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Comment by moomin | Hacker News Reader

You might want to investigate the "high percentage" figure. It's one of those talking points that isn't really grounded in any solid numbers.

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If anyone else doesn't want to investigate, this article puts it at 25%. [1] Some may consider that a high percentage. If this is a major concern though, my advice is to marry someone who you trust to not be horrible in the case of a divorce. It won't always work out that way, but at least you can have some confidence that they won't try to ruin your life just for fun.

1. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/heart-the-matter/201704...

>my advice is to marry someone who you trust to not be horrible in the case of a divorce

If people could accurately judge character they wouldn't be getting divorced.

Nobody enters a relationship thinking their partner will cheat yet it happens all the time.

Per CDC (2014), the marriage rate in the United States is 6.9/1000 people while the divorce rate is 3.2/1000 people. [1] I'd say that's very high.

1: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/marriage-divorce.htm

That's about 50%, which is the commonly quoted figure. However, IIRC that figure is skewed significantly by second (and further) marriages (i.e. by people who "like" getting divorced). The figures for first marriage are somewhat lower.

Does that really mitigate the point of divorce rate being high?

The interesting thing is that you can't actually divide one number by the other, because you don't know when the marriages began. What you actually need is the data "how many marriages in 1980/1981 &c end in divorce"? The information that a bunch of retired baby boomers are divorcing has little to no relevance to 30-somethings getting married right now.

In particular, since fewer people are getting married than used to (the whole point of the article), this is overstating the divorce rate.

Your statistic is skewed by people that get married young and have low education.

College graduates have a divorce rate closer to 25%

https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/article/marriage-and-divor...

Its 40-50% marriages. However people who get remarried or married a second time are significantly more likely to get a divorce. Pretty damn high. Flip a coin. Whats really interesting is the number of sexual partners and how that relates to divorce rates.

http://www.apa.org/topics/divorce/

Yes, but for educated people who have a reasonable income, it drops to 15-25% depending on your source.

There's also a growing body of research on practices and habits of healthy satisfying marriages. Raw average divorce rates don't really capture what's possible with forethought and discipline.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorce_in_the_United_States#R...

The rates are high, and it's worth considering how many marriages should be divorced but instead forcibly stay unhappy for things like traditional or religious reasons.

Personally, any figure over 10% is high to me.

If you're both between 30 & 34, both on your first marriage, and both have college degrees, the rate is below 10%.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/meet-catch-and-keep/201...

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