How Marriage Can Change You
Topic: Science and Culture
Well as the wedding day approaches (Aug 21st) I'll be blogging less and less (as I'm being swamped with wedding errands).

So how will marriage change us (that is Jenni and I)?

Well on the personal front - not much. We've been living together for almost seven years and we've been planing our lives together for almost that same amount of time.

So demographically how will we change?

Good question!

-Married people live longer.

-Atheists are less likely to get divorced - than any other religious (or non-religious) group.

-North easterners are less likely to get divorced than any other regional group in the US.

Now why is this?

Note that the original stats are from the BARNA group, a pro-religion "think-tank". The stats are now no longer available from their website, as their conclusions are ...

If you want to see how perplexed they are about these stats read this press release and see how they twist the numbers so that atheists have an apparent divorce rate as high as religious and born again Christians!

Here are the original stats:

Religion, % have been divorced

Jews 30%
Born-again Christians 27%
Other Christians 24%
Atheists, Agnostics 21%

Perhaps Atheists are just more likely to be open, tolerant and less rigid in their world views than other groups. The same can be said about cosmopolitan (and population dense) Northeast (19% divorce rate). Also Atheists and agnostics are more likely to sample potential mates. In addition many partners actually live together before marriage hence they get to know their marriage partners and better assess compatibility. Atheists also tend to be more educated, and studies (although not listed here) have shown that divorce goes down with education level.

[Update 8/25/05]

I came across the work of Steve P. Martin from the Department of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park.

He has an interesting power point presentation on how college level education decreases the divorce rate among women. I've copied one figure from his presentation displaying the 10 year divorce rate of women (the % of married woman that get divorce in 10 years), with and without a 4 year college education.

[end of update]

In the end, real world experience, education and tolerance do more to predict happy marriages than religion.

So getting back to Jenni and I, looks like we'll be together for a long happy life.

Refs for stats:
http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_dira.htm
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/about/major/dvs/mortdata.htm

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0923080.html