November 30, 2005
Closing the Divorce Divide
By Maggie
Gallagher
How is marriage
doing in America? Professor Norval Glenn of the University of
Texas at Austin surveyed 1,503 Americans 18 years or older and
recently released the results in the National Fatherhood Initiative
Marriage Survey. (www.fatherhood.org/doclibrary/nms.pdf).
Americans remain profoundly
pro-marriage. Eighty-nine percent agree "All things being
equal, it is better for children to be raised in a household that
has a married mother and father." Only 12 percent describe
marriage as "an old-fashioned, outmoded institution."
Sixty percent of Americans
are married, and 86 percent of the never-married say they hope
to be married someday. Ninety-three percent of married Americans
say they would marry their spouses over again.
Nonetheless, the proportion
of Americans who are in stable, "very happy" first marriages
has dropped 20 percentage points since 1973, according to Glenn's
calculations from the General Social Surveys, conducted by the
National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.
Delayed marriage, increased divorce, and a slight decline in marital
happiness are the reasons.
Who are most likely
to be in very happy first marriages? The college-educated are
about twice as likely as high school dropouts; the "very"
religious are also about twice as likely as those who are only
slightly or not at all religious. People who marry directly without
first cohabiting are also about twice as likely to succeed in
marriage as those who live together.
What's the best age
to get married? Earlier than most people think. Teen marriages
are high-risk. But the most successful age for marriage was not
the late 30s but the mid 20s. "When the quality of marriages
is taken into account, however, first marriages of persons in
their mid 20s emerge as distinctly more successful than those
entered into either earlier or later in life," the report
notes, calling this finding one that "has not been previously
recognized." If you are 23 and find the right person, you
are plenty old enough to make a happy marriage.
Americans are as anti-divorce
as they are pro-marriage. Ninety-four percent of Americans agree
divorce is a serious national problem; 59 percent think society
would be better off if divorces were harder to get; 71 percent
disagree with the statement "Either spouse should be allowed
to terminate a marriage at any time for any reason." Seventy-three
percent support a one-year waiting period "to give the couple
a chance to reconsider their decision to divorce." Only 44
percent, however, agreed that, in the absence of violence or extreme
conflict, parents should stay together at least until their children
are grown. (I wonder if some found this wording confusing.)
Moreover, even divorced
Americans express considerable ambivalence about their divorces.
More than three-fifths of ever-divorced Americans say they wish
they or their spouse had worked harder to save the marriage. (Men
were more likely to place the blame on themselves: 35 percent
of ex-husbands and 21 percent of ex-wives say they wish they themselves
had worked harder.)
The NFI Marriage Survey
also provides new evidence that the college-educated now show
a special resistance to attitudes of the divorce culture. "College-educated
respondents," the report notes, "were less likely than
those with less education to say that living together before marriage
is a good thing, and they were more likely to say that parents
should stay married until their children are grown."
A separate study by
University of Maryland sociologist Stephen P. Martin found that
divorce rates among the college-educated have declined by half
since their peak in the 1970s. He labels this growing evidence
of a "divorce divide."
Many factors are no
doubt responsible (the better economic position of college-educated
men springs to mind). But the NFI Marriage Survey suggests another
possibility as well: an information gap. College-educated Americans
are undoubtedly the principal consumers of the new social science
evidence that divorce hurts kids, and that living together doesn't
reduce the risk of divorce.
Taken together, these
data suggest a new challenge for those of us concerned about marriage
in America: closing the divorce divide by getting better information
-- and more practical help -- into the hands of the non-college-educated
majority.
Copyright
2005 Maggie Gallagher
