Tag Archives: marriage

Interesting Divorce Statistics

Posted by apt46 on April 9, 2012 None comments

Mental Floss dug up some data on what circumstances are correlated with either higher- or lower-than-normal divorce rates. Of course, correlation is not causation, so just because something is related to a higher divorce rate, doesn’t mean that it causes divorce. Still, they’re interesting to consider:

  • Smoking: couples where one person smokes are almost twice as likely to get divorced. It’s a little higher if the smoker is the wife. And even when both spouses are smokers, the divorce rate is still higher than non-smokers; however, this may have a common cause, since poorer people smoke more and are also more likely to get divorced.
  • Jobs: some professions have lower divorce rates than normal. Optometrists, shuttle car drivers, transit cops, farmers, nuclear engineers and clergy. Again, this is probably just due to the kind of people that choose those professions, and the spouses that marry them — the jobs themselves don’t really make them less divorce-prone. Massage therapists and mathematicians were among the most likely to get divorced.
  • Generosity: couples that split chores evenly tend to have a lower divorce rate. This was also corroborated by the National Marriage Project, which showed that generosity was the 3rd biggest predictor of a happy marriage.
  • Ideology: conservative states have a higher rate of divorce than progressive ones. This is probably due a few factors, including the average level of education and marriage age being lower in conservative states: people there get married younger, then probably grow apart as they age, and don’t have coping skills like good communication techniques to work problems out. It’s worth noting that while some liberal states do have the lowest rates of divorce, others have the highest likelihood of marriages ending in divorce.
  • Influence: people who know more divorced couples tend to get divorced more. The social effect is very powerful and its presence can be seen in a lot of other problems, such as smoking and obesity: people tend to be like their friends and family. When it comes to people, birds of a feather don’t necessarily flock together, but rather those who flock together start growing the same feathers.
  • Beginnings: couples who met during high school or college are more likely to stay together; those who met in bars are more likely to get divorced. This likely has to do with shared history, values and other things the spouses should have in common.
  • Kids: couples who have more daughters have a higher rate of divorce; couples who have more sons have a lower rate.
  • Wife: 73% of divorces are initiated by the wife.

 

See also:

 

From Mental Floss, via Neatorama

Reductionism: The Ultimate Form Of Sarcasm

Posted by apt46 on December 29, 2011 None comments

From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Gay Community Finally Apologizes For Ruining The Sanctity Of Marriage

Posted by apt46 on December 27, 2011 1 comments

Amy Koch was a senator in the Minnesota state senate until December 16th, when she resigned her post after it got out that she was having an affair with the senate’s communications director. The affair was quite untimely, as Senator Koch was trying her best to pass the state’s version of the Defense of Marriage Act, which defends marriage from the machinations of the gays. Unfortunately, even if it passes in 2012, the proposed amendment to the Minnesotan constitution will have come too late to save Koch’s own marriage from the manicured hands of the LGBT community. Indubitably, Koch’s role in this saga will now change, as she will become a martyr for the sanctity of marriage and a warning to all about the devious tactics of the homosexuals, who routinely lure innocent straight spouses into either affairs or complacency for the sole objective of raising the divorce rate.

Amy Koch's family (left), which the gay community broke up using the chiseled good looks of Michael Brodkorb (right)

 

Taking responsibility for the attack, a spokesman apologized on behalf of the gay community for the success of its shrewd campaign:

Dear Ms. Koch,

On behalf of all gays and lesbians living in Minnesota, I would like to wholeheartedly apologize for our community’s successful efforts to threaten your traditional marriage.  We are ashamed of ourselves for causing you to have what the media refers to as an “illicit affair” with your staffer, and we also extend our deepest apologies to him and to his wife. These recent events have made it quite clear that our gay and lesbian tactics have gone too far, affecting even the most respectful of our society.

We apologize that our selfish requests to marry those we love has cheapened and degraded traditional marriage so much that we caused you to stray from your own holy union for something more cheap and tawdry.  And we are doubly remorseful in knowing that many will see this as a form of sexual harassment of a subordinate.

It is now clear to us that if we were not so self-focused and myopic, we would have been able to see that the time you wasted diligently writing legislation that would forever seal the definition of marriage as being between one man and one woman, could have been more usefully spent reshaping the legal definition of “adultery.

Forgive us. As you know, we are not church-going people, so we are unable to fully appreciate that “gay marriage” is incompatible with Christian values, despite the fact that those values carry a biblical tradition of adultery such as yours. We applaud you for keeping that tradition going.

And finally, shame on us for thinking that marriage is a private affair, and that our marriage would have little impact on anyone’s family. We now see that marriage is more than that. It is an agreement with society. We should listen to the Minnesota Family Council when it tells us that marriage is about being public, which explains why marriages are public ceremonies. Never did we realize that it is exactly because of this societal agreement that the entire world is looking at you in shame and disappointment instead of minding its own business.

From the bottom of our hearts, we ask that you please accept our apology.

Thank you.
John Medeiros
Minneapolis MN

From CityPages, via BoingBoing

Predictors For A Happy Marriage

Posted by apt46 on December 17, 2011 1 comments
  1. Sexual Intimacy
  2. Commitment
  3. Generosity

That’s according to a study (PDF) by the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project. The top two are no-brainers, but how high generosity ranks may be a little surprising. All the couples in the survey had kids, but the ones that said there was a lot of generosity in the marriage were five times more likely to say their marriage was very happy. And there was correlation between all three: couples who reported high amounts of generosity and commitment also said they were sexually satisfied.

From the report:

Generosity is defined here as “the virtue of giving good things to [one’s spouse] freely and abundantly,” and encompasses small acts of service (e.g., making coffee for one’s spouse in the morning), the expression of affection, displays of respect, and a willingness to “forgive him/her for mistakes and failings.” Husbands and wives who score high on the generosity scale—both in terms of giving and receiving in a spirit of generosity—are significantly more likely to report that they are “very happy” in their marriages and less prone to divorce.

From The National Marriage Project (PDF), via MSNBC and The New York Times

Maybe They Should Outlaw Celebrity Marriage

Posted by apt46 on November 4, 2011 None comments

George Takei on Kim Kardashian's divorce

From Twitter

Mexico City Trying To Introduce Expiring Marriage Contracts

Posted by apt46 on October 4, 2011 None comments

There’s a bill in the Mexico City legislature that would require the signatories of a marriage contract include a prenup and give the marriage an expiration date — no less than two years. Why? Too many divorce battles are clogging up their legal system. (Mexico City is like Washington, D.C. — it’s not a Mexican state, but it has its own laws like a state would.) So in light of a 40% divorce rate, they figure it’s pointless to pretend that there’s even a good chance that death will do the bride and groom part, and rather than put off the legal question until the end of the marriage, why not treat it like the contract that it is?

It’s pretty routine for business contracts to have clauses for dissolution of the contract, where damages and so forth are spelled out. It’s also routine to specify the duration of the contract, e.g:

I will lease your house for 2 years and if I break the lease early, I’ll pay you two months rent. The lease can be renewed after the 2 years are up and I’ll pay damages for anything I break in the meantime.

Imagine if leases didn’t specify those things — small claims court would be filled with tenants and landlords. The Catholic church is of course mortified by this law, because they keep insisting that marriage is for life, as if they’re blind to the divorce rate. They’re also mortified that marriage is being treated like a commercial contract. Well, this is what happens when church and state are not properly separated: the state steps on the church’s toes — take note, Republicans.

Maybe it’s time the church jumps on the Libertarian bandwagon and declares that there’s a difference between marriages sanctioned by God for the purposes of sacraments, procreation and so on, and those sanctioned by the state for the purposes of taxation, visitation rights, and health insurance. That way the heathens can all marry whomever they want under the auspices of the state alone and write in a two-year expiration date to the contract, and the righteous can marry one person of the opposite sex for life, under the auspices of the church (and for taxes and other legal matters, under the auspices of the state also). To eliminate confusion, we could call the state-sanctioned ones “civil unions,” and keep the term “marriage” to its original, religious meaning. And everyone would live happily ever after, until the question of robotic civil unions comes up.

Futurama's Calculon and his would-be bride, Coilette of Robonia (a.k.a., transgendered Bender)

 

From NPR

So You Want To Marry Your Gay 14-Year Old First Cousin

Posted by apt46 on September 8, 2011 None comments

Where do you go for something like that? The answer is New York, because it’s perfectly legal there. If you can wait until he’s 16, you can also do it in Vermont. And if you can wait until 18, then you can do it in most of New England. The South, however, is divided on the issue: in South Carolina, you can marry your first cousin at 14, but there’s a constitutional ban on doing so if he’s gay. If however, there’s no homosexuality involved and you can wait to marry your first cousin until 16 or 17, well that’s perfectly legal in most of the South.

And so, besides the highest divorce rates in the nation, allowing you to marry your underage first cousin is the other thing New England and the Deep South have in common. Given the ridiculousness of all this, and the fact that marriage licenses have traditionally been used only to prevent interracial marriages, plus the fact that marriage is primarily a religious institution, maybe it’s time to abolish legal marriages and make them all civil unions. After all, since it sounds like it’s been ripped from the Declaration of Independence, just below the right to pursue happiness, few Americans can disagree with this:

Government does not have the authority to define, license or restrict personal relationships. Consenting adults should be free to choose their own sexual practices and personal relationships. (Libertarian Party platform, section 1.3)

From Mediaite

The State Of The American Marriage In 2009

Posted by apt46 on August 25, 2011 1 comments

The US Census released a report today on “marital events” (meaning marriages, divorces and deaths of spouses) for 2009 — apparently it takes them a couple of years to analyze all the data. The short of it is that the modern marriage starts at 28 for guys and 26 for girls, lasts about 20 years and there are about half as many divorces as marriages going on.

One thing worth mentioning is that that last statistic is usually taken to mean that “half of all marriages end in divorce”, which is not true: they don’t actually know how many marriages end in divorce, since it would take some really complicated calculations to track all marriages individually. What the statistic is actually saying is that if we suppose 2 million people got married in 2009, then about 1 million also got divorced that year. But they’re not the same people: the ones getting divorced in 2009 probably got married sometime in the 1990s. So it’s hard to say what percent of marriages actually end in divorce, and it’s likely somewhere in the ballpark of 50%, but it could be 40% or 60% too.

Photo by Carlos Mendoza Lima

 

The report breaks things down by geography and gender too. The statistics for men and women are surprisingly similar, but geographically they are very different. For example, the religious people in the South and West tend to get married and divorced more often than their heathen counterparts in the Northeast (and to a certain extent the Midwest), who probably avoid the marriage/divorce statistic by living in sin. And in the South, where the sanctity of marriage is supposedly rivaled only by the right to bear arms, the divorce rate is the highest in the nation. The West leads in marriage rates, and is in the middle with the Midwest in divorce.

Highest marriage rates: Wyoming, Utah, North Dakota, Alaska, Arkansas, Idaho, Hawaii — basically the states that are also leading the nation in having nothing to do but throw weddings.

Highest divorce rates: Arkansas, Maine, Oklahoma, Alabama, Kentucky, Alaska, Nevada — God’s country, Sin City… and Maine

Lowest marriage rates: Maine (they almost have more divorces than weddings), New Jersey, Rhode Island, Minnesota, Pennsylvania — the Northeast… and Minnesota

Lowest divorce rates: DC, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Idaho — places where they don’t get married… and Idaho

Where you’re most likely to stay married: Idaho, North Dakota, Hawaii, Wyoming, Utah, Delaware — the wedding states, minus Alaska and Arkansas, plus Delaware

Where you’re most likely to get divorced: Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Tennessee, Rhode Island, Mississippi — the only thing New England and the Deep South have in common

Other interesting facts:

  • Over the past 40 years, every 7 years, people enter their first marriage a year later in age than they used to — it’s 28 in 2009 for guys, but it was 22 in 1970
  • The length of marriage tends to go down for people that get married multiple times; the first marriage is by far the longest. This may have a lot to do with death though.
  • The middle of the country has the longest-lasting marriages, while the coasts tend to have the shortest; maybe that’s why they call it the heartland
  • Divorced women are much more likely to have a college degree than divorced men: 68% vs 57%
  • The couples that got married in 2009 are better educated than those that got divorced or widowed

From US Census Bureau, via NPR

Ship Captains Cannot Perform Marriages

Posted by apt46 on August 5, 2011 1 comments

Another day, another myth debunked. Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope answered a question way back in 1987 about ship captains being able to officiate marriages: they have definitely not had that power since at least the 1800s. In fact, the US Navy specifically forbids it. And generally speaking, a marriage performed by a ship captain would not hold up in court as being legal. No word on where the myth comes from, but probably due to the belief that the captain is the law on a ship. There was a case in 1929 where a marriage performed by a ship captain was found to be legal, but only in the sense that it was a common-law marriage: since the parties involved exchanged vows and believed they were married, it didn’t matter who married them, whether the captain, the janitor, or the village idiot.

Common-law marriage is still legal in 11 states, only three of which are in the South (Alabama of course, Texas and South Carolina), two in New England (New Hampshire and Rhode Island), and the rest across the Midwest and West. And to bust yet another myth, there’s no requirement that the couple has to live together for seven years; the only state that comes close is New Hampshire, which requires three years. All the rest require is that the marriage is legal (i.e., no polygamists and pedophiles), that the couple lives together, and that they tell other people that they’re married.

Although why a religious institution like marriage is also a legal institution — and not a violation of the separation of church and state — to begin with, is still a mystery. Beyond of course, the desire for the Southern states to prevent interracial marriages after the Civil War. If it’s just a question of rights and benefits, surely there are other ways to declare beneficiaries.

From The Straight Dope

We Never Really Grow Up

Posted by apt46 on July 27, 2011 None comments

Because this is pretty much how every relationship goes.