The INSIDER Summary:

• There's a myth that divorce rates are 50% and ever increasing.

• The divorce rate has actually been going down for decades.

• Part of it is because divorce rates are hard to measure.

• Overall, younger people in the United States are getting smarter about marriage.





It's a long-standing, depressing myth that 50% of marriages in America end in divorce. At that point, why even try, right?

Wrong. In fact, the divorce rate in the United States is going down. It hit a peak of about 41% for people who married 35 years ago and it's been falling ever since.

But the story of divorce — and how to measure it — is still a complicated one. Nonetheless, it's been mostly good news for the past few decades.

It's hard to measure divorce rates.

The misconception about the divorce rate could be partially attributed to the trickiness of measuring it.

Most people mistakenly believe that in order to find the divorce rate, you divide the rate of divorce in the entire population by the rate of marriage in the entire population in any given year.

Still, there are some upsides to divorce, like humorous cakes. Denise Truscello / Getty

In 2006, for example, the marriage rate was 6.9 out of 1,000 people in the United States and the divorce rate is 3.2 out of 1,000 people, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

So if you divide 3.2 by 6.9, you get 46.3% of marriages ending in divorce. That's almost half!

The thing is, dividing the annual divorce rate by the annual marriage rate is useless. The same people getting married in 2016 aren't the ones getting divorced in 2016. So by measuring the divorce rate that way, you don't get any sense of how divorce rates change across different generations, which is what you need to understand if you want to see how divorce rates are trending.

But there's a way to do it.

The best way to understand divorce rates, researchers say, is to calculate how many marriages have subsequently ended in divorce.

In other words, if we want to count how marriages held up in the past few decades, let's count how many of them made it to their 15th anniversary.

Statistically speaking, this couple isn't going anywhere. Chris Jackson / Getty

Measured that way, approximately 65% of marriages that began in the 1970s and 1980s reached their 15th anniversary, according to data from University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers provided to the New York Times, making for a divorce rate of about 35% for those generations.

Based on that same data, about 70% of marriages from the 1990s reached 15 years, for a divorce rate of about 30%. And through around 2014 (which is when the dataset ended), the divorce rate for people who married in the 2000s was only at 15%.

The divorce rate, it appears, is dropping.

In the 1970s, people thought marriage was doomed.

There's a reason why people are worried about divorce rates. It's a holdover from decades ago, when the rate started trending upwards.

But according to the Times, the rise in divorce rates in the 1970s and 1980s was a historical anomaly. It occurred during the same time as a major feminist movement, which changed the way society thought about the role of women in life and in the economy. Women initiate about 70% of today's divorces.

At the time, the high divorce rate signaled an upward trend that would lead to 50% of marriages ending up in divorce. But that statistic never substantiated itself. Divorce rates began declining in the mid-1980s and continue to do so.

Today, people are getting smarter about marriage.

A few combined trends are leading to lower divorce rates, according to sociologists. In general, people are making better decisions about who they marry.

This couple will probably be fine. REUTERS/Athit Perawongmetha

Young people are waiting longer before getting married, citing the need for a strong economic foundation before doing so. And young people also have more children out of wedlock than previous generations, according to a 2014 Pew report, indicating that they're avoiding "shotgun weddings" that are more likely to end in divorce.

Another huge trend is cohabitation: More couples are living together before getting married. According to a study at the National Center for Family and Marriage Research, only 11% of women who first married between 1965 and 1974 cohabited before marriage. For couples who married between 2005 and 2009, 66% of women lived with their significant other before marriage.

But the divorce rates vary depending on where you live.

The divorce rate may have been decreasing overall in the United States, but if you look at the breakdown by state, there's something else going on.

In some states, the number of divorces as a percentage of the population in any given year is more than double of some other states. And while that statistic isn't useful for charting trends within any given area, it's used by scientists to illustrate differences between different places.

There hasn't been a lot of research done as to why that is. And a look at the data doesn't yield any obvious conclusions about religion, urban vs rural life, or any other factor being an obvious reason.

Iowa, for example, had the lowest divorce rate as a fraction of the population in 2014. An average of 1.5 of every 1,000 people got divorced in 2014. Next comes Illinois, with an average of 2.2 of every 1,000 people, then Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Louisiana, and Maryland with averages of between 2.4 and 2.6 per 1,000 people getting a divorce in 2014.

Brits have an even lower divorce rate than Americans. WPA Pool/Getty

In Nevada, though, an average of 5.3 out of every 1,000 people got divorced in 2014. And Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Wyoming had divorce rates in 2014 with averages between 4.8 and 4.5 out of every 1,000 people.

And, of course, not every country is like the United States. The Economist, in an analysis done in 2014, found that divorce rates were higher in the United States than in Britain — though it's steadily dropping in both countries. And in China and Russia, the divorce rate is rapidly increasing despite government emphasis of "family values."

So while the divorce rate is definitely nowhere near half, it's still a tricky thing to measure. And though not every place in enjoying a lower divorce rate, the next generation looks like it's gotten smarter about handling their marriages.