
Millennials Are Causing the U.S. Divorce Rate to Plummet - joeyespo
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-25/millennials-are-causing-the-u-s-divorce-rate-to-plummet
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dsfyu404ed
Discussed once already. Lots of good points made in the comments.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18068003](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18068003)

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wyldfire
> ... the divorce rate as a ratio of divorces to the total number of married
> women. So, the divorce rate’s decline isn’t a reflection of a decline in
> marriages.

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.

~~~
romed
Yeah everybody always skips right over Gen X ... The NYT covered divorce in a
better article with a better graph four years ago[1].

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-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/upshot/the-divorce-surge-is-
over-but-the-myth-lives-on.html)

~~~
naravara
I think a lot of that stuff wasn't things Boomers worried about so much as
things Boomers' parents worried about. And they were right. And then the
generation after looked at the results of that and decided to go nowhere near
it.

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MisterOctober
Yep! it's funny - I've been feeling some disgust and resentment toward the
behavior of my parents' generation for some time, and felt like I was kind of
alone in that until I saw Bruce Gibney's recent book [and accompanying NPR
interview on] 'Generation of Sociopaths,' which coherently makes it clear
that, well, there are other folks who feel the same way.

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emodendroket
The last three paragraphs kind of throw cold water on the hopeful
implications. Marriages are more stable because the working class is
increasingly living in unstable, informal relationships.

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koboll
Is that not a good thing, though? Especially for the working class, breaking
up via an expensive divorce, after an expensive marriage, seems objectively
worse than breaking up a lengthy partnership, for all involved.

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mijamo
Not if you have kids or any valuable belongings. Then it can become incredibly
messy.

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bilbo0s
I think his material point was that dealing with custody matters for never
married parents is no more, or less, messy than dealing with custody for
married parents. So what's the benefit drawn from being married?

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.

~~~
gamblor956
There are significant custody-related benefits that accrue only _during_
marriage, like for example being allowed to pick your children up from school,
medical decisions, etc., that automatically flow to married fathers that don't
flow to the unmarried fathers who don't have the proper paperwork on hand. (As
with all things related to domestic laws, this is highly jurisdictional.)

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nradov
Is the institution of civil marriage still even needed? When a marriage is
officially recorded with the county clerk that confers a set of legal benefits
and obligations related to child custody, immigration, income taxes,
healthcare decisions, etc. But in principle there's no reason those things
have to be bundled together. It could all be handled with standardized legal
contracts.

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.

~~~
astura
It costs somewhere between $20-$200 to get married. ($20-$50 to file the
paperwork plus whatever the officiant chooses to charge ($0-$150(?) - mine
charged $100). It costs more than that to hire a lawyer to create a series of
legal contracts.

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.

~~~
izacus
Of course the costs of all the social ritual and expectations around it are
orders of magnitude higher. Which might be the main barrier I think.

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pcwalton
Some people have interpreted this as evidence that millennials are more
conservative than they seem, based on the idea that staying married is a
conservative value. But I think it's just as easy to see this the other way:
if _staying married_ is a conservative value, then _getting married_ in the
first place surely is as well, and millennials seem less willing to do that
unless they're confident it will work out.

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MrEfficiency
Anecdotally, I have seen some disaster marriages and it explains how divorces
can happen:

>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.

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make3
getting married just to have sex is really a brain dead thing to do. Too much
risk of horniness affecting the decision instead of it being just about
knowing you found someone you expect to be able to spend your life with
happily and without drama

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wincy
Yeah since you’re far less likely to get divorced if you’ve never had sex
before marriage. Everyone before 1960 was just a complete brain dead idiot and
we can learn absolutely nothing at all from our idiot ancestors.

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make3
Source please on your claim that no sex before marriage leads to longer
lasting marriages. That sounds like the kind of thing conservatives would make
up without data to back themselves up. Also, even if it were true, longer
lasting mariage doesn't mean happy 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

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gooseifer
Not the original poster, but I've seen it cited before.

[https://ifstudies.org/blog/counterintuitive-trends-in-the-
li...](https://ifstudies.org/blog/counterintuitive-trends-in-the-link-between-
premarital-sex-and-marital-stability/)

Which uses data from the CDC NSFG.

[https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/nsfg_cycle6.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/nsfg_cycle6.htm)

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make3
yeah, this is possibly mostly a correlation with people being in religious
groups were marriage is very frowned upon. you would expect that if sex before
marriage is frowned upon, divorce is too

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sp332
Also Gen X. Everyone forgets Gen X though.

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mistrial9
in the United States, active marriages are plummeting overall.. in 2016 four-
in-ten births were to women who were either solo mothers or living with a
nonmarital partner; spanning demographics, geography, race and economics
(excluding only the so-called one percent)

Source: Pew Research on Marriage and Children

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hiram112
I'd be interested to see what the rate is if they only counted first
marriages.

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?

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moate
Outcome is still the same: There are fewer people getting divorced.

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.

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weliketocode
Seems like the growing expense of marriage combined with lower stigma for
being unmarried is the driver here.

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crooked-v
Now millenials are killing the divorce industry, too? How despicable.

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m0llusk
Just come out and say it: Millenials are killing divorce!

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astura
Warning: autoplaying video

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clubm8
TL;DR: Can't get divorced if you never get married

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monocasa
> ... the divorce rate as a ratio of divorces to the total number of married
> women. So, the divorce rate’s decline isn’t a reflection of a decline in
> marriages.

~~~
seba_dos1
It sure still can be. If people who would later divorce stopped getting
married (for instance because it's more socially acceptable now to live
together without marriage), causing a decline in marriages, divorce rate
defined as a ratio of divorces to the total number of married women also gets
lower.

