According to the CDC, the divorce rate in the United States is 3.2 per 1,000 people.

That rate decreased by 18% between 2008 and 2016

While that may seem like good news, the marriage rate is also declining, indicating both marriage and divorce are out of reach for certain segments of the population.

It's commonly said that half of all marriages end in divorce. While that may have been true at some point, that stat is out of date, at least for the United States. As demographics and economics change in our country, along with attitudes about marriage vs. cohabitation, the divorce number paints a much rosier picture than the grim conventional wisdom.



The actual divorce rate is lower.

The Centers and Disease Control and Prevention notes that — as of 2016, the most recent information available — the real divorce rate in the United States is 3.2 per 1,000 people.



Of course, there are limits to the information in the CDC's model. For example, only 44 states and Washington, DC, record enough marriage and divorce data to go into the report. The excluded states include California, Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Minnesota, and New Mexico, which is a big chunk of the population. But, if you really want to put a figure on the number of divorces in America, that will give you a rough estimate.

The divorce rate is going down.

A better number to zero in on, other than the 3.2 per 1,000 people, is this: The divorce rate dropped 18% between 2008 and 2016. That's according to a recent study on divorce rates by Philip N. Cohen of the University of Maryland. Even when Cohen adjusted for demographic shifts, like the age when people get married, he found an 8% drop. No matter how he studied the data, he writes, "the regression models show no increase in adjusted divorce odds at any age."

And while no age group is seeing an increase in divorce rates, the decline has been pinned to Millennials, who have some trends working in their favor. Cohen notes that members of that generation wait longer to get married, and are more established and stable when they do, leading to fewer divorce risks. A generally accepted view of cohabitation before marriage doesn't hurt, either — the Pew Research Center reports that the number of cohabitating partners has increased 29% since 2007.



But there's something more sinister beneath that stat.

Though the decline in divorces and the increase in secure relationships are good things, Cohen makes sure to point out that the picture isn't entirely a rosy one. Divorces are decreasing — but marriages are, too, and sometimes that's not by choice. He describes "the increasingly selective nature of marriage — at least on demographic and socioeconomic traits," which makes marriage more solid for the people who can swing it: people who are often "at high levels of economic interdependence." Everyone else? Well, marriage might be a stretch for them to begin with. "The trends described here represent progress toward a system in which marriage is rarer, and more stable, than it was in the past, representing an increasingly central component of the structure of social inequality," he writes.



Reports from the Pew Research Center bear this out: "Half of Americans ages 18 and older were married in 2017 ... [which] is down 8 percentage points since 1990," it notes. Pew says this is because Americans are staying single longer, but the organization didn't weigh in on whether that's by choice (to travel and establish a career before getting married), or, if economic conditions mean life isn't stable enough to get married earlier, by necessity.

Marisa LaScala Parenting & Relationships Editor Marisa LaScala covers all things parenting, from the postpartum period through empty nests, for GoodHousekeeping.com; she previously wrote about motherhood for Parents and Working Mother.

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