Love isn’t dead, but it is getting wiser.
Pew Research Center’s newly released brief on divorce lands with a hopeful headline for families: Compared with the 1980s, Americans are less likely to divorce than they used to be. That’s not wishful thinking or an over simplification, it shows up in a long arc of numbers. Researchers at Bowling Green State University track the “refined” divorce rate (divorces per 1,000 married women). That rate peaked in 1980 at 22.6 and has fallen substantially since down to 14.4. In other words, among people who do marry, marriages today are, on average, more stable than they were in the Reagan era.
Pew’s snapshot brings the story into the present tense: Divorce still touches many lives, with over 1.8 million Americans divorcing in 2023. But the broader trend is that divorce is less common than decades ago.
So what’s behind the decline? A few big trends seem to be at play.
First, Americans are marrying later, and that matters. The typical first-time bride is now around 28-29 years old, and the typical groom is about 30-31, up dramatically from newlyweds being in their late teens/early 20s in the 1980s. Waiting a little longer tends to reduce divorce risk. People bring more maturity, more education and a clearer sense of “fit.” Peer-reviewed studies find that marrying young is linked to higher odds of splitting. Translation: Couples are slowing down, choosing more intentionally, and that’s paying off.