When love is not enough

marriage cartoon
Source: Marion Fayolle, The New York Times.

I cringe when I hear people quoting the statistic that half of all marriages end in divorce. Not only it's an outdated measure from a time in the 80s, it's also a glaring example of how popular culture has turned a multi-faceted phenonmenon into a misleading number devoid of any nuances. When I came across the data set National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979[1], I decided to wrap those numbers into interactive visualizations for the marriage trend of the boomer generation, and to show that context matters.

The patterns in these visualization are somewhat reminiscent of Eli Finkel's book The All-or-Nothing Marriage, in which he argued that American marriage has shifted from love-based to self-expressive[2], in an attempt to satisfy higher-level needs. As our society adjust to those changing expectations, he noted,

"The pursuit of self-expression through marriage simultaneously makes achieving marital success harder and the value of doing so greater."

May 25th, 2020 - 7 minute read -
D3, Data sketch, divorce in America

Data Source

The survey dataset was collected from cohorts born between 1957-1964. The study follows the participants up to the age of 46, and tracks the marriage and divorce outcomes by age group, gender, race, and education attainment. The sample size was 7,357 people and 8,112 marriages during the course of the study. The data used in the study is weighted to reflect the demographic representation of those born in the U.S. during the period 1957-1964.

Demographic trends

Of all the variables in the study, I was most interested in gender and age at marriage. Although I suspect that those factors are correlated with education attainment to some extent.

Percent of first marriages ending in divorce

Across the board, women from the boomer generation have slightly higher divorce rates than their male counterpart. It's not surprising to see the probability of divorce decreases with education attainment. But the difference is more stark for men who have Bachelor degrees vs. men who only completed high school (25% points). By contrast, the different in divorce rate for women who has Bachelor's degree vs. high school diploma is 12.1%, about half of the difference seen in the male counterpart.

The second bar chart looks at the effect of age at marriage. Here, the observation is in unit of marriage(not individuals). It shows the percentage of divorces along with the age at the start of the marriage, with a breakdown by education level.

Percent of marriages ending in divorce by age groups

This barchart shows that the percentage of divorce is below 50% for cohorts who got married at age 29 or older.

While the likelihood of divorce trends downward with older age at marriage, there're some confounding factors. For instance, age at marriage is directly proportionally to education attainment, so it's hard to attribute the lower divorce rates to just one variable (eg. education). Having a Bachelor's degree or higher signals a significantly lower chance of divorce compared to those without a degree. The biggest difference is seen in participants age 29-34, where having a bachelor's degree or higher means the chance of divorce declines by at least 17.2% compared to someone who doesn't have a degree. However, the magnitude of that difference tapers off for cohorts older than 35. The older age group is more likely to have observation samples of second or third marriages, so another confounding factor is the baseline likelihood of divorce in marriages after the first.

Distribution of marital status by gender and age groups

In this zoomable circle packing digram, the size of the inner circle is proportional to the percentage of people in that category. The overall trend is that boomer women tend to get married much earlier than men, but a higher percentage of women than men prefer to stay single after ending the previous marriage. As seen by the number of colored bubbles in each age group, women go through more marital transitions through out their lives.

If we look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs (Fig.1), it is reasonable to map the migration of the lower-level needs to higher-level needs in the context of aging.

Fig.1. Maslow's pyramid of needs (source: simplepsychology.org).

As people become better educated and accumulate more life experiences, their expectations move towards the top of Maslow's pyramid, this is where individuals seek a partner who will help them achieve personal growth and self-fulfillment. Ironically, due to this shift in value and heightened expectations the average marriage seems to be getting worse over time just as the best marriages have been getting better. Divorce rate is declining, but only because marriage is becoming more exclusive to privileged groups[3]. According to Finkel, the desire for self-actualization goes beyond compatibility, it also requires a system of mutual support based on deep insights of each other's essence and aspirations, as well as being adaptable. That kind of understanding through out the course of the relationship hinges on the investment of time and energy from the couple.

To quote Portia de Rossi,"It's good to be loved. It's profound to be understood."



REFERENCE

[1] Marriage and divorce: patterns by gender, race, and educational attainment, U.S.Bureau of Labor Statistics.

[2] Finkel, E.J. The All-or-Nothing Marriage, 2017.

[3] Luscombe, B. The Divorce Rate Is Dropping. That May Not Actually Be Good News, TIME.

[4] Mike Bostock's circle example, https://gist.github.com/mbostock/7607535