Marriage and Divorce in Bite-Sized Chunks

A new article by the Wharton School's Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers provides a fascinating overview of marriage and divorce over the last several decades.

Did you know that working with people of the opposite sex increases the likelihood of divorce? What's happening to divorce rates? Here are some other interesting bits we dug out of the article "Marriage and Divorce: Changes and their Driving Forces."

Marriage:

• with more socially acceptable options (staying single, living together), less of the population is married (does that mean they're more selective or committed?).
• marriage is skewing old. in 2002, 31% of marriages included a bride over 35 years old. in the mid 1950s, the median age of a man at marriage was 23; now it's 27.
• the US has both the highest number of annual marriages per thousand people (7.4) and the highest number of divorces (3.6) (that 3.6 is the lowest since 1970).
• while most people who live together before marriage expect that they'll get married, only 25% were married five years later, and half were no longer together.

Divorce:

• while divorce rates saw a huge jump from 1965 - 1980, they have fallen since then, and have returned to where you'd expect them to be given a trend that's been headed upward since the 1880s.
• 10% of the adult population is currently divorced.
• researchers are unable to prove that people are better or worse off after a divorce. The same holds true for the impact on children -- while children of divorced parents are generally worse off than children from intact families, researchers can't show whether they would have been any better off if their parents had stayed together.
• after a divorce, 3/4 of college-educated men remarry, while only 2/3 of women do. That may be by choice -- their resources and skills would make it easier to stay single.

Miscellaneous:

• working with people of the opposite sex increases the likelihood of divorce.
• the happiest single people are the most likely to marry in the future.
• over one-third of those using online personals are currently married.

An abstract of the paper is here, and a pdf can be downloaded here.