Millennials Are Causing the U.S. Divorce Rate to Plummet
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Cool that they ruled that out, that was my knee-jerk assumption.
> Young people get the credit for fewer divorces because boomers have continued to divorce at unusually high rates, all the way into their 60s and 70s.
The life lesson here is that the things Boomers say are going to happen to other generations are actually going to happen to them instead. They said we were all getting divorced but that was them not us. They said that video games were going to rot our brains but in reality it was them and Fox News, not us and Nintendo. And on and on.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/upshot/the-divorce-surge-...
and MSNBC, CNN, the NYT, and on and on.
I can't help but think that Gen X and Millenials saw/heard what their mothers and grandmothers went through and have chosen to educate themselves and secure their lives before getting married and having children.
Under some basic assumptions, this could still be.
E.g. if couples that have been married longer are more likely to stay married, lower new marriage rate would result in proportionally more old marriages and hence lower divorce rate.
E.g. if people are less willing to marry, more of those who marry would be marrying for a "good" reason (i.e. because they're more sure they're compatible, or because they follow a religion where divorce is bad).
> They’re living together, and often raising kids together, but deciding not to tie the knot. And studies have shown these cohabiting relationships are less stable [0] than they used to be.
It seems part a word game because I doubt those looking at the statistics ever really cared much about marriages or divorces for what they represent on a purely legal level, but for their approximation of cohabitation and family status.
That doesn't seem right at all,
If the decline in marriages in marriages result in more at risk marriages not happening, this could absolutely be a reflection of a decline in marriages
I can tell you right now, if you go into a family court here in the US believing you will get more access to your children because you were married, you're liable to be disagreeably surprised. Whether married or unmarried, just protect your legal rights as best you can. And, no matter what happens, abide by the judgement of the court. Appeal later if you're upset.
Are you suggesting that marriages cause overeating? ;)
But at the same time, these folks lose all of the protections and benefits that the legal framework of marriage gives. For example, health insurance coverage will not extend to your loved one without the legal framework for it to exist. You might have raised your partner's child since birth or not long after their father/mother passed on, but you'll have no legal right to them if something happens. Even something as simple as taking care of school business for the children gets muddy.
You, in general, will not get a say in their care during an emergency situation. Being low income also generally means you do not have the means to have such a legal paper put into place.
It also means that you do not get any sort of protection or help with breaking up. No one is going to step in to say that you have to share the apartment until you save up money or that one should be the one to move out, let alone help to make sure that each of you gets to keep a vehicle if they were both in one person's name.
Many poorer and less educated Americans are opting not to get married at all. They’re living together, and often raising kids together, but deciding not to tie the knot. And studies have shown these cohabiting relationships are less stable than they used to be.
EDIT: worth noting that I’m not sure who downvoted him, but I have him a vote to try and counter it
Beyond that, legal marriage has benefits that (for lack of a better word) "pretend marriage" doesn't. Some examples include potentially lower taxes, employer benefits for spouses (such as insurance), spousal social security, spousal pension benefits (widows/widowers are often allowed to collect their spouse's pension for the rest of their life), no gift tax between spouses, Spousal IRAs, military benefits, automatic tax free inheritance, next of kin status (which matters if the spouse is incapacitated), lower insurance rates, spousal immunity in court, eligibility for FMLA to care for a sick spouse, eligibility for bereavement leave if a spouse dies, eligible to sponsor a spouse for immigration, etc.
Married couples have the "benefit" of going through divorce if they break up. Divorce proceedings allow a (hopefully) neutral third party to order legal division of marital assets. I've seen some incredibly messy non-marriage breakups, where going through divorce once would have been less messy.
There might simply also be a social component of marriage that cohabitation simply doesn't provide. If you are married you may work to stay together rather than just split up when you hit a roadblock. Whereas if you're just dating then you might just break up at the first roadblock rather than try to work things out. No data or anything, that's just my "gut feeling" on the matter, it just "seems" like that's the case. Of course it could just be the people who break up rather than work on issues are just not getting married.
Even without civil marriage, people who wanted to could still have religious marriage ceremonies and anyone who wanted to could call themselves married. It just wouldn't have any force of law.
If you want to make it "file one series of standard contracts together which are stored at the courthouse" then you're just back to civil marriage.
>Pregnant shotgun weddings
>Knew the person for a few months, moved to stay with them in another state, married and pregnant within 1 year.
>Military marriages
I imagine these were worse in previous generations. Sex outside of marriage more taboo.
I think culturally its become more taboo to get married just to have sex than to live together before marriage.
Also I'm talking about nowadays, where people can have sex before marriage without having to become outcasts in their community or risk pregnancy (with protection. there is ofc still a risk, but it's much lower)
Getting married just to have sex when you could just have sex and then pick a partner when you really know them & not because you are horny seems like a wiser thing to do
https://ifstudies.org/blog/counterintuitive-trends-in-the-li...
Which uses data from the CDC NSFG.
These days, pretty much the only people who never have sex before marriage are religious extremists. Those people also tend to believe that you can be tortured for eternity if you get a divorce, which probably reduces the incidence somewhat.
That's an incredibly ignorant and inflammatory thing to say.
Hell, it was always true. The point of a diamond on the engagement ring was because it was assumed that you had kicked the tires on that part of the relationship, and the engagement fell through, then that woman had something she could sell as a nest egg for her new life as a forever alone spinster, being the 'broken woman' that she was.
As far as diamond engagement rings are concerned, it's about a century old tradition at this point, so four or five generations. That's a pretty long time for the purposes of this discussion.
And this comes form someone who didn't get their fiancée a diamond ring for various reasons.
I should also have said this was more a side comment. I don't think it detracted from the overall point made earlier.
By all means, though, keep your ideological superiority.
Source: Pew Research on Marriage and Children
Anecdotally, it seems many of my Boomer-aged relatives who got divorced ended up getting married again (and possibly divorced again). The idea that you must be married to live together is very ingrained in their value system.
In contrast, those of my friends in the Gen-X / millennial groups seem to be getting divorced in their first marriage at the same ratio as the older generation, but almost all of them do not especially want to get married again, even if they have found new relationships and even had more children.
In other words, is it possible that the serial divorcees of the boomers are skewing the statistics?
If the cause is that younger people are less likely to get divorced (which is what these stats are showing, even though that contradicts your anecdotal points) in their first marriage while older people keep getting married and divorced, there's still fewer overall divorces. If it's that younger people are once bitten twice shy as you suggest, then there are still fewer overall divorces.