Or do they?
Nationwide, about half of all marriages end in divorce.
via Movement under way in California to ban divorce – Yahoo! News.
I’m really sick of hearing this “fact” being passed around. Fortunately the AP article cited a source for this data so that I can attack the reporter’s stupidity:
* Number of marriages: 2,162,000
* Marriage rate: 7.1 per 1,000 total population
* Divorce rate: 3.5 per 1,000 population (44 reporting States and D.C.)
Source: Births, Marriages, Divorces, and Deaths: Provisional Data for 2008, table A
So, let’s see… 3.5 divided by 7.1 gets you 49%! Half of all marriages end in divorce.
Let’s try that with some other numbers:
- Number of births: 4,265,555
- Number of deaths: 2,426,264
2.4 divided by 4.3 gets you 56%! Over half of all births end in death.
Of course, the reality is that 100% of all births end in death, and there’s no simple statistic you could calculate for divorce.
Here are some descriptive statistics that you could try to get:
- For all marriages that occurred in 1980, what percentage were still intact, ended in death, or ended in divorce in 2005?
- For all people who died in 2000, what percentage were ever married and what percentage were ever divorced?
- For all divorces that occurred in 1995, what were the mean and decile number of months/years the marriages lasted?
But what does any of this mean for your marriage? Probably nothing.
I’d be interested in seeing the mean number of divorces for each person who’s had a divorce, which I think might shift the narrative from “Half of all marriages end in divorce!” to “Wow, some people just really should not get married at all.”
Like Elizabeth Taylor?