Divorce, prevalence and Trends

All marriages end in either divorce (many researchers also include separation as a means to end a marriage and thus equate it to divorce) or death. Historically, death has been the predominant means by which marriages have ended. Over the past century, however, declines in mortality and increases in divorce have altered the predominance of death as the ending state of marriage. This entry focuses on prevalence and trends in divorce in the United States. For women born just before the turn of the 20th century, about 17 percent could expect to see their marriages end in divorce, with the remainder 83 percent seeing their marriages end in death. For women born around the middle of the 20th century, divorce had increased to claim 42 percent of marriages. It is more difficult to make predictions for women born after the middle of the 20th century because they are still at the ages where both death and divorce can occur. A best estimate, however, is that about 44 percent of recently contracted marriages will end in divorce. This figure is among the highest in the world. For example, in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Hungary about 38 percent of marriages are expected to end in divorce. The figure is 25 percent in Switzerland, 15 percent in Israel, 6 percent in Turkey, and 1 percent in India.

Interestingly, for women born in the first quarter of the 20th century, declines in mortality more than compensated for increases in marital dissolution so that women spent a growing percentage of their lives married. Since that time, however, increases in divorce (in conjunction with substantial increases in age at marriage) have reduced the percentage of life a woman spends married. Recent data indicate that women can expect to spend only about 41 percent of their lives married.

For the most part, divorce rates (measured as divorces per 1,000 married women age 15 and over in a given year) in the United States have risen steadily since the end of the Civil War. Less than 2 marriages per 1,000 ended in divorce in 1870 compared to about 18 marriages per 1,000 in 2000. The risk of divorce has not increased monotonically over time, however. For example, divorce was [Page 462]higher than expected following World War I, much lower than expected during the Great Depression, and much higher than expected immediately following World War II. The 1950s and early 1960s once again saw lower than expected rates of divorce, followed by a dramatic increase in divorce rates starting in 1965 that led to higher than expected rates during the 1970s and early 1980s. Since about 1980, however, rates of divorce have stabilized and have even declined somewhat. Indeed, the stability and decline in divorce rates evidenced since 1980 indicate an unusually long plateau in the long-term historical rise in divorce rates. At no point in the last 150 years have divorce rates failed to increase for such a lengthy period of time.

Instead of asking what fraction of marriages end in divorce in a given year (with divorces in a year being composed of marriages that were formed over a large number of years in the past), researchers can ask what fraction of marriages contracted in a given year will eventually end in divorce (with these divorces spread out over a large number of years in the future)—that is, moving from period divorce rates to cohort divorce rates. Looking at the proportion of marriages formed in a given year that eventually end in divorce, there is a similar long-term upward trend in divorce, followed by a plateau beginning about 1980. Note, however, that deviations from the long-term upward trend using this second measure are much less substantial because divorces are cumulated across the lifetime of a marriage cohort. That is, for a given marriage cohort, the risk of divorce is averaged over a number of historical periods that may include periods of both below-average and above-average risk. For example, women married in the mid-1950s would have been exposed to the relatively low divorce rates of the late 1950s and early 1960s as well as to the substantially higher divorce rates of the 1970s and the subsequent stability and decline in divorce rates in the 1980s and onward.

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