The divorce rate has been falling since the 1970s, but we don’t want it too low
Younger generations are making more lasting choices
We often think of social change as moving in one direction over time. Sometimes it does, in a big way: The world’s population has always been growing, and longevity is increasing, as is wealth. The divorce rate, however, seems to be quite a bit more complicated.
The popular assumption about divorce is that it’s increasing over time. This perception is cemented by the marriage promotion programs aimed at lowering the divorce rate and getting couples who have children together to get married. These programs have been directed at low-income people in particular, with the federal government spending about $1 billion on marriage promotion since 2000. Like crime rates, we see rising divorce rates as an ill connected to our ever-modernizing society, one that must be overcome.
Yet Americans getting married in their late 20s probably have a less than 50 percent chance of getting divorced, and that downward trend will likely continue. Rather than a conservative turn toward family values, I think this represents an improving quality of marriages. When marriage is voluntary — when people really choose to get married instead of simply marching into it under pressure to conform — they make better choices.
There is some truth to the notion that divorce is more common than it was 75 years ago. Looked at from a slightly different angle, though, the data tells a very different story about the state of American coupling. Over the past three decades, the divorce rate has actually declined.
Overall, the long-term trend in divorce has been upward since the U.S. started collecting data on marriage. The uptick hasn’t been consistent, though. A huge spike in divorce followed the soldiers returning home at the end of World War II. Divorce rates also increased steeply in the 1960s and 1970s, following the growth of the women’s movement and no-fault divorce laws.
And to complicate an already complex picture, there is a decade of missing divorce data. Six states stopped reporting on divorce to the National Center for Health Statistics between 1998 and 2007 — though it’s unclear why — and with about 20 percent of the population missing from the sample, the resulting statistics weren’t especially reliable. The Census Bureau does do a giant sample survey, the American Community Survey, which gives us great data on divorce patterns, but they only started collecting that information in 2008.
Still, it is clear that since 1979, a higher rate of couples have decided to stay married. There is a real decline in divorce and it’s concentrated among young people. Their chances of divorcing have fallen over the last decade.
In my own analysis of the data, I’ve estimated that 53 percent of marriages end in divorce. That number is skewed, in complicated ways, by older people. Their rates of divorce have doubled over the past two decades.
Many of the people getting married today are more privileged than they used to be: more highly educated (both partners), and socially and economically stable, all of which bodes well for the survival of their marriages (even if it means more inequality in society).
That said, we should ask whether falling divorce rates are always a good thing. Most people getting married would like to think they’ll stay together for the long haul, but what is the right amount of divorce for a society to have?
It seems like an odd question, but divorce really isn’t like crime. Less crime is inarguably good, but we do want some divorces. Otherwise it means people are stuck in bad marriages. If you have no divorce that means even abusive marriages can’t break up. If you have a moderate amount, it means pretty bad marriages can break up but people don’t treat it lightly.
When you put it that way, moderate sounds best. Even as we shouldn’t assume families are always falling apart more than they used to, we should consider the pros and cons of divorce, rather than insisting less is always better.
