Intergalactic Memo Marriage and Divorce

Let’s talk about marriage today. Don’t worry, I’m an expert—I’ve been married almost 38 years and I have a license, which means I’m a licensed professional, like a teacher or a doctor.
On the way home from work this afternoon, I heard what sounded like a PSA, although there was no credit given, and the voice-over sounded like Dick Morris, but I can’t imagine Dick ever doing something for free, or out of any altruistic impulse, so its kind of a mystery.
Whatever . . . . in the ad we are told that despite everyone’s assumptions, the divorce rate has been going slowly but steadily down, since 1970, a little bit every decade. Counter-intuitive huh? There wasn’t even a point to the piece that I could discern. But it got me thinking. (Are we noticing a recurring theme here?)
Unless you’ve been living on the Nautilus with Captain Nemo since the turn of the century (the last century) you have probably noticed a decline, not only with the success and value of marriage, but as a critical social lynchpin as well. It has been battered, denigrated, scoffed-at, maligned, ridiculed as hopelessly outdated and bourgeois, misunderstood, taken for granted, abused and rendered morally impotent. (Is there a pun in there somewhere?)
A significant portion of this decline, I believe, is the urban legend that divorce had been on the rise all this time. The belief that divorce is increasing has a tendency to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, which places the thought in people’s minds that the stigma of divorce is loosing it’s behavior-tempering animus, gives us the idea that marriage is a convenient social contract and nothing more.
But what would happen if that belief were brought into serious doubt? What would happen if marriage was seen to be more healthy than it currently is? Would we care? What would happen if we discovered that divorce has been declining for thirty years? Would our attitudes, our unconscious, collective identity shift back to believing in a more reasonable and nurturing—and dare we say it, sacred—institution?
Now let’s add something explosive to the mix and see what kind of boom we get. What if the state and national divorce rate percentages were skewed enough to give us a false reading? Of course I realize the chances of this are extremely slim—because we’re dealing with government statisticians, and the dreaded ‘Computer Modelers’—that the question is just silly, but bare with me. The states all calculate the divorce-rate ratio (to marriage, which would be the opposite) with the same formula. They compare the number of marriages in the state, in a given year, to the number of divorces, (hopefully in the same state and the same year, but who knows?) then some kind of mystical mumbo-jumbo called long division takes place, and before you can say “I do!”, we have a fifty percent divorce rate.
But! This is a spurious comparison, and everybody knows it. (you probably just haven’t thought about it yet). In order to get a valid percentage, we have to compare the number of divorces in a given year, in a given state, (It’s important to be specific with these bureaucratic bean-counters because they’re so easily distracted by things like Brittany Spears sans underwear) with the total number of existing marriages in the same state. Think about it now, don’t let it scare you. The number of divorces is relevant as a ratio to all the marriages, not the marriages in the same year. And when you do that math (I assume, because, you know, I’m never gonna do it) you find the actual rate is more like fifteen percent. (Again, I made that up, but I’m sure it’s close). I have anecdotal evidence too. All the people I know have never been divorced, almost. Okay, my brother has, twice, and a few of my friends, and Elizabeth Taylor, but hey, Even Bill Clinton figured how to keep a marriage going.
Oh yeah, there’s another well-know method of forcing marriage to win. You can add up the years. Take all the marriages in the state and add up the total number of years they represent. Then take all the divorces and add up all the years those people were married, and marriage beats the crap out of divorce. I think I’ve run rings around the bean-counters, logically.
Heck, my great-great grandfather Dudley had five wives for like, ever, and he didn’t divorce any of them. Although Jane’s descendants are pretty seriously pissed at the rest of us and I don’t know why. Jane was a Piute.
To summarize, marriage is almost always better than divorce, despite the mountains of anecdotal data to the contrary. God likes marriage, because He really likes kids, which is why He gave us the institution in the first place, to create a commitment powerful enough and deep enough to make sure the kids (which, c’mon, we made) were taken care of. And you thought it was about you . . .