> ... the divorce rate as a ratio of divorces to the total number of married women. So, the divorce rate’s decline isn’t a reflection of a decline in marriages.
Cool that they ruled that out, that was my knee-jerk assumption.
> Young people get the credit for fewer divorces because boomers have continued to divorce at unusually high rates, all the way into their 60s and 70s.
Yeah everybody always skips right over Gen X ... The NYT covered divorce in a better article with a better graph four years ago[1].
The life lesson here is that the things Boomers say are going to happen to other generations are actually going to happen to them instead. They said we were all getting divorced but that was them not us. They said that video games were going to rot our brains but in reality it was them and Fox News, not us and Nintendo. And on and on.
I think a lot of that stuff wasn't things Boomers worried about so much as things Boomers' parents worried about. And they were right. And then the generation after looked at the results of that and decided to go nowhere near it.
Yep! it's funny - I've been feeling some disgust and resentment toward the behavior of my parents' generation for some time, and felt like I was kind of alone in that until I saw Bruce Gibney's recent book [and accompanying NPR interview on] 'Generation of Sociopaths,' which coherently makes it clear that, well, there are other folks who feel the same way.
I suspect there are a couple issues at play here. Boomers went through a social transition where women started into the workplace in ever greater numbers. They have had a higher divorce rate out of the chaos of that social contract change. Also, waiting for economic stability really can make people more stable emotionally - so simply waiting to get married seems like it can really help there.
This is kind-of painting with a broad brush here but the social change that the boomer's pushed hasn't been too kind to them. I have several women relatives who were taught by their mothers to stay home and be a good mother and wife (their words). So much so that when they got divorced, they didn't know what to do. They hadn't factored being a single parent into their life plans so they had to quickly and painfully learn things like how to manage finances.
I can't help but think that Gen X and Millenials saw/heard what their mothers and grandmothers went through and have chosen to educate themselves and secure their lives before getting married and having children.
I think you're spot on, but I think that parents of Millenials saw these changes as well and made sure to try to set up their children for a working life regardless of gender. There's still a stigma against stay at home dads though, so while traditionally male gender roles have become more open to women, traditionally female gender roles accepting of men have lagged a bit. It's definitely not a case where equality of opportunity has been reached, however there has been progress and we are still moving forward.
Depends on how they run the statistics. I assume marriages have different rates of divorce based on how old the people and the marriage is. So, a decline in new high risk marriages should influence the rate.
> So, the divorce rate’s decline isn’t a reflection of a decline in marriages.
Under some basic assumptions, this could still be.
E.g. if couples that have been married longer are more likely to stay married, lower new marriage rate would result in proportionally more old marriages and hence lower divorce rate.
E.g. if people are less willing to marry, more of those who marry would be marrying for a "good" reason (i.e. because they're more sure they're compatible, or because they follow a religion where divorce is bad).
If I'm not mistaking, the rub is almost a footnote at the very end of the article:
> They’re living together, and often raising kids together, but deciding not to tie the knot. And studies have shown these cohabiting relationships are less stable [0] than they used to be.
So in a way divorce rates are going up if you don't stick to the technical definition of a divorce as the end of a legal status and instead look at the breakup of family unit instead?
It seems part a word game because I doubt those looking at the statistics ever really cared much about marriages or divorces for what they represent on a purely legal level, but for their approximation of cohabitation and family status.
> ... the divorce rate as a ratio of divorces to the total number of married women. So, the divorce rate’s decline isn’t a reflection of a decline in marriages.
That doesn't seem right at all,
If the decline in marriages in marriages result in more at risk marriages not happening, this could absolutely be a reflection of a decline in marriages
I'd be interested to see what the rate is if they only counted first marriages.
Anecdotally, it seems many of my Boomer-aged relatives who got divorced ended up getting married again (and possibly divorced again). The idea that you must be married to live together is very ingrained in their value system.
In contrast, those of my friends in the Gen-X / millennial groups seem to be getting divorced in their first marriage at the same ratio as the older generation, but almost all of them do not especially want to get married again, even if they have found new relationships and even had more children.
In other words, is it possible that the serial divorcees of the boomers are skewing the statistics?
Outcome is still the same: There are fewer people getting divorced.
If the cause is that younger people are less likely to get divorced (which is what these stats are showing, even though that contradicts your anecdotal points) in their first marriage while older people keep getting married and divorced, there's still fewer overall divorces. If it's that younger people are once bitten twice shy as you suggest, then there are still fewer overall divorces.
getting married just to have sex is really a brain dead thing to do. Too much risk of horniness affecting the decision instead of it being just about knowing you found someone you expect to be able to spend your life with happily and without drama
Yeah since you’re far less likely to get divorced if you’ve never had sex before marriage. Everyone before 1960 was just a complete brain dead idiot and we can learn absolutely nothing at all from our idiot ancestors.
Source please on your claim that no sex before marriage leads to longer lasting marriages. That sounds like the kind of thing conservatives would make up without data to back themselves up. Also, even if it were true, longer lasting mariage doesn't mean happy marriage
Also I'm talking about nowadays, where people can have sex before marriage without having to become outcasts in their community or risk pregnancy (with protection. there is ofc still a risk, but it's much lower)
Getting married just to have sex when you could just have sex and then pick a partner when you really know them & not because you are horny seems like a wiser thing to do
yeah, this is possibly mostly a correlation with people being in religious groups were marriage is very frowned upon. you would expect that if sex before marriage is frowned upon, divorce is too
It's true. You can run the numbers on data from e.g. the NSFG. It's probably not causation but just a sign of religiosity (and hence unwillingness to divorce), though.
Sex before marriage was pretty common before. It just got covered up. There were a whole lot of extremely “premature” babies being somehow born at a healthy weight, but this only ever happened with a couple’s first child.
These days, pretty much the only people who never have sex before marriage are religious extremists. Those people also tend to believe that you can be tortured for eternity if you get a divorce, which probably reduces the incidence somewhat.
Nah, it's pretty much true, as someone from the bible belt even.
Hell, it was always true. The point of a diamond on the engagement ring was because it was assumed that you had kicked the tires on that part of the relationship, and the engagement fell through, then that woman had something she could sell as a nest egg for her new life as a forever alone spinster, being the 'broken woman' that she was.
As far as diamond engagement rings are concerned, it's about a century old tradition at this point, so four or five generations. That's a pretty long time for the purposes of this discussion.
And this comes form someone who didn't get their fiancée a diamond ring for various reasons.
Agreed to an extent. I posit they probably aren't 4/5 generations of actual traditional usage yet. Most folks great grandparents probably did not have diamond rings.
I should also have said this was more a side comment. I don't think it detracted from the overall point made earlier.
There are a ton of implications here that I don't buy. I could just as easily claim you are far less likely to get divorced if you aren't really given the option. Socioeconomic dependence being what it is.
By all means, though, keep your ideological superiority.
The only stats similar to this that I've seen was based on number of partners before marriage other than the one you married, in which case 0 had the lowest divorce rate. Waiting for marriage with the person you married was not measured nor reflected in the stats.
The last three paragraphs kind of throw cold water on the hopeful implications. Marriages are more stable because the working class is increasingly living in unstable, informal relationships.
Is that not a good thing, though? Especially for the working class, breaking up via an expensive divorce, after an expensive marriage, seems objectively worse than breaking up a lengthy partnership, for all involved.
I think his material point was that dealing with custody matters for never married parents is no more, or less, messy than dealing with custody for married parents. So what's the benefit drawn from being married?
I can tell you right now, if you go into a family court here in the US believing you will get more access to your children because you were married, you're liable to be disagreeably surprised. Whether married or unmarried, just protect your legal rights as best you can. And, no matter what happens, abide by the judgement of the court. Appeal later if you're upset.
There are significant custody-related benefits that accrue only during marriage, like for example being allowed to pick your children up from school, medical decisions, etc., that automatically flow to married fathers that don't flow to the unmarried fathers who don't have the proper paperwork on hand. (As with all things related to domestic laws, this is highly jurisdictional.)
Divorce proceedings offer protection to the lower-earning partner. But also a marriage usually means more pooled resources (which counts more if you don't have much) and a more stable environment in which to rear children.
Yes and no. It is rather unfortunate that splitting up costs so much.
But at the same time, these folks lose all of the protections and benefits that the legal framework of marriage gives. For example, health insurance coverage will not extend to your loved one without the legal framework for it to exist. You might have raised your partner's child since birth or not long after their father/mother passed on, but you'll have no legal right to them if something happens. Even something as simple as taking care of school business for the children gets muddy.
You, in general, will not get a say in their care during an emergency situation. Being low income also generally means you do not have the means to have such a legal paper put into place.
It also means that you do not get any sort of protection or help with breaking up. No one is going to step in to say that you have to share the apartment until you save up money or that one should be the one to move out, let alone help to make sure that each of you gets to keep a vehicle if they were both in one person's name.
Many poorer and less educated Americans are opting not to get married at all. They’re living together, and often raising kids together, but deciding not to tie the knot. And studies have shown these cohabiting relationships are less stable than they used to be.
I mean, people usually consider stability to be a good thing, especially when there are children involved.
Beyond that, legal marriage has benefits that (for lack of a better word) "pretend marriage" doesn't. Some examples include potentially lower taxes, employer benefits for spouses (such as insurance), spousal social security, spousal pension benefits (widows/widowers are often allowed to collect their spouse's pension for the rest of their life), no gift tax between spouses, Spousal IRAs, military benefits, automatic tax free inheritance, next of kin status (which matters if the spouse is incapacitated), lower insurance rates, spousal immunity in court, eligibility for FMLA to care for a sick spouse, eligibility for bereavement leave if a spouse dies, eligible to sponsor a spouse for immigration, etc.
Married couples have the "benefit" of going through divorce if they break up. Divorce proceedings allow a (hopefully) neutral third party to order legal division of marital assets. I've seen some incredibly messy non-marriage breakups, where going through divorce once would have been less messy.
There might simply also be a social component of marriage that cohabitation simply doesn't provide. If you are married you may work to stay together rather than just split up when you hit a roadblock. Whereas if you're just dating then you might just break up at the first roadblock rather than try to work things out. No data or anything, that's just my "gut feeling" on the matter, it just "seems" like that's the case. Of course it could just be the people who break up rather than work on issues are just not getting married.
> ... the divorce rate as a ratio of divorces to the total number of married women. So, the divorce rate’s decline isn’t a reflection of a decline in marriages.
It sure still can be. If people who would later divorce stopped getting married (for instance because it's more socially acceptable now to live together without marriage), causing a decline in marriages, divorce rate defined as a ratio of divorces to the total number of married women also gets lower.
Some people have interpreted this as evidence that millennials are more conservative than they seem, based on the idea that staying married is a conservative value. But I think it's just as easy to see this the other way: if staying married is a conservative value, then getting married in the first place surely is as well, and millennials seem less willing to do that unless they're confident it will work out.
in the United States, active marriages are plummeting overall.. in 2016 four-in-ten births were to women who were either solo mothers or living with a nonmarital partner; spanning demographics, geography, race and economics (excluding only the so-called one percent)
Is the institution of civil marriage still even needed? When a marriage is officially recorded with the county clerk that confers a set of legal benefits and obligations related to child custody, immigration, income taxes, healthcare decisions, etc. But in principle there's no reason those things have to be bundled together. It could all be handled with standardized legal contracts.
Even without civil marriage, people who wanted to could still have religious marriage ceremonies and anyone who wanted to could call themselves married. It just wouldn't have any force of law.
It costs somewhere between $20-$200 to get married. ($20-$50 to file the paperwork plus whatever the officiant chooses to charge ($0-$150(?) - mine charged $100). It costs more than that to hire a lawyer to create a series of legal contracts.
If you want to make it "file one series of standard contracts together which are stored at the courthouse" then you're just back to civil marriage.
75 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] threadCool that they ruled that out, that was my knee-jerk assumption.
> Young people get the credit for fewer divorces because boomers have continued to divorce at unusually high rates, all the way into their 60s and 70s.
The life lesson here is that the things Boomers say are going to happen to other generations are actually going to happen to them instead. They said we were all getting divorced but that was them not us. They said that video games were going to rot our brains but in reality it was them and Fox News, not us and Nintendo. And on and on.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/upshot/the-divorce-surge-...
and MSNBC, CNN, the NYT, and on and on.
I can't help but think that Gen X and Millenials saw/heard what their mothers and grandmothers went through and have chosen to educate themselves and secure their lives before getting married and having children.
Under some basic assumptions, this could still be.
E.g. if couples that have been married longer are more likely to stay married, lower new marriage rate would result in proportionally more old marriages and hence lower divorce rate.
E.g. if people are less willing to marry, more of those who marry would be marrying for a "good" reason (i.e. because they're more sure they're compatible, or because they follow a religion where divorce is bad).
> They’re living together, and often raising kids together, but deciding not to tie the knot. And studies have shown these cohabiting relationships are less stable [0] than they used to be.
[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4712741/
It seems part a word game because I doubt those looking at the statistics ever really cared much about marriages or divorces for what they represent on a purely legal level, but for their approximation of cohabitation and family status.
That doesn't seem right at all,
If the decline in marriages in marriages result in more at risk marriages not happening, this could absolutely be a reflection of a decline in marriages
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18068003
Anecdotally, it seems many of my Boomer-aged relatives who got divorced ended up getting married again (and possibly divorced again). The idea that you must be married to live together is very ingrained in their value system.
In contrast, those of my friends in the Gen-X / millennial groups seem to be getting divorced in their first marriage at the same ratio as the older generation, but almost all of them do not especially want to get married again, even if they have found new relationships and even had more children.
In other words, is it possible that the serial divorcees of the boomers are skewing the statistics?
If the cause is that younger people are less likely to get divorced (which is what these stats are showing, even though that contradicts your anecdotal points) in their first marriage while older people keep getting married and divorced, there's still fewer overall divorces. If it's that younger people are once bitten twice shy as you suggest, then there are still fewer overall divorces.
>Pregnant shotgun weddings
>Knew the person for a few months, moved to stay with them in another state, married and pregnant within 1 year.
>Military marriages
I imagine these were worse in previous generations. Sex outside of marriage more taboo.
I think culturally its become more taboo to get married just to have sex than to live together before marriage.
Also I'm talking about nowadays, where people can have sex before marriage without having to become outcasts in their community or risk pregnancy (with protection. there is ofc still a risk, but it's much lower)
Getting married just to have sex when you could just have sex and then pick a partner when you really know them & not because you are horny seems like a wiser thing to do
https://ifstudies.org/blog/counterintuitive-trends-in-the-li...
Which uses data from the CDC NSFG.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/nsfg_cycle6.htm
These days, pretty much the only people who never have sex before marriage are religious extremists. Those people also tend to believe that you can be tortured for eternity if you get a divorce, which probably reduces the incidence somewhat.
That's an incredibly ignorant and inflammatory thing to say.
Hell, it was always true. The point of a diamond on the engagement ring was because it was assumed that you had kicked the tires on that part of the relationship, and the engagement fell through, then that woman had something she could sell as a nest egg for her new life as a forever alone spinster, being the 'broken woman' that she was.
As far as diamond engagement rings are concerned, it's about a century old tradition at this point, so four or five generations. That's a pretty long time for the purposes of this discussion.
And this comes form someone who didn't get their fiancée a diamond ring for various reasons.
I should also have said this was more a side comment. I don't think it detracted from the overall point made earlier.
By all means, though, keep your ideological superiority.
I can tell you right now, if you go into a family court here in the US believing you will get more access to your children because you were married, you're liable to be disagreeably surprised. Whether married or unmarried, just protect your legal rights as best you can. And, no matter what happens, abide by the judgement of the court. Appeal later if you're upset.
Are you suggesting that marriages cause overeating? ;)
But at the same time, these folks lose all of the protections and benefits that the legal framework of marriage gives. For example, health insurance coverage will not extend to your loved one without the legal framework for it to exist. You might have raised your partner's child since birth or not long after their father/mother passed on, but you'll have no legal right to them if something happens. Even something as simple as taking care of school business for the children gets muddy.
You, in general, will not get a say in their care during an emergency situation. Being low income also generally means you do not have the means to have such a legal paper put into place.
It also means that you do not get any sort of protection or help with breaking up. No one is going to step in to say that you have to share the apartment until you save up money or that one should be the one to move out, let alone help to make sure that each of you gets to keep a vehicle if they were both in one person's name.
Many poorer and less educated Americans are opting not to get married at all. They’re living together, and often raising kids together, but deciding not to tie the knot. And studies have shown these cohabiting relationships are less stable than they used to be.
EDIT: worth noting that I’m not sure who downvoted him, but I have him a vote to try and counter it
Beyond that, legal marriage has benefits that (for lack of a better word) "pretend marriage" doesn't. Some examples include potentially lower taxes, employer benefits for spouses (such as insurance), spousal social security, spousal pension benefits (widows/widowers are often allowed to collect their spouse's pension for the rest of their life), no gift tax between spouses, Spousal IRAs, military benefits, automatic tax free inheritance, next of kin status (which matters if the spouse is incapacitated), lower insurance rates, spousal immunity in court, eligibility for FMLA to care for a sick spouse, eligibility for bereavement leave if a spouse dies, eligible to sponsor a spouse for immigration, etc.
Married couples have the "benefit" of going through divorce if they break up. Divorce proceedings allow a (hopefully) neutral third party to order legal division of marital assets. I've seen some incredibly messy non-marriage breakups, where going through divorce once would have been less messy.
There might simply also be a social component of marriage that cohabitation simply doesn't provide. If you are married you may work to stay together rather than just split up when you hit a roadblock. Whereas if you're just dating then you might just break up at the first roadblock rather than try to work things out. No data or anything, that's just my "gut feeling" on the matter, it just "seems" like that's the case. Of course it could just be the people who break up rather than work on issues are just not getting married.
Source: Pew Research on Marriage and Children
Even without civil marriage, people who wanted to could still have religious marriage ceremonies and anyone who wanted to could call themselves married. It just wouldn't have any force of law.
If you want to make it "file one series of standard contracts together which are stored at the courthouse" then you're just back to civil marriage.
They dont have the money to divorce from what I read about their finances.