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“It’s a beautiful night/We’re looking for something dumb to do/Hey baby/I think I want to marry you/Is it the look in your eyes?/Or is it the dancing juice?/Who cares baby/I think I wanna marry you/If we wake up and you wanna break up that’s cool/No, I won’t blame you/It was fun girl.” – Bruno Mars
The sacrament of marriage is a well-thought out agreement made by two self-aware and self-sacrificial individuals who work tirelessly to create a more perfect union, right? Doesn’t that sound like the lyrics you just read?
A review of divorce rates in “What is the Actual US Divorce Rate and Risk?” by Glenn Stanton outlines four ways to measure divorce rates. Each gives a different answer, because like each individual who enters a marriage, each measuring stick has a different perspective. Stanton refers to the work of Professor Paul R. Amato in these four measurements:
A Crude Divorce rate refers to the annual number of divorces per 1,000 people in a population. The age-adjusted crude annual divorce rate is thirteen divorces for every 1,000 people age fifteen and older.
A Percent-Ever-Divorced rate refers to adults who have been divorced and that rate sits at 22 percent of women and 21 percent of men.
A Refined Divorce rate refers to the annual number of divorces per 1,000 married women. In 2011, 19 of every 1,000 marriages ended in divorce, making the rate 1.9 percent.
A Cohort Measure rate is “the “40-50 percent” number that most people cite. It is not a hard, objective number, but an educated projection. It is calculated by looking at a particular “cohort”—a large group of people marrying within a particular measure of time—relative to general life-tables.”
Each rate is different, but the most-popularly quoted 40-50 percent sounds staggering. Since it isn’t an objective number of actual divorces, it doesn’t make me a fan of the cohort measure rate, but Amato says it’s the “larger picture of the overall marital lifetime expectation.” Can we blame Bruno Mars for this travesty? Part two of the “Marry You” blog will focus on reasons why we might marry the wrong person.
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By: Melissa Hardin Baysinger
