Actually, I think you can easily get that number down to 5 or 15%. Well below 25%, anyways.
The stat that people really care about is, if I get married to my partner, what's the divorce rate of people similar to me.
If you're reading HN and are thinking about marriage, it's quite likely that most or even all of the following apply to you. All of which have shown indications that they lower the divorce rate. The first three alone drop the divorce rate below 25%.
- getting married later then 1980
- first marriage for both
- both older than 30
- both have college degrees
- both make wages > $60k, < $1M
- similar ages
- man makes more $ than woman
- getting married later than 1990
- neither goes through an extended period of involuntary unemployment
- neither goes to jail
"Later than 1980" distorts because lots of marriages newer than that haven't ended through either divorce or death yet. If you were looking at, say, a 20 year success rate and the window in question was 1981-1994, it might be comparable to earlier periods where you were looking again at the 20 year success rate.
I'd say that if you care about your personal chance of divorce, there's way better ways to gauge it, including talking with a marriage counsellor and/or psychologist before marrying (which could bring it very close to 0, especially if you choose to not marry).
If, on the other hand, you want to know what percentage of marriages result in divorces, then you probably want to implement some very suspect social policies and probably should be stopped. Not certainly, but probably.
>The stat that people really care about is, if I get married to my partner, what's the divorce rate of people similar to me.
Who are those people? I (and those the article mentions talking about the US in general) care about the general numbers. Not how to use the numbers to gauze my own wedding's future.
The stat that people really care about is, if I get married to my partner, what's the divorce rate of people similar to me.
If you're reading HN and are thinking about marriage, it's quite likely that most or even all of the following apply to you. All of which have shown indications that they lower the divorce rate. The first three alone drop the divorce rate below 25%.
- getting married later then 1980 - first marriage for both - both older than 30 - both have college degrees - both make wages > $60k, < $1M - similar ages - man makes more $ than woman - getting married later than 1990 - neither goes through an extended period of involuntary unemployment - neither goes to jail