Maggie's Farm

You're right, Dr. B, that seems completely backward. You'd expect it to follow the 'divorce by age' chart on the site, with divorce rates going down as people get older. In this case, you'd expect a lot of early marriages to blow up "because we were just kids and didn't know what we were doing", then for it to seriously drop as people wised up and made better choices in the future. You'd certainly expect a third marriage to be the strongest of all, since any "we were just kids" excuse has long fallen by the wayside.

And the stat that couples with children have a "slightly" lower rate than childless couples also seem odd, in the sense that it's the kids that usually hold couples on the brink together -- or so we've been led to believe by TV, movies and books. Another cultural myth shattered (sigh).

If you feel like doing a follow-up post, it would be interesting to hear your theories on the above two anomalies. Is it merely cultural, or does it go deeper than that? How do we compare with other Western nations, the world in general, and is it simply because it's a lot easier to get a divorce in America than other nations? Either way, thanks for the interesting post.