That Loving (and I Want Custody of the Kids) Feeling

Divorce. Huh. What is it good for. Huh, yeah. Absolutely nothing. Rallying the political troops to moral arms.

That liberal rag, so vehemently eschewed by those in flyover country, has an informative story about a the divorce rate. It's falling. It's been falling for decades. Still high, but 53% is better odds than Blackjack.

The story of ever-increasing divorce is a powerful narrative. It is also wrong. In fact, the divorce rate has been falling continuously over the past quarter-century, and is now at its lowest level since 1970. While marriage rates are also declining, those marriages that do occur are increasingly more stable. For instance, marriages that began in the 1990s were more likely to celebrate a 10th anniversary than those that started in the 1980s, which, in turn, were also more likely to last than marriages that began back in the 1970s.

The narrative of rising divorce is also completely at odds with counts of divorce certificates, which show the divorce rate as having peaked at 22.8 divorces per 1,000 married couples in 1979 and to have fallen by 2005 to 16.7.

Clearly, the decline in divorce and the strengthening of marriage is due to:

1) Regan's $2.2 trillion of deficit spending, particularly his Strategic Missile Defense program and it's effects of weeding out the godless Communist infiltrators that were destroying our country from within by screwing up our censuses ("Sorry Honey, there is nothing left, I spent it all on Star Wars." (please note the pun on words (note that is redundant (ahhh, I am drowning in a sea of self-reflexivity)) because, you see, Lucas came out with his in the 80s too));



2) the influx of blow in the 80s ("No problem, Honey, whatever..." cut to the getting high sequence in Requiem for A Dream.)



3) the rise of the internet, specifically pets.com ("I would divorce, but I just got a 50 lb bag of dog food delivered to my front door--your infidelity and our money worries matter no longer.").



(I learned to open and close parentheses like that in Excel.)