When I look at divorce statistics, I’m pleasantly surprised. From 1960s until about 1981 the divorce rate went up, but from 1981 to present the divorce rate has been slowly but steadily dropping.
I hear all the time that 50% of marriages will end in divorce. Maybe you have too. It’s just one of those things that people heard somewhere, fit in with their already established metanarrative about the social decline of American life, and henceforth believed wholeheartedly. But it’s not a fact out there in the world to be observed. It’s a projection. And projecting how many of today’s marriages will end in divorce is complicated.
A lot of what’s happening is that there are fewer marriages and therefore fewer divorces. So if the divorce rate falls, but the marriage rate falls by the same amount, the number of marriages that end in divorce should stay the same.
It seems conservative leaning folks who are the ones primarily concerned with what they think is an epidemic of divorce. That makes a lot of sense. For them at most a very small % of divorces are for good reasons – maybe for infidelity and maybe for abuse. For liberals however, a lot of the rising divorce rate could be a good thing. A lot of people who were miserable in the marriages left and found a better life for themselves. A lot of people who have changed or fallen out of love improved their lives greatly by getting a divorce.
The short conservative list of reasons for divorce are all reasons why divorce is permissible. The longer list of liberal reasons for divorce often include several reasons why divorce is the right thing to do.
Not to say that liberals consider a rising divorce rate ideal or even good in general. But there’s a lot more room from them for valid divorce in their worldview. So when I find that conservatives are the ones harping about the divorce epidemic, I’m not surprised.
But when it comes to interpreting the drop in marriages alongside the drop in divorce statistic, I think conservatives will spin it in a negative direction. “That the only (only?) reason divorce is becoming less frequent is because marriage is becoming less frequent”, but why is that a bad thing to a consistent conservative. Conservatives believe that if you get divorced, you shouldn’t have married in the first place. That’s what’s happening. “It is better to have married and divorced then to never have married at all”, is a claim very contrary to conservatism. If you can’t handle marriage, don’t get married.
There’s still plenty for the conservative to complain about. People likely aren’t getting married because moving in together before marriage is now a thing when before it wasn’t. But this is shifting to a completely different social issue in pursuit of something to complain about. If divorce is falling because marriage is falling, and marriage is falling because of rising rates of cohabitating couples, then people moving in together is a bad solution that solves a worse problem.
And that’s if cohabitating couples explains all of the fall in marriage rates. In reality, it only explains a portion, and the drop in marriage rates only explain a portion of the drop in divorce rates. When we start taking fractions of fractions things start getting very insignificant very quickly. There are lots of other reasons why both marriage and divorce rates would be going down. Of course, if you listen carefully, you can hear all the conservatives saying it’s because of liberal influence, and liberals saying it’s because of conservative influence. What is striking is how infrequently what each of these groups interpret as a “good influence” ever has a single negative consequence. Good policies can never have any negative effects. Bad policies can never have any positive effects. Real life doesn’t work that way.
