True Divorce Statistics – How to Understand the Divorce Rate
Many have often heard a statistic that says something like “50% of all marriages end in divorce.” It’s a shocking and troubling statistic. The only problem is, it’s not really true. Here’s why: most divorce statistics measure the number of divorces against the number of marriages in any given year. The problem with this way of measuring is it doesn’t account for fewer overall marriages. In other words, the marriage rate in the U.S. is declining so it’s only logical that there would be more divorces from all the prior year marriages combined than there are total marriages for the current year. This flaw is discussed more fully here:
The second calculation, which compares the divorce rate to the marriage rate, is what leads to the oft-recited and misleading statistic that “1 in every 2 marriages end in divorce” in the United States. The main flaw in this way of looking at statistics is that the people who are getting divorced in a given year are not always the same as those who are getting married. Based on this method, if 8 people per every 1,000 are getting married in 2009 and 4 for every 1,000 are getting divorced, then the divorce rate is 50 percent.
The more accurate and insightful way of looking at divorce is to simply count the number of people who are divorced for a given number of people in a given area. Changes in this number will give a good indication of whether the divorce rate is increasing or decreasing.
While divorce is on the rise, it’s not necessarily true that 50% of all marriages end in divorce.
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