Study Sez...

This year's State of Our Unions study out of Rutgers University was good news, bad news for DOMA fans.

The good news for fans of 2-parent households everywhere is that the divorce rate is down to its lowest point since 1980. The bad news is that this can be at least partially attributed to the fact that the marriage rate is down to its lowest point since 1960. In short, fewer people are getting divorced because fewer people are getting married. When the pool of potential divorcees shrinks, a corresponding reduction in the divorce rate is expected.

To what must be the chagrin of the moral values voters, the slack is not being taken up by people making virginity pledges. About 8% of households are what was, not so long ago, quaintly called POSSLQ's: Persons of Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters. Less quaintly, shacking up. Seems that more than half of first marriages start out as cohabitations these days. Frankly, I can't think of anyone among my peers who married without first living together (though I'm sure you'll speak up if you did). Anecdotally, among my generation, getting married before combining households is more and more the anomaly. I'm not sure I could have handled getting used to being married on top of trying to sort out the details of whether to buy crunchy or creamy peanut butter and staking out territory on the bathroom counter, among the countless other adjustments to be made when moving in together.

By the way, if any of you single people out there feel pressure to pair off in some legally-binding partnership, you might be surprised at the study's findings that, in spite of how it may seem, only a little over half of the adults in the US are married.

One final plea for help here. The study says that 8% of adult men and 11% of adult women are divorced. That works out to, give or take, about 9.5% of the adult population as a whole. Seems to me it would take a lot of divorce and remarriage and divorcing and remarrying again to have that 9.5% of the population responsible for the 50% of marriages that allegedly end in divorce,with 55% of the adult population married. If someone can explain how we get so many divorces while simultaneously maintaining relatively few divorced people, I'd really like to know. My only solution, and I admit I'm bad at math, is that divorced people average around 3 marriages apiece. That would mean for everyone who is on a second marriage, someone is on a fourth. That seems a bit off.