I don’t paint a rosy picture.
I don’t say the current divorce rate is good.
I say that if the divorce rate is 30% and the media keeps telling us that it is over 50%, then the media is lying to us, spreading propaganda, and trying to further undermine what health is left within American marriages.
That is all.
People don’t get married and divorced based upon statistics. While I understand your frustration about the 50% vs 30% thing - I assume it has to do with those people divorced multiple times figuring in; a statistical blunder only if the stat is reported at 50% of people not 50% of marriages. Clarification would be appreciated. It bears noting that there are some even scarier statistics bandied about in my world – as a parent to a special needs child – where the divorce rate is astronomical; around 75% or so. I’ve read it over and over again WRT parents of autistic kids or just parents of special needs kids.
Turns out, that statistic is wildly overstated as well, but it pops up in the media (and in the “community”) all the time. I have no idea what purpose it serves though. Honestly, I don’t.
I don’t think it’s an agenda, it’s just convenience. It would be nigh on impossible to calculate the true divorce rate. Every marriage would have to be individually tracked to truly arrive at an accurate number. The 50% divorce rate is calculated by subtracting the number of divorces granted in any given year from the number of marriages in that same year.
It’s obviously flawed, but not as flawed as some would think. Those who’ve been married 8 times like Mickey Rooney are simply too small in number to skew the statistic when calculated this way.
Rather than taking it as gospel that half of marriages end in divorce, or disputing the statistic entirely, we should simply glean from the down and dirty comparison of marriages and divorces in any given year, that we do indeed have a problem.