Marriage and Divorce

Marriage is a very common in society today and many people believe they need to be married to have their lives complete. But with many marriages they end in very nasty divorces. I am going to begin talking about marriage rates in 2018 (FP-18-20) and then I will be discussing the divorce rates in 2018 (FP-18-21). Society is very focused on finding a spouse and then throwing a huge wedding spending an unnecessary amount of money. The rate of women getting married has gone down a ton since the 1970’s.

But I believe it partly has to do with the fact that people are starting to realize you can have a successful relationship with someone and not have to get married to them.

According to Bentley.edu “Marriage has lost much of its social allure, but remains a desired milestone for about 70 percent of millennials. They say they would like to marry, but many?” especially those with lower levels of income and education ??” lack what they deem to be a necessary prerequisite: a solid economic foundation.” With the fact that many people want to get married but they know that financially they would not be stable is very telling about our society. It shows that the cost of living is unnecessarily high where people can’t live comfortably, and so people are just living together while dating and never making that transition to married life.

By reading figure 2 it is shown that most of the states with higher marriage rates have a lower living cost in that state, unlike the bottom of the chart where a lot of the states have a higher living cost. According to the FP-18-20 all states in the Northeast exhibited low marriage rates. The fact that the Northeast had lower marriage rates is confusing to me because I wouldn’t have thought that regions would matter in this type of study. Marriage is become a decline for many reasons but another reason why people don’t get married because of the fact that divorce can happen is scary for many people.

Divorce within the United States is a very expensive thing and it causes families to be torn apart. Divorce can also play in a part of child development if there are children in the household during a divorce. According to the FP-18-21 “the divorce rate had decreased by 28.8% from the historical highpoint in 1979 to 2016.” With the divorce rate decreasing drastically over a couple decades it might be shown in future statistics that marriage rates would go up with the knowledge of that. It might be due to the fact that people are now cohabitating much earlier than what was done years before.

“Corinne Reczek, now an assistant professor of sociology at Ohio State University, once described cohabitation as a “trial marriage” of sorts. Living together could theoretically increase the odds that mismatched couples with no long-term compatibility will break up before tying the knot, thus gently decreasing the divorce rate.” With the fact that people are just “trying” married life is smart because if you were married that long and had problems and then would have to go through a divorce instead of just separating.

Another reason that divorce rates could be going down is the fact that people are waiting longer to get married than a couple of decades ago. According to figure 2, Hawaii had the least amount of divorces, I wonder what the significance of it being warm and tropical has to do with people wanting to stay together or having a good reason to stay together. “States with the highest divorce rates (1st or 2nd quartiles) were spread out around the country. However, the highest concentration was found among Southern states, with two-thirds (67%) having divorce rates falling in the top quartile.” Since there is not one specific place that divorce is affecting people the most, I believe that divorce is inevitable, and that people will get divorced no matter where they live.

With marriage there is always the chance that it can eventually end and turn into a nasty divorce. A marriage is known to bring people and families together but sometimes when people get married when they already have kids it can be an unhealthy environment for the kids and the parents. The parents could be fine, but the kid does not like the new step parent so then it causes the child to act out. It could also cause things in the household such as running away or not obeying the parent’s rules.

With having a unstable household during a healthy marriage, the household can be even more toxic during a divorce. With divorce it can cause the child to not know what to do and act out since it is such a big change in their life. It starts with having to go to two different households and change their whole environment, it can also change to one of their parents not being in their lives because one of them never wants to see the other parent. 

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