usually have qualified for many government programs otherwise.
- jxramos 7y agoThat right, there's three or so tax filing statuses with different rates https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filing_status https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filing_status. Presumably that favoritism in rates assumed an investment by the country in the children that naturally follow the union of a man and woman that are majoritatively fecund by a wide margin populationally speaking. Despite there being marriages that are inherently or voluntarily infertile when does the presumption no longer match reality is an interesting question. Put another way when is the married subpopulation not the primary group to which children are born.
- cagenut 7y agoare we (u.s.) not already there? if not it has to be very close.
- metalliqaz 7y agoFor a long time, the tax system actually punished couples for getting married. The reason is because it assumed that when married, the wife was a dependent on the husband. It was old fashioned. When modern couples got married but both continued to work in their careers, the taxes were actually a bit higher on their incomes (mostly on high earners but also on middle class). This is described by my conservative family as "anti-marriage" tax policy. However it could better be described as "pro-family" because if the couple has a child and the wife stops working to take care of the kid(s), then the tax situation becomes favorable in order to benefit the children. It's old fashioned, but it made sense. With the changes to the tax code in the Trump era, I don't know if the situation still holds, I haven't looked closely at it.
- buboard 7y ago[2018] . Apparently the article says that the rate of growth of divorces has been overtaken by the growth of the average marriage age?
- SuperGent 7y agoI would also be interested to see if the divorce rate of first marriages has changed. I assume that people getting married later in life is due to a reduction in the 'moral' pressure of living together.
- basseq 7y agoClickbait title. The reason is because fewer people are getting married in the first place. The author posits that it's a "bad thing" because: * ... the decline of well-paying jobs for those without college degrees makes it harder to form more stable relationships. And thus, marriage is “an increasingly central component of the structure of social inequality.”* And yet, those "well-paying jobs" that led to "more stable relationships"... were more likely to end in divorce before. So if the decline is due to a socioeconomic class less likely to get married, that class historically saw higher rates of divorce. I get what the author is going for, but anchoring to divorce rate (which is dependent on socioeconomic mix and the underlying marriage rate) seems backward versus just talking about marriage rates in the first place.
- metalliqaz 7y ago> The reason is because fewer people are getting married in the first place. It's the divorce RATE that is declining, not the number of divorces. The reason,as stated, is that the people who are getting married tend to be more mature and economically stable than they typically were years ago.
- Kiro 7y agoWhat's "Not-So-Great" about that?
- jandrese 7y agoI guess the author prefers people to marry young? It seems to me that the "problem" is that people aren't feeling forced into marriage and are instead deciding to wait until they ready before getting married. Maybe our shifting societal attitudes towards sex before marriage have something to do with it? The author seems entirely hung up on the socioeconomic side of the picture, but I'm not sure that's the entire situation.
- jrace 7y agoA question I have is...why marriage at all? Is there a reason I need the government to recognize the union between my and my SO?
- rubidium 7y agoMain reason for government recognition is taxes, healthcare situations, common property ownership, and kids. There's laws that take into account if two people are married or now.
- t0mbstone 7y agoJust so you know, there isn't always a tax break for being married, unless one of the partners is making significantly less than the other or is a stay at home parent. In many cases, you can actually save more money by filing separately, and instead of getting legally married, just become "domestic partners". Health insurance treats domestic partners just like spouses (so you can still add each other to the primary person's insurance if you want). Many of the other "benefits" of marriage can be solved by intentionally creating a living will where you state how you want medical issues to be handled, and where you have named the other person as your benefactor if you die. You can even list your domestic partner as the benefactor on your life insurance policy. As for kids, you don't lose your parental rights just because you aren't married. It's still your kid, and you still owe child support regardless. There are plenty of people who are divorced and have kids. Being in a domestic partnership with kids works just fine. Honestly, I don't even know why anyone gets married these days. The laws regarding marriage in many states are so antiquated and nonsensical. A lot of the laws and protections in marriage are designed around the antiquated idea of stay-at-home moms who can't work or provide for themselves. That's not the modern world we live in anymore. My significant other and I have been in a relationship for over 5 years now, and we have a 3 year old kid. We keep almost all of our finances completely separate (with the exception of a shared savings account just for household and childcare expenses). She makes her money, and I make mine. We track all of our shared household and childcare expenses using Splitwise, and we file our taxes separately. When we do our taxes, we figure out who gets the bigger refund that year (when filing for head of household and adding the childcare expenses), and then we split the refund difference. Everything is totally fair, and everyone pulls their own weight in the relationship. We split all of the household duties, and we split things like childcare duties, too. For example, she watches the kiddo all day on Saturday (giving me a day off), and I watch him all day on Sunday (giving her a day off). We also play World of Warcraft together in the evenings after the kiddo has gone to bed. Life is great!
- 033803throwaway 7y agoMarriage is a wonderful institution and the children that come from it are the greatest gift you can be given. Our culture tells us the opposite. But our culture is insane and wants you to be an isolated, rootless, consumer wage slave.
- paggle 7y agoSeriously. I used to be on a high flying career path and was pretty happy about it. Then I had kids and realized I never knew what happiness was. I have about $2m and will be going to stay at home dad soon. Now everything at work seems like such utter bullshit. Who cares if this code compiles or not. We’re all just useless worms on a piece of dust. I’m going to spend my femtosecond with my kids.
- 033803throwaway 7y agoAmen. And congratulations. But you are not a useless worm and this is not a piece of dust.
- monkeynotes 7y agoElephant in the room is the $2m in the bank. This alone affords you the perspective to value family life over all else. If you were struggling to make rent and feed your kids you might find that children are a burden and stress. I don't think this would necessarily make you love them any less, but some of my friends have warned me off of deciding to have children because of the financial strain that comes part-and-parcel for the average person with kids.
- epx 7y agoMarriage is expensive and divorce is even more expensive, especially for men. The antidote is to marry only in your money league, or higher. Women used to do that, for their own protection - now men must do the same, and obviously the mating pool shrinks.
- defertoreptar 7y ago> “If you were to include cohabiting relationships [in addition to marriages], the breakup rates for young adults have probably not been going down,” It's interesting that they think to factor in cohabitation when when looking at overall breakup rates, however they go the opposite direction and fail to account for how well-paying jobs actually relate to college degrees over the years: > Chen connects this trend to the decline of well-paying jobs for those without college degrees, which, he argues, makes it harder to form more stable relationships. Indeed, Cohen writes in his paper that marriage is “an increasingly central component of the structure of social inequality.” [...] In 1960, 22% of Americans ages 25 to 34 had some college or more. By 2009, it was 60%. [0] For the sake of argument, let's say we have 100% employment among this age group and that those with college degrees always get the best paying jobs. We'll define a "well-paying job" as the top 50% of jobs by wage. That means that in 1960, the college folks get the top 22% well-paying jobs. That leaves the remaining 28% of well-paying jobs to those who skipped college. In 2009, we have all well-paying jobs filled by the college folks, and they actually spill over into the non well-paying jobs, since we have so many now. So yes, there is technically a decline in well-paying jobs among those without college degrees. However, that's only because there are a larger proportion of those with college degrees in kind! If you want to consider "social inequality", it makes more sense to look at the proportion of those with well-paying jobs compared with those without, which is 50% in both theoretical scenarios. [0] https://trends.collegeboard.org/education-pays/figures-tables/educational-attainment-over-time-1940-2009 https://trends.collegeboard.org/education-pays/figures-table...