Item from the Smart
Marriages Archive, reproduced in the Divorce Statistics
Collection
November 6, 1998
What few people seem to know is how much the MARRIAGE rate has
declined. According to S.C. Clarke, of the National Center of Health
Statistics, the marriage rate has fallen 41% since 1960, from 148 marriages
per 1,000 women to 87/1,000 in 1990. (See Advance Report of Final Marriage
Statistics 1989-1990, July 1995, Monthly Vital Statistics. The marriage
rate of 8.8/1,000 is virtually the same as the 8.7/1,000 in 1990.)
It was during this same time that the number of divorces tripled
from 390,000 in 1960 to 1,153,000 in 1997. Obviously, if the number of
marriages are in decline, there should be an equally sharp drop in the
number of divorces. In fact, as you know, the number of divorces per 1,000
has doubled from 2.2/1,000 to 4.3/1,000. In fact the number of divorces
is
down only 1.3% in 12 years, from 1,178,000 in 1986 (the year Modesto signed
America's first Community Marriage Policy) to 1,153,000 in 1997.
In 16 cities with Community Marriage Policies, the number of
divorces is declining at least 10 times the U.S. decline. For example,
Columbus, GA's divorces are down from 1,008 in 1996 to 950 in 1997, a drop
of nearly 6%. Columbus signed its policy on Feb. 28, 1997. So its
divorces are dropping more than 4 times as much as the 1.3% U.S. decline
in
less than one-twelfth of the time. A 50-fold faster decline is
statistically significant.
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