The Good News About Marriage Part 10

86. Jennifer Baker, e-mail message to authors, May 30, 2013.

87. The citation was listed as "US Bureau of the Census, 2006, Statistical Abstract of the U.S. (122nd ed.)," but as noted, those statistics are simply not listed in this publication.

88. For example, there were two longitudinal studies done during the height of the worst divorce-rate years to look at issues such as the impact of divorce on children, one by Dr. Mavis Hetherington and another by Dr. Judith Wallerstein. See E. Mavis Hetherington and John Kelly, For Better or For Worse: Divorce Reconsidered (New York: Norton, 2002), 262; and Judith S. Wallerstein, Julia M. Lewis, and Sandra Blakeslee, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25 Year Landmark Study (New York: Hyperion, 2000).

Neither was designed or intended to get a handle on the divorce rate, especially since they were engineering their sample in order to get a very high proportion of divorced families, with a specific number of children, at specific ages, and so on, so they could study the impact of divorce. Hetherington ended up tracking 450 families over four different longitudinal "waves" in Virginia (each wave had smaller sample sizes, with 144 families in one wave and 121 families in another wave). Wallerstein's study was smaller, with 121 children from 60 families. Both studies started at a great time to consider the impact of divorce on children, since they were conducted during the highest divorce-rate years (Hetherington's study initially started in 1972, and Wallerstein's started in 1971), and both went twenty years or more. Although both found an extremely high divorce rate (around six in ten or higher) among the partic.i.p.ants who had been remarried, it is important to know that these studies were designed with samples that would deliver insight about the impact of divorce on children and thus not appropriate to draw conclusions about the national divorce rate or the redivorce rate.

89. For example, Drs. Larry b.u.mpa.s.s and Teresa Castro Martin in 1989 projected that, based on the 1985 Current Population Survey, 56 percent of first marriages would end in divorce or separation by the forty-year anniversary mark. Overall, they figured second marriages had a 25 percent greater chance of breaking up. Divorce numbers quickly began declining again, so those projections were moot, but it is possible that readers could have misunderstood those as saying they had found those actual numbers.

90. Cherlin, "Demographic Trends in the United States."

91. Kreider and Ellis, "Number, Timing, and Duration: 2009."

92. Note that in chapter 2, we had enough first-marriage divorce data for couples to know that 72 percent of marriages were still intact. Here, we refer to 71 percent of women being in marriages that are still intact. Since remarriage data is spa.r.s.er, in this chapter we will be focusing on the divorce rates of women, specifically (not couples), which is the only way we can compare first-, second-, and third-marriage divorce rates.

93. We can see this, in fact, by comparing the numbers for men and women. Since women are more likely to live longer and thus more likely to be widowed, we would expect fewer of their marriages to still be intact than among men-which is exactly what we see. Among men in their second marriage, the percent of those marriages still intact is much higher: 78 percent! Just 22 percent of these men are no longer married to their second wife.

94. Larry b.u.mpa.s.s has long been a respected expert in the field of marriage and divorce research, publishing several studies, including a few on the subject of remarriage. Because Dr. b.u.mpa.s.s has retired from teaching, most of the divorce and remarriage data is dated from earlier surveys, during the highest-risk years, and thus doesn't give a current snapshot of today's situation. But one of his studies did find a pattern that seems to match the data we do have that is more recent, so his conclusion is likely to be still valid today.

Using 1985 Current Population Survey data, Dr. b.u.mpa.s.s estimated that remarriages generally had a risk of divorce that was 25 percent greater than first marriages. But nearly all that risk came in the first few years. Once a couple in a remarriage had made it five years, the increased chance of divorce was only four percentage points (23 percent for first marriages versus 27 percent for second marriages). The study also found that once "age at first marriage" was accounted for, the difference between first- and second-marriage divorce rates disappears. (See Castro Martin and b.u.mpa.s.s, "Recent Trends," 4147.)

95. Alison Aughinbaugh, Omar Robles, and Hugette Sun, "Marriage and Divorce: Patterns by Gender, Race, and Educational Attainment," Monthly Labor Review (October 2013): table 3, section "Among Those Who Remarried After Divorce," www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/article/marriage-and-divorce-patterns-by-gender-race-and-educational-attainment.htm. The BLS examined a specific cohort in the well-known longitudinal study National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79).

96. Matthew D. Bramlett and William D. Mosher, "Cohabitation, Marriage, Divorce, and Remarriage in the United States," Vital and Health Statistics 23, no. 22 (July 2002), www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_23/sr23_022.pdf. Compare table 21 on page 55 with table 41 on page 83 (0.33 versus 0.39).

97. By ten years of marriage, 33 percent of those in their first marriage had divorced, compared to 39 percent of those in their second marriage. (As noted, these rates are high because this study heavily surveyed those who married young. An adjustment for a more representative age of marriage is discussed in the FAQ section.) 98. Goldstein, "Leveling of Divorce," 41011.

99. Krista K. Payne, First Divorces in the U.S., 2008, Family Profiles FP-10-06 (Bowling Green, OH: National Center for Family and Marriage Research, Bowling Green University, 2011), www.bgsu.edu/content/dam/BGSU/college-of-arts-and-sciences/NCFMR/doc.u.ments/FP/FP-10-06.pdf.

100. See Shaunti Feldhahn, The Surprising Secrets of Highly Happy Marriages: The Little Things That Make a Big Difference (Colorado Springs: Multnomah, 2013).

101. For more, see chapter 3 in Feldhahn, Surprising Secrets, or the research section of www.shaunti.com.

102. Other evidence of this is the polls that show 93 to 95 percent of married people saying they married the right person and would marry them all over again (see chapter 3). Only 5 to 7 percent felt that they didn't and wouldn't, and it seems reasonable to infer that those couples are more likely to be the ones encountering bigger, systemic issues. But if the overall divorce rate ends up being around 30 percent, many more than that 5 to 7 percent end up divorcing. Thus, we can infer that many of the others who split are not as likely to be doing so because of big, systemic issues.

103. Specifically, the Decision a.n.a.lyst survey for The Surprising Secrets of Highly Happy Marriages, not the independent surveys for the same book. On that survey, 22 percent of couples were struggling, compared to 29 percent in our internal surveys. As explained in endnote 41 above, the "very happy," "happy," and "struggling" percentages on the Decision a.n.a.lyst survey were engineered to ensure we would have a statistically valid (large enough) sample of struggling couples to a.n.a.lyze. The final groupings were in the same ballpark as our internal surveys: 39 percent "highly happy," 38 percent "happy," 22 percent "struggling." We are using this survey instead of our internal surveys for this particular a.n.a.lysis because the technology behind it allowed us to get a precise comparison between individuals and couples, where the independent surveys carried a possibility of a few percentage points' error either way. (The fact that the Decision a.n.a.lyst percentages were engineered should have little impact on the a.n.a.lysis of how many individuals described themselves as happy versus how many couples did, once the answers of both spouses were taken into account.) 104. The data about the percentages of men and women who have these various emotional needs comes from The Surprising Secrets of Highly Happy Marriages, For Women Only, and For Men Only.

105. Sam Roberts, "Divorce After 50 Grows More Common," New York Times, September 20, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/fashion/weddings/divorce-after-50-grows-more-common.html?emc=eta1&_r=0.

106. Janean Chun, "Bert and John Jacobs, Life Is Good: From Living in a Van to Running a $100 Million Company," Huffington Post, March 21, 2012, www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/21/bert-john-jacobs-life-is-good_n_1345033.html.

107. a.s.suming, in our simplistic example, that the number of marriages in the church stayed exactly the same over the thirty years and that they were starting from no divorces. Neither of these is going to be true in the real world, of course, but this at least shows why the divorces-as-a-percent-of-marriages-each-year does not give us the divorce rate.

108. The ratio of approximately two marriages to one divorce can be found as early as the 1975 to 1977 time period. See Arthur J. Norton and Louisa F. Miller, "Marriage, Divorce, and Remarriage in the 1990's," Current Population Reports P23-180 (October 1992): 2, table A, www.census.gov/hhes/socdemo/marriage/data/cps/p23-180/p23-180.pdf.

109. The National Vital Statistics System in 2011 listed the number of marriages nationwide as 2,118,000 out of 311,591,917 people, for a rate of 6.8 per 1,000 total population. The number for divorces nationally reached 877,000, but out of only 246,273,366 people, which would be a rate of 3.6 per 1,000 total population, but they used different populations for each category. See www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/marriage_divorce_tables.htm.

110. Rotz, "Why Have Divorce Rates Fallen?"

111. Manning, Brown, and Payne, "Two Decades," 22.

112. Aughinbaugh, Robles, and Sun, "Marriage and Divorce."

113. Casey E. Copen et al., "First Marriages in the United States: Data from the 20062010 National Survey of Family Growth," National Health Statistics Reports 49 (March 22, 2012), www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr049.pdf.

114. For example, Shaunti looked at how much the divorce rate improved for those who married at age twenty-five and older compared to those who married at ages twenty to twenty-four at each of the other anniversary thresholds. Then she applied that same improvement for the twentieth-anniversary mark to estimate what the divorce rate might have been for that group if the survey had included people married long enough to reach that mark. In fact, that improvement had increased for each anniversary (the divorce rate was 26 percent lower at the fifth anniversary, 29 percent lower at the tenth, and 33 percent lower at the fifteenth). With a three- to four-point improvement each time, it could easily have been 37 percent lower at the twentieth, so we felt it was conservative to a.s.sume it would stay at 33 percent for the twentieth-anniversary mark as well. Using a 33 percent lower divorce rate than the twenty to twenty-four age group gives us a 30 percent divorce and 70 percent survival rate.

115. For example, Dr. Betsey Stevenson did a rea.n.a.lysis of the 2004 Census SIPP data because she found a discrepancy with the data that caused a higher divorce rate than she thought probable. See Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, "Trends in Marital Stability," in Research Handbook on the Economics of Family Law, ed. Lloyd R. Cohen and Joshua D. Wright (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2011), 102.

116. Francesca Adler-Baeder, e-mail message to authors, October 12, 2013.

117. Note that number (34.5 percent) is out of the total population, but since 94 percent have been married, that is still very close to the real figure. If the table showed those divorced out of ever married, the number would be 37 percent.

118. Norval D. Glenn, Closed Hearts, Closed Minds: The Textbook Story of Marriage (New York: Inst.i.tute for American Values, 1997), 3, http://americanvalues.org/catalog/pdfs/closedhearts.pdf.

119. David Olson, phone interview with the authors, October 25, 2013.

120. Brown and Lin, "Gray Divorce."

121. Betsey Stevenson, e-mail message to authors, April 26, 2013. Dr. Stevenson indicated the "ACS provided divorce numbers for a short period, but they aren't comparable to public records like vital statistics. ACS reports overestimate divorce rates. They are based on asking people if they've gotten divorced in the past year and it looks like people are answering over a broader time frame (for instance saying 'yes' even if their divorce isn't quite finalized)."

122. Another study published in late 2013 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) found a higher rate of divorce among baby boomers' first marriages as well. Again, these results look somewhat more depressing; but if you look closely, you notice that this study is a longitudinal study, using a very narrow segment of the highest-risk group of people (baby boomers born from 1957 to 1964). Unfortunately, this study came out just as this book was going into production, so we did not have a chance to fully a.n.a.lyze it. (See Aughinbaugh, Robles, and Sun, "Marriage and Divorce.") But as we referenced Scott Stanley, pointing out in chapter 2, "Divorce is increasing rapidly among those older than fifty, but the great increase is among those who are remarried and/or in shorter duration marriages."

123. Part of why Dr. b.u.mpa.s.s's percentages are so high is because he included separation in his estimates. (See Castro Martin and b.u.mpa.s.s, "Recent Trends.") 124. Robert Schoen and Nicola Standish, "The Retrenchment of Marriage: Results from Marital Status Life Tables for the United States, 1995," Population and Development Review 27 (2001): 55363.

125. Paul Amato, phone interview with the authors, February 19, 2013. Dr. Amato also mentioned that Schoen increased his projection to 45 percent in 2006, using data from 2000; but this has not been updated since and, again, does not distinguish between death and divorce.

126. As we were putting the finishing touches on the book, we talked to an expert at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Sheela Kennedy, who even projected a divorce increase. In an interview, she shared the conclusion from her paper that if one took "2010 as the standard population, the age-standardized divorce rate rose 40 percent between 1980 and 2008." See also Kennedy and Ruggles, "Breaking Up Is Hard to Count." (Sheela Kennedy, e-mail correspondence with authors, October 25, 2013.) 127. Glenn Stanton, interview with the author at Focus on the Family, Colorado Springs, CO, January 9, 2013.

128. Andrew J. Cherlin, Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 29.

129. Bramlett and Mosher, "Cohabitation," 55, table 21.

130. The Survey of Marital Generosity has produced some interesting and positive findings. This nationally representative survey interviewed over sixteen hundred married couples. The Science of Generosity at the University of Notre Dame is funding the survey with Dr. Brad Wilc.o.x as princ.i.p.al investigator. In addition to other factors, Wilc.o.x, along with Jeffrey Dew at Utah State, specifically examined how likely people thought they were to divorce, a factor the researchers labeled "divorce p.r.o.neness."

The researchers found that among couples where both the husband and the wife attended church regularly, only 4 percent of women and 6 percent of men thought they were at risk of divorce! Compare these figures to 13 percent and 21 percent among women and men where neither person attended church regularly. In other words, when couples attended church regularly, they are 70 percent less likely to feel that they will be a statistic.

See also The State of Our Unions 2011 and Jeffrey P. Dew and W. Bradford Wilc.o.x, "Generosity and the Maintenance of Marital Quality," Journal of Marriage and Family 75, no. 5 (October 2013): 121828. Received copy in personal e-mail with Jeffrey Dew, June 16, 2013.

131. Bradley R. E. Wright, Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites ... and Other Lies You've Been Told: A Sociologist Shatters Myths from the Secular and Christian Media (Minneapolis: Bethany, 2010), 133. Dr. Wright also wrote about the divorce rate falling in his most recent book, Upside: Surprising Good News About the State of Our World. He was also kind enough to share his refined divorce rate chart in an e-mail to the authors on May 27, 2013. Information on his books and articles can be found at http://brewright.com.

132. The first study was sent to us by Dr. Mahoney herself as an attachment in a personal e-mail on May 20, 2013. (See Annette Mahoney, "Religion in Families, 19992009: A Relational Spirituality Framework," Journal of Marriage and Family 72, no. 4 [August 2010]: 80527, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3219420.) Note that she discussed what a divorce rate might be for those who are religious, if the starting-point divorce rate was 50 percent. She noted the calculation she did in the study is not to be taken literally, as many readers have done, but she was trying out numbers with a presumed 50 percent divorce rate just to see in general what the effect of church attendance would be on divorce. (See A. Mahoney et al., "Religion in the Home in the 1980s and 1990s: A Meta-a.n.a.lytic Review and Conceptual a.n.a.lysis of Religion, Marriage, and Parenting," Journal of Family Psychology 15, no. 4 [December 2001]: 55996.) Dr. Mahoney has created a website (www.bgsu.edu/departments/psych/spirituality/) for public use ent.i.tled the Psychology of Spirituality and Family Relationships that lists these two studies.

133. Gritzon, "Super Composite."

134. By and large, those who prayed and read the Bible were just as likely to have been divorced as those who hadn't. But since all survey takers were in a church and were committed enough to take this extensive, lengthy survey, that signal of commitment is probably trumping any other factor in the actual divorce rate. Also, as noted earlier, this survey ended up capturing a higher percentage of baby boomers (who have a much higher divorce rate than those older and younger), which is probably also skewing the results.

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