What Are Your Chances of Divorce? 2003

The State of Our Unions

The Social Health of Marriage in America

2003

Sidebar: What Are Your Chances of Divorce?

Barbara Dafoe Whitehead

What are Your Chances of Divorce?

One often hears it said that "a marriage today has about a 50 percent chance of ending in divorce." This statement is so frequently invoked—and disputed—that it is useful to discuss its derivation. First, what it does not refer to is a simple comparison of the number of divorces in one year with the number of marriages that same year, because the people who divorced that year are in most cases not the same people who married.

What the statement does refer to is the percentage of marriages entered into during a particular year that are projected to end in divorce before one spouse dies. Thus a 50 percent chance of divorce would mean that half of all marriages are expected to end in divorce before the marriages break up through death. Such projections typically assume that the divorce and death rates in that year will continue indefinitely into the future, and because of this unlikely assumption this divorce measure is not an accurate prediction but is intended as the best estimate possible on the basis of current data.^a

No one to our knowledge has calculated these projections over time using consistent methods, so trends in the chances of divorce using this measure cannot be given. However, some projections made using rates prevailing in the early 1980s yielded marital breakup chances of well over 50 percent, one as high as 60 percent, while in more recent years the chances have been lowered to the 50 percent range.^b It should be noted that the projected chances of breakup for all marriages are somewhat higher than for first marriages, because second and subsequent marriages have a higher divorce rate. And, of course, the percentage of marriages projected to break up is higher if permanent separation as well as divorce are included in the measure of marital termination.

In summary, any statement about the percentage of marriages today projected to end in divorce is useful primarily as an indicator of the instability of marriages in the recent past, not as a predictor of future events.

^a Computed with techniques similar to but more complicated than those used by demographers to calculate life expectancies, this measure ideally would be based on the exact divorce rates, death rates, and ages of persons who married during the base period. But complete and accurate data of the kind needed are never available, and the projected percentages vary in their validity according to the estimates used and the necessary compromises made in the calculations.

^b Rose M. Kreider and Jason M. Fields, Number, Timing and Duration of Marriages and Divorces: 1996, Current Population Reports, P70-80, Washington, DC: US Census Bureau, 2002