> > Who says divorce is the expected outcome of marriage?
> Statistics.
[citation needed]
> What's more likely, divorce or marriage until death?
Probably, the latter. The popular "half of all marriages will end in divorce" was from near the peak in the particular methodology it used, and was based on projecting the then-past trend and making an estimate of lifetime probabilities for new marriages based on that trend extending out into the future, and even then it was a result of second and subsequent marriages having significantly higher divorce rates than earlier marriages, with first marriages, even in the projection, being substantially below 50% probability of ending in divorce.
But its actually really hard to get a good idea of what is more likely when you don't have a way of actually sampling the space of interest (which would take reaching into the future), and various methodologies of estimating divorce risk (and even whether the rate at which marriages end in divorce is really rising or falling) come to different answers.
emodendroket|9 years ago
gnaritas|9 years ago
Statistics. What's more likely, divorce or marriage until death?
dragonwriter|9 years ago
> Statistics.
[citation needed]
> What's more likely, divorce or marriage until death?
Probably, the latter. The popular "half of all marriages will end in divorce" was from near the peak in the particular methodology it used, and was based on projecting the then-past trend and making an estimate of lifetime probabilities for new marriages based on that trend extending out into the future, and even then it was a result of second and subsequent marriages having significantly higher divorce rates than earlier marriages, with first marriages, even in the projection, being substantially below 50% probability of ending in divorce.
But its actually really hard to get a good idea of what is more likely when you don't have a way of actually sampling the space of interest (which would take reaching into the future), and various methodologies of estimating divorce risk (and even whether the rate at which marriages end in divorce is really rising or falling) come to different answers.