D-I-V-O-R-C-E
This isn’t something we often talk about here at Manolo for the Brides. After all, the point of this blog is to help blushing (and not so blushing) brides plan their weddings through budget tips, inspiring pics of pretty things, and general ‘woo hoo, weddings!’ cheerleading.
The fact is, however, that divorce is how a heck of a lot of marriages end. The common wisdom is that half of all marriages end in divorce. The good news, according to this article at The Daily Beast, is that the statistic is now closer to a 40% chance of divorce.
The article goes on to note fifteen things that can make a divorce more likely in your relationship. Some are not terribly surprising, such as how often you argue about money or if one of you smokes and the other doesn’t. Some are more surprising, such as whether you have a son or a daughter (parents of boys are less likely to break up, it seems).
There’s even a link to the handy, dandy Divorce 360 Marriage Calculator which allows you to check the statistical likelihood of your getting divorced. Of course it doesn’t include information from both partners, and the information for the person filling out the form is pretty darn generalized, but still, there it is.
According to the Marriage Calculator, a woman of my educational level who married around the same time I did and at a similar age has roughly a 28% chance of having divorced. That leaves me with a 72% chance of still being married. I’m statistically solid, as it turns out.
But there’s a lot more to life and marriage than statistics. Let me tell you about my paternal grandparents.
On paper, they were the poster children for an early, acrimonious divorce. She was tall, he was short. It was a May/December romance. In fact, my grandfather was a year older than his mother-in-law! Granny lived with her parents in pretty much one place before she married, Mac had emigrated from Canada at a very early age and traveled all over the US and beyond. My grandfather was a gourmand, Granny was a lousy cook. He had a chaotic sense of humor and adored the Marx Brothers and WC Fields. She had no sense of humor. He was a dapper flirt. She felt that clothes were God’s way of telling us to cover up and behave ourselves. She graduated high school and went on to teaching college, eventually becoming a teacher herself. He was a self-taught man with no degrees. He loved to read history books, technical manuals on engineering, Mark Twain, and especially Zane Grey. The only things my grandmother read were the Bible and Agatha Christie mysteries. By every possible statistic, these two should have been on their way to divorce court before they got back from the Honeymoon.
And yet, they delighted in one another for forty-some years. One night my grandfather went to sleep and just didn’t wake up again. He was 94 and still in love with Granny.
i got 3% of already being divorced and 15% chance in the next 5 years. and i was young and already have kids!
I love the story about your paternal grandparents! I can only guess at all the different reasons why so many marriages end in divorce whether the couple has been together for 3 months or 25 years. But it is a reality.
Very true, Gina. It’s really something of a crap shoot. On the other hand, as my grandparents illustrate, sometimes the people who don’t seem like they could possibly work out really, really do. Ultimately statistics are interesting, but not destiny.
You might take a look at the article quoted in this blog post. It’s on a book called The Science of Marriage, and what the author has to say about those statistics is interesting, as is the blogger’s take. http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/05/19/modern-marriage/
Twistie, the reason why the divorce rate has decreased is because of the economic recession. Typically, the divorce rate goes down during times of economic hardship because few couples can afford to get divorced.
Actually, Christine, the reasons for the decline in the divorce rate can’t be that simple. The study on which the Daily Beast article was based looked at data only through 2007, which means it doesn’t cover the bursting of the housing bubble and consequent economic woes. It also doesn’t show a sudden, precipitous drop in divorce rates, but rather an unsteady yet ongoing decline over the course of some twenty years and change since the all-time high in the mid 1980s.
Had the divorce rate plummeted ten per cent in a year or two, then, yes, you’d probably be onto something. It’s just that isn’t what happened.
Why did it happen? That is unknown, I don’t know. My guess, though, is that it’s a complex range of factors interwoven over a long period of time.
Hmm, do I want to calculate my odds of divorce? I’m not so sure
Okay, I sucked it up… apparently if you base my likelihood on others, I’m at 1% and 5%. But that doesn’t take into account the fact that both my parents and The Beard’s parents had multiple marriages and divorces under their belts. I’m talking a lot of marriages and a lot of divorces! The statistics of divorce are really fascinating, though, since it’s not just a straight-up percentage for everyone married. It’s a lot more complicated than the media wants to portray it!
My maternal great-grandmother was divorced. My maternal grandmother was widowed (first husband) and then divorced (2nd husband). My mother was annulled once, divorced twice; my father was divorced 3 times (currently remarried to his second wife). In my parents’ generation every person who was married has been divorced at least once. In my generation, none of my cousins got married, my sister is divorced, and I am divorced (currently married to my second husband, very happy at 11 years of marriage).
Don’t worry, my family alone brings the average up considerably.
@Kai Jones: Your family and mine balance each other out. In my family, as far back as I know, there has been just one divorce. One of my cousins (my mother’s sister’s daughter, to be exact) has been divorced. She’s been happily ensconced with hubby number two for some fifteen years now with no sign of trouble. One of my three brothers has never married, though he came close once. Everybody else stayed married, and my grandmother was widowed twice. So was my maternal grandfather.
We seem to be of the school that considers slaughter before divorce. Again, though, that has remained a fantasy rather than a reality in every case I know. Not one person on either side of the family has ever been convicted of murder. And that includes my long-ago ancestor who was booted from Scotland after the Forty-Five despite the fact that there was no evidence to tie him to any action taken against the Crown or in favor of Bonnie Prince Charlie. Thirty years later, there is absolutely no evidence of any kind that he took any part in the American Revolution on either side.
We are a strangely peaceful strain of Scots.
i got 3% of already being divorced and 15% chance in the next 5 years. and i was young and already have kids!