Why are divorce rates high in the United States?

Answer 1

The simplest answer: The United States has a culture that makes divorce socially acceptable, and we also have a legal framework that makes filing for divorce relatively easy. To dig deeper, we have to look at some divorce statistics.

• First, in the U.S., most people get married. According to the American Psychological Association, in Western cultures, more than 90 percent of people marry by age 50.
  The U.S. has a higher crude marriage rate (the number of annual marriages per 1,000 people) than Japan, Germany, Korea, the United Kingdom, and the average of the European Union; in fact, the United States marriage rate is higher than every major country other than China, Russia, Romania, Lithuania, and Turkey. More marriages generally means more divorces.
• There are a few different ways to look at divorce rates. The simplest is the crude divorce rate—the number of divorces per 1,000 individuals. As of 2017, the United States crude divorce rate was 2.9, which was higher than almost every other country.
  However, crude divorce rates can be misleading, because they include people who are not married. Another way to measure divorce rate is the divorce per marriage ratio. In 2014, there were 3.2 divorces per every 6.9 marriages in America. That’s a rate of about 46.38 percent.
• Using the divorce per marriage ratio, the U.S. divorce rate isn’t ridiculously high. Though it's in the higher quadrant, the United States certainly doesn’t top the list for this statistic—in other words, the idea that American divorce rates are excessively high might be incorrect, depending on the statistics you use.



With those points in mind, we can say that the U.S. divorce rate isn't too extraordinary on a global scale. Still, it's higher than the divorce rates of many countries, and we can identify a few of the factors that contribute to the discrepancy.

In the United States, divorces are fairly easy to file. When a couple can file for divorce without much hardship, they're more likely to get divorced. Through the 1970s and 1980s, many states passed no-fault divorce laws, which established that a couple could get a divorce without showing that either party was At Fault;divorce rates spiked as a result.

Cultural attitudes toward divorce also play a role. Divorce isn’t exactly taboo in the United States; we have dozens of movies and television shows featuring divorced characters, and while America is a relatively religious nation, 73 percent of Americans say that divorce is morally acceptable.

Will the U.S. divorce rate go down?

Here’s where we finally get to some good news: The United States divorce rate is already dropping, largely because of millennials.

According to research published by the World Economic Forum, Americans in their late 20s have a less-than-50-percent chance of getting divorced, and their chances of staying married are increasing. The divorce rate in the United States has been falling since the early 1990s, and that could be due to changing opinions regarding marriage, changing economic conditions, lower overall marriage rates, or some combination of those factors.

It's possible that the trend won’t continue forever. Millennials are getting married later than older generations, but we could see a "divorce boom" at some point in the future. That's the problem with divorce statistics; as cultural norms change, trends can reverse, so we can't say with certainty that millennials have stronger marriages than earlier generations.