Marriage Rates: Divorce Fears To Blame For Low Rates?
From USA TODAY
… Where do these fears of divorce come from? How did they differ by gender and class?
The fears differ by social class and they differ by gender. For less-educated women, there are these strong concerns about being financially trapped in a bad relationship, and not having the means to exit it. And there were fears of what divorce would do to the children. There’s also this concern that if they get married that they’d be expected to do more domestic work, and they’re working women, so they viewed it as a double burden. Many of them thought, “why take on these extra responsibilities?”
The middle class group mentioned hearing the statistics all the time: they hear one out of two marriages is destined to fail, but it’s incorrect. Divorce rates have been going down for the last few decades. Data indicates that the marriages are lasting longer in the early 2000s than they did in the 1990s, but they don’t hear that. What they hear are the scare stories — the Kim Kardashians who are on their second divorces. They don’t realize that things have changed. Across the board, it was just a lot of this free-floating anxiety about divorce. A lot of them said they only wanted to marry once. That was the most common refrain: “I want to do it right. I only want to marry once.”
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