Family Law

Divorce Rates Lowest Since 1970

By Alexander Rhoads

The Associated Press reports that "Despite the common notion that America remains plagued by a divorce epidemic, the national per capita divorce rate has declined steadily since its peak in 1981 and is not at its lowest level since 1970. The national divorce rate has dropped from 5.3 divorces per 1,000 people at its peak in 1981 to 3.6 per 1,000 people, the lowest rate since 1970.

Yet Americans aren't necessarily making better choices about their long-term relationships. Even those who study marriage and work to make it more successful can't decide whether the trend is grounds for celebration or cynicism. Some experts say relationships are as unstable as ever -- and divorces are down primarily because more couples live together without marrying. Other researchers have documented what they call ''the divorce divide,'' contending that divorce rates are indeed falling substantively among college-educated couples but not among less-affluent, less-educated couples.

What's fueling that decline? The number of couples who live together without marrying has increased tenfold since 1960; the marriage rate has dropped by nearly 30 percent in past 25 years; and Americans are waiting about five years longer to marry than they did in 1970. One of the researchers whose studies detected the ''divorce divide'' is University of Maryland sociologist Steve Martin. Comparing marriages from early 1970s to those of the early '90s, Martin found that the rate of breakups within 10 years of marriage dropped by one-third among college-educated women while remaining stable among less-educated women. ''Overall, marriages will become more stable only if the lower two-thirds of the population starts behaving like the top third,'' Martin said. ''There's a lot of debate -- is that possible? Can marriage training or other programs give all couples the sort of relationship skills that people imagine college graduates have?''

Stephanie Coontz, who teaches history and family studies at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., says divorces are dropping in the college-educated sector because many spouses ''are learning how to negotiate marriages based on less rigid gender roles than in the past.'' ''College-educated wives are more likely to work than less-educated wives, and a recent study found that unlike the past, a wife's work now tends to stabilize marriage,'' she said.

The per capita divorce rate is different from another method of calculation -- the percentage of marriages that will eventually end in divorce or separation. Many experts discount the popular notion that one of two U.S. marriages end in divorce, and suggest the breakup rate, which is hard to calculate, has stabilized in recent years at between 40 percent and 45 percent.

Source: Associated Press, May 10, 2007.

Full post as published by Iowa Divorce and Family Law on May 14, 2007 (boomark / email).