July 13th 2009

True or False: 50% of Marriages End in Divorce?

A colleague of mine at The National Campaign was fuming.

“If there’s one thing every high school kid will tell you,” he said, “it’s that 50 percent of marriages fail. It’s a lie.”

Well, it’s not exactly a lie, if you look at marriage data from years ago, or combine all education and income groups. But it’s also not true if you take a closer look at recent marriages.

Saying it over and over – as parents, politicians and pundits do – is akin to a college professor telling her class that half of them are going to fail her course, or a boss reminding recent hires that within a few years, half of them will be fired.

Such dire warnings don’t exactly motivate you to do your best in class or at work. And if marriage is such a crap shoot, why get married or, when marriage gets hard, work to stay married?

I’m thinking of this after reading Caitlin Flanagan’s thought-provoking Time article, “Is There Hope for the American Marriage?” in which she refers to “the collapse of marriage.” The poor have babies and never get married, she writes, and the middle/upper classes abandon marriage when it’s no longer any fun.

While the first part of her thesis is true, the second is, at best, misleading.

Steven P. Martin, an assistant sociology professor at the University of Maryland, looked at marriages between 1990 and 1994 and found that only 16.5 percent of those in which the wife had a college education or more fell apart in the first 10 years. Marriages in which the wife had at least graduated from high school resulted in divorce 38 percent of the time, he said in his article, "Growing Evidence for a 'Divorce Divide'? Education and Marital Dissolution Rates in the U.S. since the 1970s.".

And there’s this: According to a new study by TRU, a Chicago research firm specializing in youth, nearly two-thirds of teens say their parents are still together. "Divorce happens," the study's authors write, "but it's more often than not someone else's problem."

According to Christine Whelan, a sociology professor at the University of Iowa, calculating the divorce rate is tricky business, but the overall divorce rate for first marriages hasn't ever been as high as 50 percent. Since the late 1980s, when divorce rates peaked, after a rapid increase of dissolved marriages in the '70s, the rate has actually been declining slightly.

Yet the drumbeat of doom continues. Think celebrity breakups – Jon and Kate Plus 8 – and politicians’ affairs. Or reports about the rapid pace of cohabitation as a substitute for marriage.

To these trends, Whelan, author of Marry Smart: The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to True Love, says:

1) Celebrities and politicians aren’t “normal people” (that’s for sure) and their experiences with marriage don’t necessarily apply to most of us.

2) The effect of co-habitation on marriage is context-specific.

Demographics like education, class and race matter. And so, partners with less income and education are more likely to live with a number of partners and not get married, while those who are financially comfortable and well-educated tend to live with only one or two partners and eventually marry. Today, half or more of young adults live together before marriage, and, says Whelan, "it's way too early to predict what the future will hold for them."

We should never ignore the risks of marriage or stop exploring why some marriages do collapse. But we should also be talking more about relationships that work and why they work, as well as why married people tend to be more content and live longer. Sure, lots of married couples fight over how to spend their shrinking paychecks. But they're also cooking meals together and sharing a smile when son or daughter walks across the stage to receive a diploma.

Children do better in two-parent homes and apparently more of them are getting that opportunity, at least in families of some means. So let's shelve the 50 percent figure. It's at best meaningless and, at worst, destructive to the dreams of marriage young people still harbor for themselves.