Cecil,
During the mid 80’s, we studied divorce statistics in a Sociology demographics course. While allowing for the fact that all statistical data is open to varying kinds of interpretation (which was the point of the excercise), our professor had us use census data obtained from the 1980 census to interpret the divorce rate by the age difference between spouses. Our individual findings were varied (of course). We learned from the excercise that marriage statistics get skewed by individuals who get married multiple times (thus, maybe being individuals who are more prone to divorce) and that age has a correlation to high divorce rates (the conclusions you draw from that correlation can be as varied as the interpretators who interpret the data).
From the class finds, and interpretation of the data, we found that new-same-age-young-marriages are the most prone to divorce (as high as 75% not lasting more than 3 years). Where as, new-man-older-than-woman (by 8 or more years of age)-marriages are the least prone to divorce (as low as 12% not lasting more than 3 years).
Now, taking these statitics with a ton of salt, the main correlations that we can infer with the divorce rate is that young people who get married divorce more often than not (which doesn’t exclude that some of these marriages may last a life time) and that men who marry younger women are less prone to divorce (which doesn’t exclude that some of these marriages won’t last). Can this information help curb divorce? Probably not since most people get married for such a wide variety of reasons.
So, getting back to the original question of “Do half of all marriages end in divorce?” one would have to ask the questioner to be a bit more specific because the answer can be both ‘yes’ and ‘no’ depending on the age of the participants, if they’ve been married before, why they got married in the first place, etc…
The Master speaks.
I can’t recall who said it first, but to paraphrase:
“You think it’s bad that half of all marriages end in divorce? Those are the lucky ones. The other half end in death.” 