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Comment by rkangel | Hacker News Reader

The statistics about marriage failures are misleading. They are biased by the fact that people who divorce tend to have multiple marriages. People who are bad at being married make it look bad for everyone.

If you look at the statistics for first marriages the picture is less depressing. Also, the rates have been improving and people getting married today have much better odds.

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The statistics are useless. They tell you nothing about the percentage of unhappy marriages. Only the ones where it was convenient enough to be able to separate. There is also huge cultural stigma against divorce in most places. This is why cities tend to have higher divorce rates - it's more socially acceptable.

> The statistics about marriage failures are misleading. They are biased by the fact that people who divorce tend to have multiple marriages.

They are also biased because many unhappy couples won't divorce for various reasons.

This should be the top comment. Not even a truism, cliché or a platitude, the entire article is actually based on a misrepresentation of the facts.

Why has this become so common? I remember the first time I read something similar thinking “Interesting, but that’s weird, it doesn’t match up with my life experience. I must live in a perfect little butterfly bubble of some kind.” Then I read an article which explained the statistics in more detail. Ahh.

So, why did this author write this article? Do they not know the statistics? Maybe they read some of the many earlier articles which make the same bad assumption and decided to build on that bad assumption - but without looking at the actual data?

Statistics don't lie but liars use statistics. Is that what happened here? Maybe. Maybe the author was just lazy. Who knows. But it does seem like a huge number of stories begin with a title and brief introduction, then 3 or 4 conservative or liberal platitudes sprinkled in, each of which are so general they misrepresent reality and hide useful and actionable facts.

Maybe its more a house of cards.

Age of marriage also makes a huge difference. Under 25 has much higher rates than over.

And the parent's comment is also true: if you get divorced then chances are you'll get divorced again, e.g. Liz Taylor's eight marriages.

>If you look at the statistics for first marriages the picture is less depressing

Sort of depending on where you are in the world. Statistics for First Marriages is still quite depressing in many developed places, especially in cities.

I think the failure rates of marriages are more related to the strong economic incentives to marry when it is not "the right time." You forgo a lot of disposable income by staying single and this can be the main drive to get married.

And then on the other hand, rearing a child seems to have become more expensive as a percentage of worker output than it used to be as that output is extracted by things like rent.

First marriages end 50% of the time [1], which doesn't seem that great. It's 67% for 2nd and 73% of 3rd. Given the large number that never remarry, the 2nd and 3rd order effects don't really add much to the overall rate.

>the rates have been improving

Maybe because record few people get married, and those that do, do so at record high ages [2].

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-intelligent-divo...

[2] https://www.bgsu.edu/content/dam/BGSU/college-of-arts-and-sc...

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