Good news about marriage from some bad statistics

I was listening to a message the other day by one of the pastors out at Grace Church in Sun Valley, CA, and he had a brief discussion on those statistics that say that 50% of all marriages end in divorce. He mentioned that this is probably not accurate and that Barna may be closer when he says 33% or 34% end in divorce. However, even Barna's numbers aren't completely accurate.

The statistics are based on the comparison of the number of marriage ceremonies each year compared to the number of divorces filed at the courthouse. Let's say in your town there are 100 marriage licenses obtained in a given year and 50 divorce petitions filed. Sounds like a 50% divorce rate, right? Wrong. What this stat doesn't take into account is the number of existing marriages at the beginning of the year. Let's say there are 1000 marriages already in existence in your town on Jan. 1, there are 100 new marriages by the end of the year and 50 divorces by the end of the year. What is the divorce rate in your town? I'm no mathemetician but that sounds more like 5% than 50%.

This pastor quoted someone else who said that it is more likely that only about 10%-11% of marriages actually end in divorce. True, that number is accelerating these days and it is something to be concerned about. But the story isn't as bad as it seems.

The take-away value on this is to remember that marriages are better off than we are often led to believe. I can remember being engaged and while in the flush and blush of young love, alot of the older married couples we knew would say "that's sweet, but it'll wear off." We heard a lot of "wait till the honeymoon's over," and "I'll give it a year or so before things aren't so rosy."

If I weren't such a Chestertonian, good-humored blogger I would raise the suggestion that there's a conspiracy afoot to undermine marriage and convince everybody that those of us who are happily, traditionally, and monogamously married, really aren't so happily married. If I weren't so inclined to give a good ol' Chestertonian belly laugh (my belly used to be nearly as big as Chesterton's but it has shrunk over the last year) at such things, I would almost believe that there are forces out there in our society who want to scare young people out of getting married by offering all of these dreadful predictions.

However, truth eventually wins out, and the truth is marriage ain't so bad, statistically or experientially. Even that old relic from the stone age known as traditional, monogamous marriage is actually quite a nice thing, if I do say so myself.

Comments

[Doug]

I never considered it that way. It sure takes the depressing 50% cloud away. Thanks!

[Michael Gallaugher]

I was waiting in line at a department store last weekend and the couple in front of us were mid 20s and the girl could not stop kissing and hugging the guy. I could have bet my life they were a new couple, because I can hardly get my wife to do that when the house is empty. But I can tell you, the confusion of love as a feeling rather than what you do, has perverted the sanctity of all loving relationships, marriage notwithstanding.

Yet, I've never loved my wife more now after 6 years than I did when I first met her, our roots have grown together and I can't imagine life without her. Marriage is wonderful, even if the statistics (which are even questionable as you point out) say otherwise.

[Curt]

There certainly does seem to be a conspiracy to undermine marriage. Thanks for helping to undermine the conpirators.

[harry b.]

I followed the link you posted at CT, and have been looking around, and find this very interesting. You're wrong about the 5% -- on your calculation its 5% of marriages per year ending, but the 1000 marriages have accumulated over many years. 50% may be an overestimation, but not by much, I'm afraid (speaking as a pro-marriage secular leftist liberal).

There's different, sort-of-good news, though, which is that lots of people divorce several times. Not good news for them, of course, but it means that the 50% of marriages end in divorce does not imply that 50% of married people get divorced. My guess is that only 30-40% of married people get divorced, many of them more than once.
Still too many, sure.

[David]

Harry B - thanks for commenting. I think I want to stick to my guns on this a little more but I am interested in interacting with you on this. Oh, btw - the 5% was my number using my example in a hypothetical situation. The number that one of the experts mentioned was more like 10% - 11%. Still, even if it was wrong I would argue that if you look at the statistsics of marriage from, say the 30's and 40's on then probably until the divorce boom of what, the 60's or 70's, the vast, vast majority of marriages stayed together. Before the liberalization of divorce laws how many people got divorced? I don't know, maybe 5%, maybe 10%. So, up until the divorce boom we had a baseline of millions of existing happy marriages. However, what would be interesting would be to find a way to examine stats from say the 70's on. Maybe then it would get a little closer to the 40-50% figure.
Thanks for identifying yourself as a secular leftist liberal. As you can see from looking around my blog I'm an evangelical speaking to mostly evangelicals. We need more folks like you from outside the community piping in.

[Bob Sacamento]

The "First Things" journal had a comment on this a year or so ago. No time to look it up, sorry. But the upshot was that back in about 1973 or so, someone came up with numbers very similar to what you described and proclaimed, "Oh no! 50% of all marriages end in divorce!" This was an unwarranted conclusion, as you noted. Even worse, thirty years later, we still make the same proclamation based on those numbers from the mid-seventies. Another problem with most of these statistics is that they don't distinguish between first marriages and seconds, thirds, etc. The overwhelming majority of first marriages seem to still be successful. Second marriages and so on are not nearly as stable, and divorces from these marriages are skewing the statistics.

[harry b]

Thanks David for being so welcome. I have this horror that on the internet people listen to only peope they agree with, to the detriment of all... You might want to look at some of my posts on CT in which I suggest the secular left has something to learn from the deeply religious. Anyway, I'll make your site one of my regulars.

On marriage: I looked this up, and from what I can find the reporting is chaotic, because the Feds expect the National Institutes for Health to get the stats, but the NIH (wrongly) doesn't regard marraige and divorce as good health indiciators; the States are responsible for reporting the data, but they have to collect it from Counties, who do all the registering. Both Barbara Defoe Whitehead (in The Divorce Culture) and Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher (in The Case for Marriage) cite sociologists and economists who reckon the divorce rate at something like 50%. The divorce rate is this: the rate at which existing marriages end in divorce. It is true that in your example only 5% of existing marriages end in divorce in that year. But assume a dynamic model -- at which 100 marriages are contracted and 50 divorces settled every year for the next 20 years. Then 20 years later we have 3000 marriages (the 1000 initial marriages plus the 2000 that have been contracted) and 1000 divorces. That is 33%. Continue for another 40 years and we're up to close to 50%.

The authors I referred to all discuss data about divorce that is quite interesting. They interpret the scholarly evidence on divorce as follows. About 30% of divorces are dissolutions of marriages that are genuinely bad, by which they mean, sufifciently bad that any *children* in the marriage are, all-things-considered, better off out of it. But, they think, the other 2/3rds of divorces occur in marriages which are just going through a bad patch, and everyone, including the spouses, would be better off long term if they didn't divorce. There's lots of fancy footwork explaining all this, but their argument is pretty convincing. They also argue that the massive rise in divorce is a response not only to cultural, but also legal, changes.

Anyway, that's more than you probably needed to know. I highly recommend both books, incidentally; full of evidence about marriage and divorce, and good arguments for a more pro-marriage public policy.

[harry b]

I meant, of course, for being so welcoming!

[Russ]

I think you can be Chestertonian and suspect there's a conspiracy to underminde marriage (so long as you laugh at how ridiculous the conspiracy is). TV and movie writers revel in sending the message that any seemingly happy family must have some horrible dark secret and hidden misery.

[Chad McGrew]

Sorry. But if stats show that 1/2 as many people divorce this year as marry the existing number of divorces is irrelevant to the divorce rate. All the 50% rate assures is that the number of existing will remain static whether there are 1000 or 1,000,000, the number will remain the same. If the rate goes below 50% the number of existing marriages will increase. If the rate goes above 50% the number of existing marriages will decrease. But the divorce rate is rated against the same number of marriages in the same time frame.