Am I less likely to get a divorce than my parents? --[Reported by Umva mag]

Much to the chagrin of dating app users everywhere, there is no exact science behind meeting someone and falling in love with them. But what about those who have found someone they want to spend the rest of their lives with? Is there a way to know if it will last? Despite the hand-wringing about the falling marriage rate, the divorce rate is falling as well. Are millennials less likely to end their marriages than previous generations? That’s the question that listener Siobhan has on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s call-in podcast. 

Siobhan is very much in love, and as of late, she and her boyfriend are having serious conversations about taking a big step and getting engaged. “I think my partner is the best person in the world,” she said. “There is no better person as far as I’m concerned.” I could feel the love she has for him radiating through the computer screen when I spoke with her. 

At the same time, her parents’ divorce and the divorces of people older than her leaves her wondering how such loving relationships can shift. “Purely based on personal experience, so many people of my parents’ generation are divorced,” she said. “Is the millennial generation less likely to get a divorce compared to our parents?”

For an answer, I turned to Stephanie Coontz, marriage historian and author of many books, including Marriage, A History. Because Coontz is an expert on marriage, she’s also an expert on divorce.    

Coontz and I discussed the way the institution of marriage has changed through the years, if younger people are staying married longer than their older counterparts, and the role marriage does (and doesn’t) play in happiness. 

Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

For more, you can listen to Explain It to Me on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to [email protected] or call 1-800-618-8545.

Has the way you think about marriage changed through the years, whether through experiencing it yourself or studying it?

Well yes, it’s changed quite a bit. When I was young — raised in the ’50s and early ’60s — I thought marriage was great. I used to practice in high school writing my first name with a boy’s last name. 

And then I went away to college and I learned about the history of marriage, and my own mother ended up divorced. So I went through a period of thinking I would never marry,and that marriage was a very oppressive institution, not the protective one that we had been told it was. But when I went back and looked at the way it had actually operated in the past, it began to occur to me that no, marriage is an institution that can work in very different ways.

If you go back to where marriage was first invented and why it was first invented, it doesn’t seem as oppressive as it did over the thousands of years of history, of patriarchy, because marriage was essentially invented to get in-laws. And by in-laws, I mean a really much broader sense of connections. Marriage sets up mutual obligations. 

Let’s talk about Siobhan’s question: Are millennials less likely to get divorced than previous generations?

Oh yeah. Divorce rates have been falling for the past 20, 25 years, so your chance of divorce is lower than your parents. The baby boom generation had the highest divorce rates and those divorce rates have come down quite a bit.

What we’ve found is that people’s standards for marriage have risen since the ’80s and the ’90s. We expect more of marriage than we did in the past, and we expect more equality. We come together, we fall in love, and we have to learn to appreciate each other in a totally new way than in the past. A marriage, when it works, is more fulfilling and safer and more inspiring to people than it was for the past. 

But when it doesn’t work, it’s less satisfactory precisely because we have higher standards and because we have more alternatives. People today have much higher standards for how economically and emotionally prepared you have to be for marriage. That means you’re less likely to divorce.

How do we know that millennials are getting married and divorced less? 

The Census Bureau keeps track of the numbers of marriages and divorces each year. Marriage rates have fallen. Now, that can be greatly exaggerated because the age of marriage is rising. The rate of marriage is calculated on the basis of how many women get married every year. 

Back in 1960, when the average woman married before she had even turned 21, you would have very high marriage rates. Now that the average age of marriage is up to about 30, the question is how many people will marry as they grow older? This is another huge change that we’ve found. 

In the 1950s, if you weren’t married by 25, your chance of ever marrying fell precipitously. But today, people are marrying at older ages than ever before. If you’re not married by 30 or 35 it not only means that you may indeed eventually marry, but it also means that your divorce risk tends to go down. 

There are different things that predict a successful marriage. Now women come to marriage with more maturity, and if they face a man who is very oppressive or just too dictatorial, they’re going to leave. On the other hand, if they’ve known this man long enough to know that he is a good choice for marriage, that he is committed to an egalitarian and loving relationship, and they have the resources so that they know that they can support themselves outside marriage — that actually protects the marriage in a way it didn’t in the past. 

Do people ask you about divorce a lot? 

Yes. I get it, because a lot of people in America think that it’s just a disaster, that people are not getting married or that they’re delaying marriage. So I get asked a lot of questions: “Well, wouldn’t the world be better off if everybody got married? Isn’t getting married the route to happiness and economic success? Isn’t divorce a disaster?” And I can tell you that the answer to all those questions is no. Marriage is not going to make your life perfect or happy or make you economically successful. A lot of these things are predictors; they’re not outcomes.

I’m in a good marriage. It is a very big addition to my life, but it’s not going to bring me happiness if I was not already capable of contributing my share of happiness to the relationship. People in unhappy marriages are much less happy than single people. And when we look at divorced people, yes, people who get divorced from a good marriage are unhappy. But people who have been in bad marriages and get divorced are generally at least as happy as they were at the beginning of their marriage and certainly happier than they were by the end. 

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