Divorce Rates Are Falling - But Marriage Is Still on the Rocks

Divorce Rates Are Falling—But Marriage Is Still on the Rocks

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Kay S. Hymowitz is the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. She is the author of four books, including Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age and Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Is Turning Men Into Boys.

Hand-wringing is an appropriate response to the state of marriage today.

Tuesday’s New York Times’s Upshot section featured an article by Claire Cain Miller entitled “The Divorce Surge is Over, but the Myth Lives On.” The piece got a good deal of attention, but Miller manages to reinforce some myths of her own.

That’s not to say the piece is wrong in its basic facts. The divorce surge is over. (Or most people believe it is: this paper offers an alternate take.) In truth, the rise in divorce has been over for 20 years. Divorce rates peaked in the early 1980s when Ronald Reagan was president and the Internet was only a mite in the eye of wierdos hanging out in California garages. In fact, this “news” may well be older than many of its readers who were probably not even been born when divorce rates were already on the downswing.

It’s also the case that people remain strangely attached to the idea that half of all marriages end in divorce despite numerous stories over the years showing otherwise. Miller links to one of those stories—from 2005, that is, nine years ago. I myself published a book that took stock of the trends in 2006. Family scholars have talked about the turn-around in divorce rates repeatedly. Yet the myth lives on. If you want proof of that, check out the media reaction to the Times piece: a “fascinating story” in the words of the Clarion Ledger; “surprisingly optimistic numbers,” marveled the Huffintgton Post.

So why has this particular myth been so difficult to extract from the hive mind? Why are people so (ahem) wedded to an idea that is not only untrue but has been for almost a generation? Two reasons. The first will no doubt sound clichéd: Hollywood. In la-la land divorce is about as common as Botox. When beautiful, famous people split up, fan magazines, entertainment networks, and social media sites spring into action, making sure we see albums of photos of crying, stoic, rehabbed, and then newly partnered, actors and actresses claiming they’ve never been happier. Social psychologists refer to a cognitive bias they call the “availability heuristic.” Striking events—plane crashes, Ebola cases, the Kardashians—make the weird seem more commonplace than it is precisely because the brain is so impressed by it. Of course, the availability heuristic gets some help from the television shows and movies these same famous people write, star in, and produce about marital crackups that often bear a striking resemblance to their own.

The second reason the myth lives on is not only more troubling but exemplified by the Times article that seeks to dismantle it. The younger generation, whether they know divorce is declining or not, believes that marriage is on the rocks. From their vantage point, they’re right. While fewer American adults have been divorcing over the past decades, a growing number of people in their own cohort have grown up apart from one parent, almost always their fathers.

How can divorce be declining but at the same time more children growing up with single parents? Because—and this is the story that Miller underplays—so many parents never marry in the first place. A little history is in order here: When divorce rates skyrocketed in the 1970s, American were not simply suddenly looking at their spouses and deciding en masse that they couldn’t take it anymore. They were reacting to a changing understanding about what marriage meant. Instead of an arrangement largely centered around providing for and rearing the next generation, it was becoming an adult-centric union based on love and shared happiness, which as an upper middle class grew in size, became closely linked to granite countered kitchens, European and spa vacations, and weddings with 200 guests.

One big reason that divorce rates began to fall after 1980 was that people, almost always those with less education and less income for the required accouterments of marriage, took the logic of the divorce revolution and ran with it. If marriage and childbearing were no longer tightly linked but rather discreet—even unrelated—life events, and if they were not earning enough to enjoy the middle class status objects enjoyed by their more educated peers, then why marry at all? Why not just have kids without getting married? While college educated women continued to demand a ring before they became mothers, the percentage of poor women having kids outside of marriage was already on the rise; now working class women, many of them temporarily cohabiting with their child’s father, also bypassed the chapel on the way to the maternity ward. In his forthcoming book Labor’s Loves Lost, Andrew Cherlin quotes one young unmarried father this way: “You need way better reasons than having a kid to get married.”

By missing this larger picture, Miller ends up adding single parents—who after all have a null chance of divorce—to good news numbers about marital stability. Sheela Kennedy and Steven Ruggles from the Population Center at the University of Minnesota try to take into account the new reality in a recent paper. Their findings are sobering: “because cohabitation makes up a rapidly growing percentage of all unions,” they write, it has “an increasing impact on overall union instability.” And by accepting that marriage and children are unrelated, she can ignore the biggest problem with this rising instability. Experts have shown us in a virtual library of research papers that the children of single parents are at greater risk of everything from poverty to school failure to imprisonment. Their large numbers will almost surely help perpetuate inequality, poverty, and immobility.

“Despite hand-wringing about the institution of marriage, marriages in this country are stronger today than they have been in a long time,” Miller writes. As it happens, hand-wringing is an appropriate response to the state of marriage today.

That is, for anyone concerned about inequality and America’s lower income children.

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Is Divorce Too Expensive?

Divorce Too Expensive For Poorest Americans, New Study Says

For one-percenters like Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, it's easy to get the world's fastest divorce. Their legal split only took two weeks. But for the poorest of Americans, divorce is still a luxury item.
Long-term separations are an alternative for poor couples who cannot afford to legally end their marriages, new research suggests. The research was presented at the American Sociological Association's annual meeting on Monday.

The longitudinal study looked at 7,272 people who were surveyed on a regular basis between 1979 and 2008. Most people in the study who separated from a spouse reported getting a divorce within three years of the break up.

But 15 percent of people who separated did not get a divorce within the first 10 years and researchers said there was an economic reason for it: They simply could not afford to get divorced, especially when there were children involved. The study found that the married-but-indefinitely-separated group generally had only a high school education, were black or Hispanic and had young children.
"Those with young children may find it difficult to support themselves and their children if they divorce," Zhenchao Qian, study co-author and professor of sociology at Ohio State University, said in a statement. "Divorce may not protect them because their spouse may be unwilling or unable to provide financial support."

In the past, separations were usually linked to strict divorce laws that required one spouse to prove the other did something wrong -- they could have cheated or abandoned their partner. But today, as laws around "no-fault" divorces have become more lenient, researchers from the study suggested long-term separations are mostly done to avoid the financial stress of going through a divorce.
There is no definitive cost to getting a divorce -- the cheapest ones can cost as little as several hundred dollars. Hiring a lawyer, who might charge anywhere between $200 and $400 per hour, to sort out child support payments can add up to thousands of dollars. But the financial costs and benefits of divorce extend beyond the lawyers and the paperwork. Married couples, especially those with children, get substantial benefits from filing joint tax returns or sharing health care coverage.
But estranged marriages may not be limited just to low-income couples as the study indicated. A 2010 article in The New York Times suggested a new trend toward long-term separations among older professional-class couples who appear less inclined to get a legal divorce -- though perhaps more by choice rather than by necessity.

Financial reasons such as shared real estate, retirement savings and health care coverage appeared to be the primary motivation for staying married by living apart.

"People split up and have these God-awful joint custody agreements, so you would think that they stay separated for the kids' sake, but I am not seeing that," couples therapist Toni Coleman told The New York Times. "It usually comes down to the money."

While there are some financial benefits to long-term separation, there are also risks in remaining legally married, such as being liable for a spouse's debt or having to share earnings (even windfalls like a lottery win) that are considered community property in some states.

But for couples who think that a separation only makes the heart grow fonder, the Ohio State study also revealed some disappointing news: 5 percent of couples who separated attempted to get back together -- but half of those ended up getting a divorce anyway.

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*article from Huffiington Post 

Marriage Rates: Divorce Fears To Blame For Low Rates?

Recently, social demographer Dr. Sharon Sassler, a Cornell University professor, set out to learn more about how couples decide to live together, and why. In interviews conducted with 122 people, Sassler saw a surprising trend: Though her questions were primarily focused on cohabitation, respondents consistently raised the subject of divorce, even though she and her team had not solicited information on the subject. Indeed, a full two-thirds of her subjects revealed fears about their own future marriages falling apart.

Her findings, published last month in the NovemberJournal of Family Relations, seem to correspond with a recent Pew Research Institute report, which found that men and women are getting married later and later, and the number of people who do actually make it down the aisle recently hit an all time low.

So is one finding related to the other? HuffPost Divorce spoke with Dr. Sassler to find out more about how fears of divorce might be affecting national marriage trends.

What was the most surprising finding of the study?

We actually didn't have a specific question about divorce. We were asking about what the benefits of cohabitating are relative to marriage. The fact that divorce spontaneously arose in such a large proportion of the responses was what was surprising, because we weren't looking for it, and it kind of slapped us in the face. Also surprising was that, regardless of whether the cohabitators had personally experienced their parents' divorce, they expressed concerns about divorce themselves.

Is there evidence to substantiate a claim that these fears of divorce contribute to low marriage rates?

There are a lot of factors at play that contribute to low marriage rates. Most of our couples still planned to get married, so I'd prefer to say that our findings might help explain the delay of marriage...One of the factors my respondents gave in being reluctant to take that next step was being cautious about marriage or even jaded about marriage. Since the majority of young adults live together prior to marriage, I do think it tells us something about how anxious young people are today about their ability to maintain intimate relationships. They're being more cautious and they might want to take more time.

We did find that the majority of those who do mention fears of divorce do intend to eventually get married because they think it might have some benefits. They think it would make their family happy, or that it would improve their relationship or that it's one way of showing love.

Where do these fears of divorce come from? How did they differ by gender and class?

The fears differ by social class and they differ by gender. For less-educated women, there are these strong concerns about being financially trapped in a bad relationship, and not having the means to exit it. And there were fears of what divorce would do to the children. There's also this concern that if they get married that they'd be expected to do more domestic work, and they're working women, so they viewed it as a double burden. Many of them thought, "why take on these extra responsibilities?"

The middle class group mentioned hearing the statistics all the time: they hear one out of two marriages is destined to fail, but it's incorrect. Divorce rates have been going down for the last few decades. Data indicates that the marriages are lasting longer in the early 2000s than they did in the 1990s, but they don't hear that. What they hear are the scare stories -- the Kim Kardashians who are on their second divorces. They don't realize that things have changed. Across the board, it was just a lot of this free-floating anxiety about divorce. A lot of them said they only wanted to marry once. That was the most common refrain: "I want to do it right. I only want to marry once."

For those who were children of divorce themselves, how did that affect their views on marriage?

They often referenced their families and their parents' marriages as cautionary tales, but that doesn't stop them from being in relationships, it's just an added layer of anxiety. The working classes are more likely to have experienced their parents' divorce, and they move in together more quickly, but there is an economic element to this -- they're more likely to move in more rapidly because of the financial need.

For the middle class respondents, they're much more likely to have dated for over a year or longer and that's not often the case with the working class. The college-educated respondents had held on to their apartments longer before moving in together, even though they might have been spending as much time together as the cohabiters. They still had that escape hatch. If you're working two minimum-wage jobs, it's harder to maintain that second apartment.

Slightly over a third of the sample made no mention of divorce at all. Who were they and why do you suspect divorce didn't come up in interviews with them?

We did not specifically ask about divorce, so it just might not have been on their mental map. We don't have indicators of relationship quality, but maybe they're in better relationships. Respondents who are engaged might not want to jinx themselves by thinking about divorce.

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*Article from Huffington Post