From what I could understand of the Rutgers report (and I’m sure I didn’t understand everything), it seemed that the researchers had discovered trends in “divorce proneness,” based on a certain number of hard demographic factors. Some couples are simply more likely to fail than others, to a degree that can be somewhat predicted. Some of these factors sounded familiar to me. We all know that people whose parents were divorced are more likely to someday divorce themselves-as though divorce breeds divorce-and examples of this are spread across generations.
But other ideas were less familiar, and even reassuring. I’d always heard, for instance, that people who had divorced once were statistically more likely to also fail in their second marriage, but no-not necessarily. Encouragingly, the Rutgers survey demonstrates that many second marriages do last a lifetime. (As with seagull love affairs, some people make bad choices the first time, but do far better with a subsequent partner.) The problem comes when people carry unresolved destructive behaviors with them from one marriage to the next-such as alcoholism, compulsive gambling, mental illness, violence, or philandering. With baggage like that, it really doesn’t matter whom you marry, because you’re going to wreck that relationship eventually and inevitably, based on your own pathologies.
Then there is the business of that infamous 50 percent divorce rate in America. We all know that classic statistic, don’t we? It gets tossed around constantly, and man, does it ever sound grim. As the anthropologist Lionel Tiger wrote trenchantly on this topic: “It is astonishing that, under the circumstances, marriage is still legally allowed. If nearly half of anything else ended so disastrously, the government would surely ban it immediately. If half the tacos served in restaurants caused dysentery, if half the people learning karate broke their palms, if only 6 percent of people who went on roller coaster rides damaged their middle ears, the public would be clamoring for action. Yet the most intimate of disasters… happens over and over again.”
But that 50 percent figure is far more complicated than it looks, once you break it down across certain demographics. The age of the couple at the time of their marriage seems to be the most significant consideration. The younger you are when you get married, the more likely you are to divorce later. In fact, you are astonishingly more likely to get divorced if you marry young. You are, for example, two to three times more likely to get divorced if you marry in your teens or early twenties than if you wait until your thirties or forties.
The reasons for this are so glaringly obvious that I hesitate to enumerate them for fear of insulting my reader, but here goes: When we are very young, we tend to be more irresponsible, less self-aware, more careless, and less economically stable than when we are older. Therefore, we should not get married when we are very young. This is why eighteen-year-old newlyweds do not have a 50 percent divorce rate; they have something closer to a 75 percent divorce rate, which totally blows the curve for everyone else. Age twenty-five seems to be the magic cutoff point. Couples who marry before that age are exceptionally more divorce-prone than couples who wait until they are twenty-six or older. And the statistics get only more reassuring as the couple in question ages. Hold off on getting married until you’re in your fifties, and the odds of your ever ending up in a divorce court become statistically almost invisible. I found this incredibly heartening, given that-if you add together Felipe’s age and my age, and then divide that number by two-we average out around forty-six years old. When it comes to the statistical predictor of age, we absolutely rock.
But age, of course, isn’t the only consideration. According to the Rutgers study, other factors of marital resilience include:
1. Education. The better-educated you are, statistically speaking, the better off your marriage will be. The better-educated a woman is, in particular, the happier her marriage will be. Women with college educations and careers who marry relatively late in life are the most likely female candidates to stay married. This reads like good news, definitely tipping a few points in favor of Felipe and me.2. Children. The statistics show that couples with young children at home report “more disenchantment” within their marriage than couples with grown children, or couples who have no children at all. The demands that newborns in particular put on a relationship are considerable, for reasons I am certain I do not have to explain to anyone who has recently had a baby. I don’t know what this means for the future of the world at large, but for Felipe and me it was more good news. Older, educated, and babyless, Felipe and I are running some pretty good odds here as a couple-or at least according to the bookies at Rutgers.3. Cohabitation. Ah, but here is where the tide begins to turn against us. It appears that people who live together before marriage have a slightly higher divorce rate than those who wait until marriage to cohabit. The sociologists can’t quite figure this one out, except to wager a guess that perhaps premarital cohabitation indicates a more casual view in general toward sincere commitment. Whatever the reason: Strike One against Felipe and Liz.4. Heterogamy. This factor depresses me, but here goes: The less similar you and your partner are in terms of race, age, religion, ethnicity, cultural background, and career, the more likely you are to someday divorce. Opposites do attract, but they don’t always endure. Sociologists suspect that this trend will diminish as society’s prejudices break down over time, but for now? Strike Two against Liz and her much older, Catholic-born, South American businessman sweetheart.5. Social Integration. The more tightly woven a couple is within a community of friends and family, the stronger their marriage will be. The fact that Americans today are less likely to know their neighbors, belong to social clubs, or live near kin has had a seriously destabilizing effect on marriage, across the board. Strike Three against Felipe and Liz, who were-at the time of Liz’s reading this report-living all alone in a shabby hotel room in the north of Laos.6. Religiousness. The more religious a couple is, the more likely they are to stay married, though faith offers only a slight edge. Born-again Christians in America have a divorce rate that is only 2 percent lower than their more godless neighbors-perhaps because Bible Belt couples are getting married too young? Anyhow, I’m not sure where this question of religion leaves me and my intended. If you blend together Felipe’s and my personal views on divinity, they comprise a philosophy that one might call “vaguely spiritual.” (As Felipe explains: “One of us is spiritual; the other is merely vague.”) The Rutgers report offered no particular data about marital-resilience statistics within the ranks of the vaguely spiritual. We’ll have to call this one a wash.7. Gender Fairness. Here’s a juicy one. Marriages based on a traditional, restrictive sense about a woman’s place in the home tend to be less strong and less happy than marriages where the man and the woman regard each other as equals, and where the husband participates in more traditionally female and thankless household chores. All I can say on this matter is that I once overheard Felipe telling a house-guest that he has always believed a woman’s place is in the kitchen… sitting in a comfortable chair, with her feet up, drinking a glass of wine and watching her husband cook dinner. Can I get a few bonus points on this one?
I could go on, but I did start-after a while-to get a little cross-eyed and crazy with all these bits of data. My cousin Mary, who is a statistician at Stanford University, warns me against putting too much weight on these sorts of studies anyhow. They are not meant to be read like tea leaves, apparently. Mary especially cautions me to look carefully at any matrimonial research that measures such concepts as “happiness,” since happiness is not exactly scientifically quantifiable. Moreover, just because a statistical study shows a link between two ideas (higher education and marital resilience, for instance) doesn’t mean that one necessarily follows from the other. As cousin Mary is quick to remind me, statistical studies have also proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that drowning rates in America are highest in geographical areas with strong ice cream sales. This does not mean, obviously, that buying ice cream causes people to drown. It more likely means that ice cream sales tend to be strong at the beach, and people tend to drown at beaches, because that’s where water tends to be found. Linking the two utterly unrelated notions of ice cream and drowning is a perfect example of a logical fallacy, and statistical studies are often rife with such red herrings. Which is probably why, when I sat down one night in Laos with the Rutgers report and tried to concoct a template for the least possible divorce-prone couple in America, I came up with quite a Frankensteinian duo.