Do Half of All American Marriages Really End in Divorce?
It’s a statistic we hear regularly, but is it true? According to Divorce Magazine, “Statistics tell us that about half of all marriages now end in divorce.”1 It’s a statistic we hear regularly, but is it true? Here’s how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Center for Health Statistics measure this question: Marriage and Divorce (Data are for the United States, in 2003.) • Number of marriages: 2,187,000 • Marriage rate: 7.5 per 1,000 total population • Divorce rate: 3.8 per 1,000 population (46 states and the District of Columbia reporting)2 According to the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University (led by David Popenoe and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead), the most authoritative group tracking and analyzing these numbers: The American divorce rate today is more than twice that of 1960, but has declined slightly since hitting the highest point in our history in the early 1980s.3 Is the divorce rate in America really 50 percent? We need to clarify these figures. So
