U.S. divorce rate falls to lowest level since 1970

Correlation with education
“What we’re doing is making sure the poor have access to some help and support,” Coffin said. “So many people never heard of marriage education before.”

One of the researchers whose studies detected the “divorce divide” is University of Maryland sociologist Steve Martin. Comparing marriages from the early 1970s to those of the early ’90s, Martin found that the rate of breakups within 10 years of marriage dropped by one-third among college-educated women while remaining stable among less-educated women.

“Overall, marriages will become more stable only if the lower two-thirds of the population starts behaving like the top third,” Martin said. “There’s a lot of debate — is that possible? Can marriage training or other programs give all couples the sort of relationship skills that people imagine college graduates have?”

Stephanie Coontz, who teaches history and family studies at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., says divorces are dropping in the college-educated sector because many spouses “are learning how to negotiate marriages based on less rigid gender roles than in the past.”

“College-educated wives are more likely to work than less-educated wives, and a recent study found that unlike the past, a wife’s work now tends to stabilize marriage,” she said.

Glenn Stanton, a family policy expert with the conservative ministry Focus on the Family, suggested one factor behind the declining divorce rate was simply a societal revulsion toward the high rates of recent decades.

“In the past 30 years, we’ve had more divorce than any culture has ever had,” he said. “A lot of young adults now are coming out of the family upheaval of the ’70s, and they are cohabiting out of fear. They don’t want to mess up the nice clean carpet of marriage — they saw their parents do that.”

'Marriage wasn't for us'
Amber Settle and her partner, Andre Berthiaume, are among the couples who have opted not to marry, even as they celebrate 10 years of living together and raise a 3-year-old daughter in Chicago. Each teaches computer science at DePaul University, each is 39, each has parents who divorced.

“We decided a long time ago that marriage wasn’t for us,” Settle said. “We have a number of friends who got married, and we’ve supported them. But it’s not something we want to do.”

Among their reasons, she said, was their belief it would be unfair to get married until same-sex couples across the country had the same opportunity.

Observing her married friends, Settle sees some wonderful relationships and some on the rocks. Married or cohabiting, she said, “you have to work hard at a relationship to make it work.”

The per capita divorce rate is different from another method of calculation — the percentage of marriages that will eventually end in divorce or separation. Many experts discount the popular notion that one of two U.S. marriages end in divorce, and suggest the breakup rate, which is hard to calculate, has stabilized in recent years at between 40 percent and 45 percent.

Gaetano Ferro of New Canaan, Conn., president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, says overall national trends haven’t had a noticeable effect on his fellow divorce lawyers.

“I’ve been active in the academy two decades plus,” Ferro said. “I’ve never heard anyone say, ’We’re in trouble. There are fewer divorces.”’

But North Carolina divorce lawyer Lee Rosen, while reporting that business for his large firm is booming, says he has noticed a trend toward increased realism and civility among couples with marital strains. Many seek mediation as they split, and arrange for joint legal custody of their children.

“People are coexisting more peacefully, whether they stay together or come apart,” Rosen said. “They are more contemplative and serious about their relationships, and I see people stay together who once would have allowed the marriage to unravel.”

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