Monica Hesse writes in the Washington Post today about a crop of new books on marriage and divorce:
All of these treatises about divorce are really, no surprise, about marriage. Who benefits from it? Who carries it? Who gets to be the show pony and who has to be the workhorse? What should we make of the statistic that Lenz offers us, that 70 percent of divorces are initiated by wives, while their husbands seem shocked to realize that things aren’t actually fine? She cites research and anecdotes pointing to the conundrum of modern marriages: Wives may have entered the workforce, but husbands still haven’t entered the kitchen to pick up the slack. Can marriage be saved?
Earlier, Hesse pondered whether she was "the only female essayist in America who was not either getting or considering a divorce." Interesting! Of course, one thing she could have done is 60 seconds of googling:
About 1.5% of marriages end in divorce every year. This has dropped steadily since 1979 and is now a bit lower than it was 50 years ago. Admittedly this says nothing about divorce specifically among American female essayists, but it certainly suggests it's probably fairly low.
This data comes from the National Center for Family and Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University, which also provides a geographical breakdown. I know you're curious, so here it is:
Marriages are most fragile in the Bible Belt, which explains why they're the ones most concerned about the breakdown of the family. They see it and live it every day.
POSTSCRIPT: Marriage rates have dropped substantially since the '70s, which probably explains part of the low divorce rate. When people get married only if they really want to, they're less likely to eventually get divorced.
Um, even I, reflexive partisan that I am, find myself surprised at how closely divorce rates parallel Redness, politically speaking. I mean ... yikes!
At least per-capita homicide rates are a little less closely correlated.
Good thing they're all good Christians!
Divorce, baby-murdering IVF, suicides...
Living the christian dream!
👍👍👍👍👍
It looks like the top-quartile outliers on this map really are Georgia, Delaware, and maybe Indiana on the guess that they're higher in per capita and household income and probably more diverse than most of the others (but not Oklahoma and NM?). This map really makes me wonder what divorce rates would look like if broken down by religion and race. And if there was a usable way to quantify social pressures toward marriage.
"They see it and live it every day" in the Bible Belt, indeed. Interesting observation.
There also tends to be a big college/non-college split IIRC, with college-educated couples being much less likely to divorce compared to non-college folks, who are both more likely to be single parents and more likely to have unstable marriages that end in divorce.
Yes. This is an artifact of increasing education attaiment (though that has mostly peaked) and (more importantly) the fact that persons of lower SES are less likely to get married in the first place. It's not lefty seculars who are shacking up. Our affluent upper middle classes are thorougly bourgeois in lifestyle. Rather, it's the poor and/or less well-educated.
In other words, divorce has declined because marriage has declined among those Americans most likely to get divorced.
I wonder how much of the education split is caused by education as such, and how much of it is a product of delaying marriage to a later age in order to spend some years in college, and how much is merely a selection effect since people how go to college tend to be smarter and more conscientious than those who don't.
Q. Why is divorce so expensive?
A. Because it's worth it.
As usual, rather large percentage of journalist and essayist articles may be summarised as "journalist / essayist over-generalises without foundation in data from their own personal experience and/or contact circles, to make observations of dubious broad applicability due to data innumeracy."
I think you've nailed it.
As always, Louch, why are you here?
For the negative attention, of course.
Re the bible belt, it is not just education. There is social pressure to get married at a young age. I know that if I had married at 19 that I would have gotten divorced. I was just too immature but this is common among southerners. I bet if you correlated the average of marriage vs. divorce rate within 10 years that it would be pretty tight.
Yes. I came here to make the same point, but you beat me to it. It would be interesting to compare this map to a state-by-state map showing mean or median age at first marriage.
I lived in the south (Louisiana, Tennessee, Florida, Georgia in order of decreasing tenure) for nearly 13 years. While I don’t have anything but anecdata, my observation was that the Southern Baptists provided a very sound basis for divorce. As one person commented, the pressure to marry young was part of it, but also the intense disapproval of sex outside of marriage. So, as I mostly worked in higher education, I knew a lot of college-age people who would get married in order to have a bunch of sex, maybe a child or two, and then get divorced once the romance wore off. You can, of course, observe this behavior anywhere, but the volume of it I saw in the South seemed quite remarkable in comparison to the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern states where I’ve lived.
Aside from the correlations mentioned above, there is also a trend to favor "traditional" marriage in which the wife is subordinate to the husband, is expected to stay at home with kids doing all of the cooking, child care and housework and has little say in decision-making. This would explain why it is women who mostly initiate divorces. To put up with all of that and then find that a husband has cheated or cannot hold a job, or drinks and abuses the family, would be a last straw for a wife who has put up with the rest of traditional wifehood.
Yeah, the question I had based on the article wasn’t “are more people getting divorced” it was “is it true that more women are initiating divorces”. I don’t know if there are any statistics kept regarding that.
Here's my advice:
First, teach the first scientific principle in preschool. The first scientific principle is, just because you think you're right doesn't mean you're right.
Second, teach the second scientific principle in elementary school. The second scientific principle is, you use inductive reasoning to draw a conclusion, but you must use deductive reasoning to confirm or refute your conclusions.
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
Third, get grade seven student to teach adults the meaning of the word "science."
Forth, teach the scientific method to students in middle and high school.
Modify that to "You must use deductive reasoning to try to prove that you're wrong."
Emphasize proving yourself wrong, because that's the bit that goes against human nature.
If most people understood this simple idea, Trumpism would be a major force.
Exactly. It's about testing and being dubious when you're found right.
The patriarchy's control of the social system has weakened across the board in all things, from credit cards, to driving, to renting, the codification and enforcement of sexual harassment and rape, abortion and birth control, and the closing pay gap. In areas where the patriarchy keeps its foothold on the indoctrination of young women into submission in service of the Christofascist tradition of marriage and family, these same women, as they grow older, realize the fallacy of the patriarchy and discover the system that exists to support them as single mothers and women.
That's why CHIPS and all of the social services that Democrats push, including the ACA and Medicare expansion, are valuable. But it's also why the Conservative pushes back. The Conservative wishes to return to "family values", aka the patriarchy, IMHO.
Also, have you considered plotting the states by the divorce rate against the marriage rate?
* SCHIP not CHIPS
I think that you mean the "phallusy of the Patriarchy", don't you?
Ever since the Supreme Court struck down the Communications Decency Act and effectively legalized internet porn, both crime rates and divorce rates have dropped significantly.. And yet Republicans are currently having another moral panic over internet porn. It's time to defend porn as a societal good.
Well, it's possible that Internet porn lowers crime by giving hormonal young men a way to blow off steam, but it's also possible that Internet porn just so happened to arrive just as the cohorts who breathed leaded gas fumes as little children were aging out of crime and being replaced with cohorts who hadn't.
"About 1.5% of marriages end in divorce every year"
You mean, the people who blab about 50% of all marriages ending in divorce are wrong? Huh.
Careful, there. You're mixing up two very different bits of data. Marriages may end in divorce very quickly or they may endure for many years and still end in divorce.
nyt top of page has a poll asking whether biden/trump is too old to be an effective president
funny, but i haven't seen them do a poll asking whether biden/trump is too corrupt to be an effective president
or a poll asking if scotus is slow walking trump's cases to help him in the election
i guess that wouldn't be journalistically objective; it's only objective if the nyt adopts republican framing for their polls
I don’t even see why it’s a relevant question. They are both their party’s candidate. In any case, it seems clear that of the two Biden is sharpest mentally.
In the interest of controlling household spending and the inflationary pressures that nearly doubled the cost of reading the NYT (while whittling away what I could read -- no food, for instance -- I cancelled my subscription.
And not only do I not miss it, but from afar, I see how uselessly it's drifted into being not relevant to anything in a desperate bid to be fair and balanced.
i cancelled in 2016 after the nyt put all their effort into hillary's emails instead of digging into trump's corruption
they're in manhattan yet they had no contacts that could feed them information on trump? please.
Not to mention their latest challenge with facts.
“Screams Without Words” initially seemed like a searing and irreproachable indictment that settled this debate. But doubts soon emerged about the article, both on account of the unacknowledged biases of the reporters (in particular Anat Schwartz) and also the shaky nature of the evidence presented. Key sources for the article had a history of false claims. The family of one allegedly raped murder victim spoke out against the article, claiming it presented an impossible story. A fierce internal debate emerged inside the Times itself as reporters not part of the original team found it difficult to verify many of the claims of the article. The reporting behind the Times article has been questioned both by the Times podcast The Daily and The Intercept.
https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/new-york-times-intercept-hamas-rape/
"70 percent of divorces are initiated by wives, while their husbands seem shocked to realize that things aren’t actually fine"
I blame socialization for this. A lot of families socialize girls to hint at their discontent politely instead of saying it straight up, and then those girls grow up and get married to men who don't realize this, and misinterpret those polite hints as expressions of small disagreement when they are actually indicators of something much worse. So the problems don't get solved, and eventually the wife hits her breaking point and files for divorce, leaving the husband gobsmacked.
Moral of the story: socialize your kids to communicate clearly and tell the truth about how they feel. Indirect communication may feel gentler, but it creates too many misunderstandings and the cost isn't worth it.
Perhaps telling young girls that they clearly need to state to their partners, "get off your lazy a** and do some work around the house," will help. Or maybe men could just get off their lazy a**es and do some work without being told to.
much better if both parties pay close attention before marriage as to how clean their partner's living areas are, how much cooking they do for themselves, and how much credit card debt they carry
a sink overflowing with crusty dishes and a kitchen littered with unpaid bills and pizza boxes are red flags if you require a tidy home environment
and if you're expecting to raise kids with that as your baseline... hoo boy
"The divorce rate is lower because the marriage rate is lower"? Not if we are talking about the divorce rate among married people, as opposed to the general population.
Is the unmarried general population having more divorces these days? I did not know that. Thank you.
That depends on what percentage of the unmarried general population is married.
If you talk about divorce rates in the same breath as marriage rates, the figures have to apply to the same set of heads.
could the reason be they generally MORE stressed than other states?
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/03/top-10-states-with-the-most-stressed-out-people-in-america.html
Great news, less people are rushing into marriage (take your time), and those who do get married are divorcing less.
Interesting to note that the divorce rate ticked up right around the same time as the subprime mortgage crash, and went down during the beginning of Covid, different stressors at work in those otherwise stressful situations.