The claim that half of all marriages end in divorce has been a prevalent topic online for years. The statistic often sparks debate, regularly surfacing in social media posts and discussions. However, delving deeper into this claim reveals a more complex picture than the straightforward figure suggests.
For instance, in July 2024, Alex Falcone, a Los Angeles-based comedian and writer, posted a video on Instagram, saying that the claim that 50% of marriages end in divorce was false. As of this writing, the post had reached more than 2.1 million views and 149,000 likes.
In the video, Falcone said:
It's time for some unlearning, and today: 50% of marriages end in divorce. Or do they? Nope. first of all, it's a dumb thing to measure. Until the 1970s, divorce laws were very different. So really it would have been a measurement of what percentage of couples are trapped in bad situations. Also, it's a dumb statistic because it doesn't take into consideration length. So the couple that held hands while the water came in on the Titanic counts exactly the same as someone who got hit by a bus on their honeymoon. Oh, but also, it doesn't take into consideration overachievers. Some people are really good at getting divorced. And if you stay married forever, you only get to count for one. But if someone gets divorced five times, they get to be counted five times. And even given all those caveats to the statistic, no one actually bothered to measure because it would be too hard.
He continued, claiming that the statistic was an example of "lazy math":
That way you'd actually do this is you would track every single marriage that's ever happened, and you'd sort them into three buckets: "Still Going," "Death Did Us Part" and "Oopsie Doodle." And the reason you can't do that is because that's too much data. So a group of people put together this statistic, and you might be wondering, did they have a political agenda? Hahaha, of course. And what they did was the lazy math. They took the number of people who got married this year, and the number of people who divorced this year, and they compared them. And those are obviously dumb numbers, because those are mostly not the same people. You're basically saying that 50% of apples end in oranges. And now the craziest part. It's not even 50. If you do their bad math on their made up numbers, you get 32%. That's the current rate. So we as a society need to split up with the 50-50 myth.
Similarly, one Reddit user wrote, "TIL '50% of US marriages end in divorce' statistic is very misleading. In reality, divorce rates peaked in the early 1980s and have been steadily decreasing since then. If current trends continue, only one third of today's marriages will end in divorce."
Another user asked under the post: "Do these statistics account for serial divorcers? If one person causes 6+ divorces, should that be weighted the same as a person who gets one divorce and then lives happily ever after with their next spouse?"
Social media posts have continued to circulate the statistics. "50% of marriages end in divorce..meaning the other half end in death," one Reddit post claimed. The claim also spread on platforms such as YouTube, X and TikTok.
Various reputable news outlets have addressed the topic over the years, consistently stating that the widely circulated statistic was inaccurate.
For instance, The New York Times debunked the claim in a 2005 article titled, "Divorce Rate: It's Not as High as You Think," reporting that the statistic was based on a flawed calculation:
The figure is based on a simple — and flawed — calculation: the annual marriage rate per 1,000 people compared with the annual divorce rate. In 2003, for example, the most recent year for which data is available, there were 7.5 marriages per 1,000 people and 3.8 divorces, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
But researchers say that this is misleading because the people who are divorcing in any given year are not the same as those who are marrying, and that the statistic is virtually useless in understanding divorce rates. In fact, they say, studies find that the divorce rate in the United States has never reached one in every two marriages, and new research suggests that, with rates now declining, it probably never will.
Similarly, in 2017 Business Insider published an article titled, "The common statistic that 'half of marriages end in divorce' is bogus." And in 2018, Time started an article titled, "The Divorce Rate Is Dropping. That May Not Actually Be Good News," with this: "Have you heard that statistic that half of all marriages will end in divorce? It's wrong."
Divorce statistics are calculated using various methods. For instance, one crude divorce rate simply calculates the number of divorces per 1,000 people in the total population per year.
On the other hand, the marriage-to-divorce ratio compares the number of marriages to the number of divorces in a given population during a specific time period. It is calculated by dividing the number of marriages by the number of divorces.
However, as The New York Times stressed in 2005, researchers say that these statistics might be misleading, as the people who are divorcing in any given year may not be the same ones marrying.
The National Center for Health Statistics, a unit of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and one of the United States' principal statistical agencies, collects and publishes data on marriages and divorces in the U.S. According to the NCHS' most recent data , the divorce rate in 2022 was 2.4 per 1,000 population, while the marriage rate was 6.2 per 1,000 total population.
Number of marriages: 2,065,905
Marriage rate: 6.2 per 1,000 total population
Number of divorces: 673,989 (45 reporting states and D.C.)
Divorce rate: 2.4 per 1,000 population (45 reporting states and D.C.)
The file below provides detailed statistics on marriage and divorce rates in the U.S. from 2000-22:
Overall, as some social media posts underscored, since the 1970s the share of marriages ending in divorce in the U.S. has been decreasing. An Our World in Data article on the topic of marriages and divorces rates said:
We see that the share of marriages ending in divorce increased significantly for couples married in the 1960s or 70s compared to those who got married in the 1950s. The probability of divorce within 10 years was twice as high for couples married in the 1960s versus those who got married in the 1950s. For those married in the 1970s, it was more than three times as likely.
You might have heard the popularised claim that "half of all marriages end in divorce". We can see here where that claim might come from – it was once true: 48% of American couples that married in the 1970s were divorced within 25 years.
But since then the likelihood of divorce has fallen. It fell for couples married in the 1980s, and again for those in the 1990s. Both the likelihood of divorce has been falling, and the length of marriage has been increasing.
(ourworldindata.org)
Below you can see a chart comparing the number of divorces per 1,000 people over the decades in select countries, including the U.S.:
"The number of marriages per 1000 persons decreased within the EU in recent decades, while the number of divorces increased. However, both of these trends seem to have slowed in recent years. An increase in the proportion of children who are born to unmarried couples was also observed," reported Eurostat, one of the directorates-general of the European Commission.
Crude divorce and marriage rates in 2022 for the European Union countries are shown below:
(ec.europa.eu)
In the chart below, you can also see crude marriage and divorce rates in the EU from 1964 to 2022:
(ec.europa.eu)
Furthermore, the graph below that we accessed via Statista, an online platform that specializes in data gathering and visualization, shows countries with the lowest divorce rates in 2020 (the most recent year for which data was available):
Other rumors on marriages and divorces we have investigated include:
