08/21/2025
A very interesting read... TL;DR: The divorce rate is actually at a 50-year low. (but) Americans are also getting married at record low rates. (and postponing marriage until much later). " That the marriage age has been rising and divorce rates falling also lends credence to the idea that people are choosing their partners more wisely (and after their brains have fully developed), and setting up the economic basis for a successful marriage."
We're Divorcing Like It's 1959
Nearly nine out of ten Americans believe that the divorce rate is increasing. It’s not—a couple who got married in the 1990s had a 47% chance of divorcing, but a couple marrying today, 40%, if current patterns hold. The divorce rate is actually at a 50-year low.
Hold the champagne, however. What at first seems like an indicator that marriage is back, baby, might just be the function of a smaller pool of candidates: Americans are also getting married at record low rates.
This has sparked an internal debate at The Progress Network. Do these data points represent progress or not?
On the one hand, those who get married nowadays are less likely to be taking the leap due to cultural pressure; women in particular no longer need to marry for financial reasons. That the marriage age has been rising and divorce rates falling also lends credence to the idea that people are choosing their partners more wisely (and after their brains have fully developed), and setting up the economic basis for a successful marriage. Why lament this state of affairs?
On the other hand, marriage confers real benefits that half of America is missing out on. Married people are both happier and wealthier than their divorced or single counterparts. And as I wrote about recently in the newsletter, the family is one of the most reliable producers of meaning in people’s lives (although not the only one, of course). While the marriage rate lingers at just under 50%, about 70% of high school teenagers expect that they will get married in the future, implying that there is a gap between the number of people who would like to get married and the number that actually do.
There is also the matter of marriage widening the class divide. Marriage rates among the highly educated and high-earning have remained stable, enriching them further, but have plummeted for everyone else. (Now that an educational gap has opened up between women and men, women are so far just fine with marrying men without college degrees as long as he makes decent money.) There is some evidence of the “marriage is for the upper class” trend reversing, though. A new report by the Institute for Family Studies, a conservative think tank, found that “the percent of children in lower-income families with married parents rose from 38% in 2012 to 42% in 2024.”
Some might find that any talk of increasing marriage rates as a societal good smacks too much of regression, especially with nostalgia for the 1950s "tradwife" exploding all over the manosphere. It also risks delegitimizing the perfectly legitimate lives of the never-married. Not to mention that all of this talk about data glosses over realities that can only be understood at the individual level. Some married people would be better off divorcing, after all.
There is still that headline news, however: those standing at the altar today now have a better chance of staying hitched.
—Emma Varvaloucas
https://theprogressnetwork.org/newsletter/
