Article: Divorce Shocker: Most Marriages Do Make It


 This based on a book. I saw a post of this somewhere a few weeks back, so the book has been out for a while now.

The commonly used statistic for divorce in the US is 50%; that is, 50% of all US marriages end in divorce. Turns out there was never any basis for this number. Nobody ever researched the actual rate of the divorce. The 50% statistic was derived from the increase in the divorce rate in the 1970's to 1980's and extrapolated.

Various quotes:

"First-time marriages: probably 20 to 25 percent have ended in divorce on average," Feldhahn revealed. "Now, okay, that's still too high, but it's a whole lot better than what people think it is."

[I]t's even lower among churchgoers, where a couple's chance of divorcing is more likely in the single digits or teens.

Feldhahn has more shocking research: four out of five marriages are happy. That number flies in the face of the popular belief that only about 30 percent of marriages are happy.

Some observations:
1) Herbert Stein's law paraphrased, no trend that can't continue, won't.
2) No trend lasts forever. (I could not find an attribution)
3) People like to believe bad news.
4) Some people love to spread bad news.
5) "There are three types of lies: Lies, d**n lies, and statistics." This has been attributed to various wits, wags, and writers.