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For those not inclined to RAnyFA - they all agree with the GP.

That's part of it, but the biggest problem is how the 50% number is generated. It compares the number of people getting divorced to the number of people getting married in a single year. Since most people don't get married and divorced in the same year, the results are skewed. Even worse, most people currently getting divorced are baby boomers; a huge statistical bulge that recently married Gen-Xers can't hope to compensate for (much like social security). According to this report the divorce rate in the US has never been 50% even at it's peak in the 1970's and has been dropping since then.

http://www.divorcereform.org/rates.html#anchor168283

says the average length of a marriage that ends in divorce is 8 years... which means, at that point, there have probably been issues going on well over 2 years between the couple.

Could this fact, maybe, have something to do with the human attention span? Or maybe the desire to continually have something new?

Interesting, though, that it's the same length of time as a double presidential term... o.O

It's called privacy, everyone needs it, it is in no way misogynistic.

http://www.divorcereform.org/rates.html

Good luck! I don't know how long you've been married, but all things considered, I think I did alright. Anyways, thanks for busting my balls and if you ever need advice for your divorce, you can count me out. ;)

I hate these America = bad, and Europe = good arguments. The reality is that Europe and North America have divorces. http://www.divorcereform.org/gul.html. At the link you will find the real trends. But before you say, "But wait in Europe there are less divorces", you have to remember in Europe less people get married http://www.townhall.com/columnists/MaggieGallagher /2006/02/28/europes_marriage_crisis. Thus when they split they don't need a divorce.

The chance that any given marriage will fail over the entire course of that marriage is somewhere around 40%. But, that is much different than half the marriages in a department failing in such a short time.

The chance that any given marriage will fail over the entire course of that marriage is somewhere around 40%. But, that is much different than half the marriages in a department failing in such a short time.

If they've got that much ability, why is it that my Hotmail account mostly shows me ads for online dating?

This question is rhetorical, and here's why - I'm married, my Hotmail profile even says I'm married. As a matter of fact, I've never had a problem sharing that info (and I've been married for 8 years) so *every* online profile that asks that question should know that I'm married.

So, let's see... online dating targeting married people... hmm... so now thanks to technology, Fortune 500 companies are deliberately trying to sabotage the institution of marriage for the sake of profits.

Chew on that one.

Oh yeah, one more thing...

http://www.divorcereform.org/teenmoms.html

J

I don't know which ones are red and which are blue, but I am pretty sure Mass. is pretty liberal, and Wyoming is conservative. Nevada is highest, but I don't know if it counts. Partly because I imagine there are inflated divorce rates, and partly because Clark County is very liberal, and the entire rest of the state is very conservative.

But, like you said, what does this really mean? There are more reasons to divorce than cheating. Also, there are far more promiscuous people out there than the cheating divorcees.

Divorce rates in the US have never been, and are never likely to be, as high as 50%.

http://www.divorcereform.org/nyt05.html

It has been shown that the divorce rate among the most fundamentalist christians is TWICE that of the divorce rate among atheists and agnostics - and that the divorce rate between the two is pretty much linearly related to the level of fundamentalism the couple is involved in.

What's the marriage rate compared between the two groups? Are fundies getting divorced more often because they are more likely to get married in the first place?

I'd doubt this on other grounds as well:
Here's the first hit Google gives for the terms: US Divorce Rate
http://www.divorcereform.org/rates.html

Here's some of the interesting parts:
  The last-reported U.S. divorce rate for a calendar year, available as of May, 2005, is 0.38% divorces per capita per year, ... given the latest Monthly Vital Statistics Report .

Notes on understanding this per capita rate:

        * This rate is only for the states that keep track of the number of divorces.
            California, Colorado, Indiana and Louisiana do not.
        * Since every divorce involves two people, the percentage becomes somewhat more meaningful if you double it. E.g., 0.74% of the entire population gets divorced every year.
        * A rate per married people, instead of per straight population, would
be even more helpful, but we do not know of a consistent source for that number. If you do, please tell us.

So California (a state generally on the low end in terms of fundamentalists, one which had progressive divorce laws earlier than any other state and is still generally considered to have some of the most liberal (in the standard not the right-wing sense) divorce laws today, and the state with the most population of all, doesn't keep track of the needed data. That's a transcendentally huge source of error right there. Louisiana, one of the states that has the highest portion of self described fundamentalists, doesn't either, but at least they don't have 35.9 million people.
From the last note, the official rates also don't consistently collate to how many people were ever officially married so they could officially divorce. Dachannien's first closing question is presumably unanswerable without that data, which means the second question can't be answered either.

Here ya go..have fun...though I didn't see any numbers relating divorce to political affiliation.
http://www.divorcereform.org/stats.html

One thing I noticed is that the group with the lowest divorce rate were Mormons who got married in their temple. It was 6%. Mormons marrying outside the temple divorced at the "usual" rate. WTF do they do in there?

Baptists divorce at the highest rate, even higher than atheists or non-christians. That should give you some fun for a while.

Europe isn't doing much better and in some cases are doing worse.

http://www.divorcemag.com/statistics/statsWorld.sh tml

http://www.divorcereform.org/nonus.html