Shaunti and Jeff point out the 50 percent figure came from projections of what researchers thought the divorce rate would become as they watched the divorce numbers rising in the 1970s and early 1980s when states around the nation were passing no-fault divorce laws.
"But the divorce rate has been dropping," Feldhahn said. "We've never hit those numbers. We've never gotten close."
Maybe this is just paranoid thinking on my part...
BUT, could it be possible that the 50% Divorce Rate Figure has been planted into our media and popular culture by those who want to discredit marriage and family?
Why else would we be fed such a lie?
And, when arguing for “Same Sex Marriage”, its proponents OFTEN cite this figure to justify their own position.
The 50% figure has been bandied about for at least as long as the push for the destruction of the Traditional Family has.
Has anyone else thought of this?
This fact doesn’t fot the progressive agenda ergo it can’t be true. The MSM now calls marriage “civil unions” so homos can say they’re “married” to make it “official”. Marriage between a man and a woman is so old school and outdated you know...
Actually, the research was out there to suggest all along that 50% was way on the high side. Extrapolating from different data, my own personal conclusion was that about a third of marriages putatively end in divorce. I’m happy to see that it’s lower still.
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard that first marriages last 75% of the time. And the 25% who get divorced and remarried tend to get divorced again and mess up the overall statistics.
I wish they included some of the raw numbers in this article though.
Another point to consider is that the researchers appear to be looking only at first marriages. The divorce rate for people who have multiple “marriages” is likely higher.
In my own family, between my wife’s and my siblings, there are a total of nine siblings, 13 marriages, and five divorces. That’s a divorce rate of nearly 40%. But among the nine siblings, there are only two persons who have been divorced at all. That’s 22%. Of eight first marriages, there were two that ended in divorce. That’s 25%.
Medved has been harping on this for decades. It is one of those pop-culture parroted myths.
Another liberal myth being shattered ??
This is such wonderful news, I wonder if anyone besides a few here at FR will hear about it. I would love for the MSM to pick this up, but really doubt that they will, because it doesn’t fit in with the left’s agenda of destroying families.
There are roughly 2.2 million marriages every year.
There are roughly 1.1 million divorces every year.
That is how they come up with the statistic of 50% of marriages end in divorce.
But to find out the RATE of divorce, you need to put the number of divorces over the total number of marriages that exist in the country.
If there are fifty million marriages that exist in America, then that is 1.1 million divorces over 50,000,000 marriages, or a rate of 2.2% that end in divorce in a given year.
I am using WAG estimates to prove a mathematical point, as government statistics do not include all states, every year, for divorce and marriage.
The rate of divorce in a given year is nowhere near 50% or even 25%.
This isn’t really news. The ‘1 in 2 marriages end in divorce’ has never been true, despite being repeated on tv and other media frequently.
I don’t know about others, but I’m 43 and have been married for 22 years. My Depression-Era, Christian grandparents who raised me were married for 60 years. They taught me that life and marriage can be hard and that when you’re going through hell, you cry out to God and push on, because a) you said you would and b) the end result is so worth it.
The numbers I have seen are:
85% of people who get married stay married.
15% of people who get married have three or more spouses in their lifetime.
The math just about matches that 50% divorce rate lie that has become so common.
The above number as well as the author’s numbers match my own experience over 60 years or so.
We’ve been lied to for a century. The question is can we turn it around? The government school system continues to indoctrinate our children. That’s the key.
bookmark
A bigger problem is young people deciding to cohabitate without the benefit of marriage in the first place.
Strangely much of this is driven by young women, using pretzel logic that if they never get married, they’ll never know the pain of divorce.
Though they might know the pain of their baby daddy picking up and running off with a younger woman, leaving them high and dry.
In modern times, the statistic is bound to improve even more, because, I suspect, those more likely to divorce are less likely to marry in the first place (since no-commitment shacking up is the cultural norm now).
My experience has also told me the often quoted 50% number was bogus. My guess was always that those who divorce and remarry over and over skew the numbers, but it turned out the numbers were completely bogus to begin with.
During the Reagan administration a guy by the name of Mitch Snyder claimed that there were three million homeless people in the U.S. and the press ran with it for years. Turns out he made it up.
There’s a problem here.
“First-time marriages: probably 20 to 25 percent have ended in divorce on average.”
That just counts first-time marriages. There is no reference to them for them rest of the article, so is it *only* about first-time marriages?
If you count multiple marriages, the statistics get really skewed. Take Mickey Rooney, for example. Married eight times. His first, second, and third wife were also married three times; number four was married twice; number five just once; six and seven unknown; and eight twice.
So nine people with at least 16 unique marriages between them.