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.
While the folks on their 8th like Rooney are an outlier there is something to be said for how serial divorcers mess up the numbers. Almost everybody I know that has a divorce has more than one. That seems to be where the 40 somethings are on that front, they’re either on their first marriage or 3rd, maybe 4th. Who knows, those that live as long as Rooney might be on #8 by then. That just seems to be how the population is divided, there’s those that stay together, and those who wind up on a first name basis with divorce judges, there’s a very small group who apparently got it right the second time.
While the folks on their 8th like Rooney are an outlier there is something to be said for how serial divorcers mess up the numbers. Almost everybody I know that has a divorce has more than one. That seems to be where the 40 somethings are on that front, they’re either on their first marriage or 3rd, maybe 4th. Who knows, those that live as long as Rooney might be on #8 by then. That just seems to be how the population is divided, there’s those that stay together, and those who wind up on a first name basis with divorce judges, there’s a very small group who apparently got it right the second time.
Though Rooney is an extreme example, averaging ordinary divorces is what really fouls the stats.
Think of it like classroom test grades in which students can only get A’s or F’s. But if they get F’s, they can take the test over to try and get an A.
Only on the first try if half the students get A’s and half get F’s, does the class get 50%, a C average. This is how most people imagine the statistic, as just what happens in a discreet year.
But every time thereafter, anyone who makes an F in a retake lowers the class average against a *different student* who made an A.
So instead of thinking Mickey Rooney, with 8 marriages and 6 divorces, think of the vast number of people out there who have had 2 marriages and 2 divorces. In their case, the total of three people with two divorces makes the divorce rate 50% for 7 people.