Americans Actually More Happily Married
In the New York Times, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, assistant professors of business and public policy at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote that recent reports about marital breakups are “divorced from reality.”
They assert that statistics showing that couples married in the later 1970s are more likely than not to be divorced 25 years later are faulty. They claim the divorce rate has fallen continuously over the past quarter-century and is at its lowest level since 1970.
According to the assistant professors, marriage rates have fallen, but marriages are more stable than in the past. More couples, married in the 1990s, are likely to see their tenth anniversary than couples who married in the 1980s, who were more likely to be together after ten years than those who married in the 1970s.
The Census Bureau reported that more than half of marriages occurring between 1975 and 1979 had not seen their 25th anniversary. Stevenson and Wolfers point out the Bureau conducted its study in mid-2004, and at that time, it had not been 25 years since the wedding day of 1 in 10 of the couples surveyed. Those married in the last half of 1979 could not possibly have been married 25 years, yet. They say if the study had been conducted six months later, it would have found that a majority of couples married in late 1979 had made it to through their 25th year. Including all of the marriages in 1979, about 53 percent of those married between 1975 and 1979 had celebrated their silver wedding anniversary.
Divorces peaked at 22.8 per 1,000 marriages in 1979 and have fallen by 2005 to only 16.7 per 1,000.
