One In Two? Not True

For years the state of the marriage union in the U.S. has been widely proclaimed as dismal. Citing high divorce rates, preachers and social commentators have bemoaned the institution as virtually doomed unless American couples mend their fickle ways. To support their cries of alarm, they have often cited a commonly accepted statistic: one out of every two marriages ends in divorce.

Not so, insists Pollster Louis Harris. After studying the divorce rates and surveying some 3,000 married people, as well as unmarried couples, Harris issued two reassuring findings last week: only one in eight marriages ends in divorce, and fully 89% of those surveyed say their relationships with their partners are satisfying. "The prophets of doom could not be any more wrong," says Harris. "The American family is surviving."

So what happened to all those marriages that were supposedly on the rocks? Is reconciliation suddenly sweeping the country? Harris claims that many experts looked at the stats too hastily. The National Center for Health Statistics, for example, reported that in 1981 there were 2.4 million * marriages and 1.2 million divorces. Many misinterpreted those figures to mean that half of all nuptial knots untie.

Harris notes that in 1981 there were also 54 million marriages that "just keep flowing along like Ol' Man River." In other words, only 2% of all the marriages then in existence actually ended in divorce that year. "If you take in marriages that occurred 30 and 40 years ago and combine them with recent marriages, it certainly wouldn't turn out to be 50%," agrees Arlene Saluter, a statistician in the Census Bureau's marriage and family statistics branch.

In fact, the U.S. divorce rate, which climbed sharply in the late 1960s and '70s, declined in the early 1980s and by last year was back to its 1975 rate. The number of divorces per 1,000 Americans peaked at 5.3 in 1981; it was 5 in 1985. Although the actual number of divorces each year tripled between 1962 and 1981 to a high of 1.2 million, this too began dropping in 1982. In 1985 there were 1,187,000 divorces.

As Harris sees it, even if there is one divorce for every two marriages in any given year, that trend would have to continue for 30 years before it could accurately be said that half of all unions end in divorce. Harris' survey, which indicated considerable contentment among family members, convinces him that this will not happen. Now if only someone, married, divorced or single, could find a way to make one out of every two statistics disappear . . .