"Half of all marriages end in Divorce"

[Brefugee]

I've seen this a lot, here and elsewhere. But it confuses me. How is the calculation done?

Adding up marriage records and distracting divorce records?

Leaves you with a number/percentage?

Easy, take number of recorded marriages and minus number of recorded divorces. Government will have stats for obvious reasons.

I read somewhere that it was quite out of date, and the rate is lower now.

There was a spike (in the 90s/ 00s) when a cohort of people had married young, as was the norm then, but 20 years or so later divorce was more normalised so many couples split up.

Today people are more likely to marry later or not at all, so those who do marry are more likely to stick together.

I’ve also read something about how people who are once divorced are significantly more likely to divorce a 2nd/3rd time, so it skews the perception of numbers.

A bit like how infant death in the Middle Ages brought life expectancy down rapidly. If you survived to 10, it wouldn’t be unusual to live in to your late 60s or 70s, it wasn’t that 30 was considered a ‘full life span.’

There's an episode of More or Less on BBC sounds about divorce rates and how they are calculated (and how Portugal's was once at 94%) - it's quite interesting and only 10 mins long

They would need to track individual cases I would have thought. So Mr and Mrs Brown who married on 10.03.85 got divorced on 12.10.98

Otherwise they're not accounting for immigration and emigration. Nor are they accounting for population fluctuations. Eg. 100 couples got married in 1985 and there were 50 divorces that year. Vs. 100 couples got married in 1986 and only 5 divorces but there was a war/pandemic and 40 couples died. Sorry for the slightly depressing analogy!

Yeah- I know someone who’s on number 4. Every marriage is shorter than the last. This one will last about 18 months if the trend continues. I just can’t understand why you’d keep doing it.

The divorce rate has never been 50%. Plus, with more recently married couples, you need to wait quite a while, like say 50+ years, before you can look at their overall divorce rate as a cohort.

People married in 1995 have the highest overall divorce rate as a cohort by the 25 year mark - it's over 40%. More recent cohorts look to be divorcing at lower rates. And yes, first marriages are statistically the most durable. The ONS has a whole bunch of statistics for the curious.

www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/divorce/bulletins/divorcesinenglandandwales/2021

thanks all, i had assumed it's a statistical calculation but i can never work out how they get so high.
Will listen to More or less, i like that one.

I think it's one of those things that people hear once, don't fact check and, particularly if it's a fact they like the sound of they just keep trotting it out. It comes up fairly often on here when someone's heard something they didn't like about the legal implications of marriage v cohabitation.