You stole my post. I think I must have deliberated too long.
This factor is behind many of the other ones mentioned in this thread, based on the famous cookie experiment. (Or cracker, or whatever.) The ability to tough it out because it will eventually get better is very important for a long marriage, based on 38 years of experience. No marriage is great all the time. And, as others have said, a better job, more money and less debt helps also.
I don’t think it is intelligence. I’ve known plenty of smart people who are a mess.
College isn’t just an education, it’s a maturity filter. Without discipline and planning, you’re unlikely to complete a degree no matter what your skills. Employers know this, and prefer to select from college-educated prospects because the undisciplined and unreliable have been effectively filtered out.
Those attributes of discipline, planning and reliability are exactly what is needed for a successful marriage. It’s no surprise college-educated couples do a better job of it.
I was able to show my kids a real-time demonstration of this a few years ago. I worked at a factory with a large (2000+) blue-collar workforce, and an equally large white-collar workforce. Almost all the white-collar jobs required degrees, but not so for the hourly workers. This demonstration was available each afternoon because of a 1 hour difference in shifts between hourly and professional. The differences in their “departures” from the parking lot were astounding. The hourly workforce resembled the local high school as they honked, sped, screeched tires, yelled, and gleefully joined the all-important competition to see whose pickup could leave the gate first. An hour later, the professionals would calmly and slowly drove away in an orderly group. It was a great demonstration for my kids to see the difference between high-school and college educated people.
I doubt that it all/mostly comes down to income because income is easy to measure so then the result would be “people with higher incomes have lower divorce rates” rather than “people with higher education have lower divorce rates”.
When a woman can support herself she has choices. She can wait and marry someone who is a good partner, or not marry at all. A woman without choices may marry someone she doesn’t know too well, or who isn’t a great fit, so she has financial support or a way out of living with her parents.
I’d be curious at the divorce rates of highly lucrative trades, like plumber or electrician.
Are they similar to divorce rates of college educated people, since they make a good income?
Are they higher since they often take less time than a college degree so less “maturing” and “planning ahead” is involved?
Are they higher since fewer women go into the trades and the data suggested that college education impacts women more?
That would be the result if that’s what they chose to compare, yes. Since this study chose to compare education and divorce, that’s the headline.
I can’t find an actual study comparing divorce rates and income. I can find references to one or two, but not the actual studies. Here’s one:
The number of married, college-educated couples that split by their seventh anniversary was 20 percent in the 1980s and is now just 11 percent.
Meanwhile, 17 percent of lower-income couples (in the study this was couples making no more than twice the federal poverty line of just over $30,000) get divorced at roughly the same rate as the 1980’s: 20 percent.
An annual income of over $50,000 can decrease risk of divorce by as much as 30% versus those with an income of under $25k.84.
Feeling that one’s spouse spent money foolishly increased the likelihood of divorce 45 percent for both men and women.
Couples that argue about finances at least once a week are 30 more likely to get divorced.
The same study also found that couples with no assets at the beginning of a three-year period are 70 percent more likely to divorce by the end of that period than couples with $10,000 in assets.
Like I said, these are only references to studies, not the studies themselves, but they do seem to indicate that the difference may well be income rather than education levels.
But these are so tightly correlated that you need a study that looks at both to be able to tease out the difference.
I would think that education leads to lower divorce independently from income, but that the relationship with divorce and income is U-shaped: the really poor have lots of problems that stress a relationship, the well-to-do have so many options and can afford an expensive divorce. For middle income people the stress on the relationship isn’t excessive but divorce is costly and it’s not clear you’re going to do much better afterwards.
Income might be easy to measure, but from 1940 to 2000, the US Census asked about education level, but not income. So there’s massive amounts of data out there about education level, and not about income.
But, there’s certainly some data about income, and the result is that people with higher incomes have lower divorce rates.
Since income and education are closely correlated, this isn’t surprising. And the fact that reports use education data (which is plentiful) more often than income data (less so) doesn’t tell us anything about which effect actually dominates, it just tells us about which questions were on surveys that massive numbers of people answered.
And even if you had a study that told you which was more predictive, it wouldn’t tell you the cause. It’s possible that going to college makes you more self-aware and gives you the ability to make better decisions, leading to more successful partnerships. Or, it’s possible that, because going to college is difficult and expensive, most people who go to college have strong support networks and functional families that support them, which provide direct help and are good role models for marriage.
I tend to think it’s the latter. College is great for lots of things, but the family support required to complete college matters a lot more in terms of predicting how successful you’ll be as an adult than anything you actually learn in college.
This was my first thought and I’ll add that, in the U.S. at least, higher income correlates with having (or having better) medical insurance so serious illness is also less likely to be a stressor on a college-marriage.
I ha a somewhat similar discussion with a friend of mine, whose older sister barely made it out of high school, moved in with her boyfriend the motorcycle mechanic, then a few years later dumped him and afterwards is married to some accountant type and is doing well as a financial adviser.
Based on early 80’s lifestyles in a small town… the smart and ambitious boys put their nose to the grindstone, study, act like nerds, and eventually make it to college to become that engineer, doctor, lawyer, accountant, etc. But - in high school they’re boring. The interesting guys are the rebels with the flashy car or motorcycle, don’t give a damn about school and aren’t doing so well anyway, but like to go partying and drinking.
the smart girls see they can have more fun with the rebels. The less smart girls aim for the quiet nerds, as a secure and reliable boyfriend. By about the 80’s this translated into “shacking up” or for the more quiet and traditional, perhaps getting married.
Then somewhere around 22 to 25 years old, the smart girls wake up and realize “I’m married to a moron and all he’s going to do for the next 30 years is drink and fix motorcycles”. Meanwhile the smart guys wake up one day and realize “I’m married to a stunned ditz”. The music starts, everyone switches partners, and the smart women end up with the smart men… and they lived happily ever after.
NOTE: There’s probably no factual answer to this question.
Besides what the others have mentioned, it seems reasonable to suspect that relationships tend to end during times of hardship. If you have a secure job, medical insurance, and fewer children, the odds of an illness or death in the family are decreased, the odds of becoming destitute are lower, etc. It’s less likely that the relationship will be tested as thoroughly as that of someone who is living poorly.
There’s probably also a correlation between poverty and substance abuse. One would hope that there’s a correlation between substance abuse and divorce.
I think I must have deliberated too long.