Does the recent trend signal a long-term change or is it merely a hiccup ?
While divorce rates remain high in both the United States and United Kingdom, recent data point to a decline over the past decade in the frequency of divorce, especially among college-educated couples. Experts can’t seem to agree on the causes. If you search the internet to read about the trend, you’ll find a number of explanations, including speculation that it all might be accidental. Some of the given reasons will make at least intuitive sense to readers of The Good Men Project. Here are five:
1.) Men have become more serious about commitment
While this article from the Daily Mail implies that the failure of most marriages in the UK is the fault of the male, it also states that men are “…improving at keeping their wives happy.” Perhaps contemporary men have become wary of this assumption that the wellness of the marriage should depend wholly on the happiness of one partner. It seems they’re weighing the decision to get married much more carefully than they have in the past, taking time to settle on a like-minded partner. This leads to men who enter marriages with fewer jitters and a stronger belief in their long term commitment.
2.) The model of marriage has changed
Couples no longer enter marriage assuming that the wife and husband will play traditional roles, and so they look for different skills in a partner. Prior to and during the sexual revolution, women sought men with workforce “market skills” while men sought women with home-making skills. These skills did not translate well to the modern marriage. Now couples enter marriage feeling comfortable with the idea that both partners will work on some level while they also maintain the home, and both partners search for traits appropriate for this model. Apparently, we’re getting better at choosing partners and remain much more flexible about how we exist in married life.
3.) Couples are waiting longer to marry
As young people remain skeptical of the institution, they approach it later, often after finishing their studies, sometimes even after living with their partner for a few years to try things out and reaching some level of financial security. Another factor in this trend is that more jobs are requiring college degrees; college is also taking longer to finish. Women now actually outnumber men in college.
When both partners delay the move, for whatever reason, we can guess they enter marriage with greater maturity. In the college scene, men should have to grow in maturity if they want to compete for stable long-term partners even when women outnumber them.
4.) Couples skip marriage altogether
Cohabitation is on the rise, and so couples who might have contributed to the statistic have fallen out of the pool.
The reasons for cohabitation are curious. When both partners have the capacity to work and earn a decent salary, they’ll often perceive marriage as nothing more than a custom, often a useless one. Especially in the UK, where access to health care is less of a problem than in the US, rising numbers of young people see no need to get married. There is risk when those couples split, as many of them do; they are not protected by the same laws as married people. Still, this reality does not keep many couples from perceiving cohabitation as a better arrangement, even if they want children.
5.) Economic downturn
Divorce is expensive. Some argue that the drop in divorce rates simply shows that people have been waiting to recover from the recession before divorcing, and divorce lawyers report seeing a spike in business in the last year or two as access to credit finally increased. An editorial in Slate from early 2012 predicted a boom in divorce rates and, in terms of how it might affect the overall economy, applauded it.
Paradoxically, the downtrend may be an aberration caused by economic collapse. Of course, in the US, divorce rates are much lower among college educated couples than the rest of the population, and the most common reason for divorce, in the UK and US, is still money. In our times, some stressed couples were obviously only weathering bad times before they could afford the cost of divorce.
All these interesting notes aside, it is still troubling to look at contemporary discourse about marriage and find so many loaded assumptions, especially the one that a happy marriage depends exclusively on a happy wife, that wives should depend on husbands for happiness, and that husbands’ decisions should be based mostly on what makes the wife happy, even if that means personal dissatisfaction. These assumptions beg important questions. How many people are miserable in marriage but avoid divorce simply out of feelings of apathy, even depression, and just can’t be bothered to go through the steps, the perceived social embarrassments, etcetera?
Even if a regressing divorce rate is merely a temporary aberration linked to the stagnant economy, we should applaud the signs that young people are approaching the decision to marry with more care. Perhaps if we could make a permanent shift in our social consciousness to regard marriage not as an inevitable step for someone before their 30th birthday—and shame of you if you haven’t found a spouse by then!—we could save many people much grief. If the social pressure to get married is waning, this can only lead to more patient, practical and intelligent decisions, including the one not to get married in the first place if you don’t really want to.
Photo by dark4
I think cohabitation is definitely a contributing factor. Rather than marrying and divorcing later those who do not wish to get married don’t!
Get a more accurate view of the divorce rates and how the numbers are off. “A false conclusion in the 1970s that half of all first marriages ended in divorce was based on the simple but completely wrong analysis of the marriage and divorce rates per 1,000 people in the United States. A similar abuse of statistical analysis led to the conclusion that 60 percent of all second marriages ended in divorce”
http://psychcentral.com/lib/2012/the-myth-of-the-high-rate-of-divorce/all/1/
One way to lower the divorce rate is to hide the dissolution of a marriage in other categories so they don’t look like divorces, and that way we can feel better about the marriage rate. Our ancestors can show us the way in this regard. We should go back to the good old days of the nineteenth century, when the divorce rate was really low. It was low because it was really hard to get legally divorced, so there was not much choice in the matter. If you wanted to leave your wife, you just picked up stakes and moved… Read more »
Good column, but the reality is the divorce rate has been falling since the early 80s. All the factors you mention probably play a role in its continued decline, but it’s not a new phenomenon.
As for those saying it’s a result of fewer marriages …. um, irrelevant. It’s divorce rate, not raw numbers of divorces.
The point is that the divorce rate will obviously tend to fall when only the most committed are getting married in the first place (just as rates of religious commitment in churches will naturally rise as more nominal congregants leave).
What data are you examining that indicates “only the most committed are getting married in the first place?” You could, of course, be correct. But it seems speculative, at best, on your part, and I haven’t seen any data to support that. A more likely theory (IMO) that’s been suggested is based on the fact that the overall decline in the divorce rate is primarily a result of a decline among the better educated (the rate generally has been flat for less educated couples). Those couples are more capable of creating a stable environment – financial and otherwise – in… Read more »
The problem with your theory is that marriage rates have been on a downward slope for quite some time. That jibes with what he says. If what you were saying was true, we would be seeing an increase, because the same people would be getting married, but fewer of them would be getting a divorce. And women having a degree doesn’t significantly increase the likelihood of a stable family. We have seen a fairly static rate in over-all college attendance for a decade now. That means that for more women to to college in that time period, fewer men had… Read more »
@soullite I’m sorry, but you’re conflating issues here. Nobody is, or has, suggested that college educated people are more likely to get married than those without college degrees, just those those who do get married are more likely to stay married than their less educated peers. So, in reality, it has no impact on the marriage rate whatsoever. If his theory were correct – that the decline in divorce rate is primarily a result of “true believers” making up a larger share of the married population – one would expect to see similar divorce rate declines across the demographic spectrum… Read more »
Marriage is foudation on which the pillar of divorce stands. Since marriage rates are declining so is divorce rates. It is simple as that.
That was the first question that occurred to me–what’s going on with the marriage rate by comparison?
That doesn’t automatically follow all by itself. Fewer marriages would mean fewer divorces, but that’s just in absolute numbers, which is not the same as the rate of marriage or rate of divorce. I’d say it’s mostly a combination of #4 and #5. Couples who might have gotten married a generation ago and then gotten divorced are less likely to get married today in the first place. Perhaps those more able or willing to stay married are more likely to be the ones getting married today, and there are fewer non-committal people getting married compared to previous generations. I’d be… Read more »
More people are staying single, hence less reason to get a divorce.
Far fewer men (and by extension, women) are choosing to get married. Those that do get married are more serious about it than those who do not. I think this is one of the main reasons for a falling divorce rate.
People are more wise due to the Internet. Information Technology have answered questions Leaders lied about for years. Social Media is a quick method to discover truth from someone who is familiar with the subject through experience. Now, we define what is required as a US citizen and move forward. People can reason picking out the truth.
1. Women & men both have increased committment to “institution” of marriage!
Correction: The (much fewer) men and women who marry have increased commitment to marriage, not men and women in general.
When any institution loses its cultural dominance, it is typically the marginal cases and the least committed who drop out first. Less culturally dominant institutions are dominated by ‘true believers’ and don’t have so many nominal adherents (so increasingly high levels of religious commitment in the membership of a particular church tradition are just as likely – probably more likely – a product of decreasing numbers than they are of an upsurge of religious conviction). The high divorce rates of the past few decades resulted from the movement from one model of marriage to another, now that that movement has… Read more »
The economy is a more powerful force than I think we give credit for. It provides a sense of security to those who are independent earners, and forces others to stay together because they can’t afford to split up. When I lived in a city with ridiculous rents, the problem seemed to be worse, but it gets worse wherever people are broke. If women’s ability to earn is consistently fragile, it erodes their rights. Likewise, if men are the ones whose ability to earn crashes with every economic downturn, their rights within families are the ones that get worn away.