This has been pointed out on this board before, but it’s worth repeating:
The 50% divorce rate stat is a myth, so why won’t it die?
Sure, that’s fair, but the vintage view of divorce rates is in the low to mid forties, which doesn’t materially change the argument.
I personally don’t see much if any difference between 40-45% and 50% when citing the failure rate of marriage, but if you see a huge gap in that extra 5-10% squeaking past without formally splitting, by all means, let’s use 40% or 45% instead.
Also, I’m not sure it’s inaccurate to say 50% when speaking at the population-level, because in that population the multi-marriage + multi-divorce people who are bringing up the vintage average DO exist - so as a rejoinder to “marriage is for LIFE, yo” I find it perfectly cromulent.
It’s not even close to 40%. Did you read the articles? From the second link:
The 50% figure has never been even close to true. And it boggles my mind that so many people seem to want it to be true.
I didn’t read the articles, but I’m passably familiar with Census ACS data, and have had this discussion before. There’s basically a floor of a 40% vintage-level divorce rate.
So the objection is that if you look at the simple view of divorces / marriages, which averages between 40% and 55% over the last 40 years, you are overestimating the number of divorces because of the ~5-10% of married people who get married and divorce multiple times. But the Census data above is the vintage view of women who ever divorced from their first marriage, which corrects for that.
Another interesting tidbit is that for first marriages that end in divorce, they last a median of 8 years.
I think what your article writers are probably doing is looking at recent trends and saying “hey, divorce rates are lower for people married in the last 10 years, if we assume that trend continues, nobody will ever get divorced!” when really, we don’t actually know what the divorce rates will be for that cohort for another few decades.
For now, I think it’s safe to assume that the divorce rate is 40% at the individual marriage level, and between 45% and 50% at the population level (which includes multi-divorcees), because we have 50+ years of data to that effect and humanity hasn’t fundamentally changed when it comes to interpersonal failure modes in the last 50 years.
Like I said earlier, couples in this situation often divorce because of other issues that existed before. The sick spouse may think, “I may not live all that long, so why should I stay in this unhappy relationship?”
That chart is only showing how long marriages lasted for women who got divorced from their first marriage. It doesn’t show what percentage of women got divorced.
It’s not safe to assume the divorce rate is that high, because it simply isn’t true.
And the answer would be “she’s emptying my pee containers and cooking my dinner”.
This. The weight loss and foot problem are red herrings. The real problems are his controlling nature and refusal to get counseling. I have witnessed a controlling person willfully refusing to do anything for health in order to control and torture the spouse. The pee bottle thing sounds especially bad. If he can walk around a flea market, he can make it to the bathroom, or empty his own pee bottles. If he has regard for you, he will want to do that himself. Otherwise, it’s a powerful way to demean you while being able to claim he needs it because he is disabled. Even if he were in a wheelchair, he could empty his own bottles.
Get counseling for yourself, under circumstances where you can say everything you can’t say on a message board.
Totally not my point. I’m very happy, ecstatic even, in my relationship. As the sick one I would not want to subject my partner to playing the part of “nurse” (or playing the part of “patient” myself), even if she didn’t mind.
When/if I’m no longer capable of caring for myself I have other plans.
That is not true, if you attend to the title, it is the percentage of “Ever-married” women who undergo a divorce, with cuts by duration and race/ethnicity. The weighted average is ~40%. It’s “of all married women, how many ended in divorce”, not the subset of women who were ever divorced, or the graphs would all end at 100% for each ethnicity / race.
Clicking through the article, they are getting some things manifestly wrong. The typically reported divorce rate is not based on projections, it’s the aggregate annual view, which as I showed in my second cite, has been between 40% and 55% for the last 40 years. This is the “blended population” divorce rate, with all marriage vintages commingled, and although it has gone down in recent years, it is still above 40% as of 2008-2010.
They themselves admit that in the 2009 ACS data where divorce rates have been going down, the vintage divorce rate is in the mid-thirties.
I didn’t read much beyond that, because they are plainly biased and writing towards a foregone conclusion rather than trying to interpret the data available in the best way, but as I said earlier, I would put money on them taking the most recent cohort’s (those married in the last 10 years, say) divorce rate, and projecting it out and saying “actual divorce rates are super low now, guys!”
That may or may not be true, but we won’t actually know that for another 3 or 4 decades, and indeed, divorces steadily go up over that time per my first cite.
So again, are divorce rates less than 50%? Sure, and I’ll freely agree to that, and in fact did. Are they drastically lower than 40%? We don’t have any reliable evidence to suggest that at either the population or the vintage level, and saying so is disingenuous.
Until more data comes in, I maintain the most parsimonious estimate is that divorce rates will stay in the 40% range, just like they have for the last 40 years.
If a marriage is miserable, leave it, whatever the reason.
Damn the scoundrels Honour and Vows and Duty and Pity .
I adore the amount of introspection and sharing that this post has engendered. Thanks for that, SDMB.
I feel like an acknowledgement of this would go SO FAR to making me… if not happy, then at least content.
There are no words in any extant language that could adequately express how fucking much I love this.