We've all heard the oft-quoted dictum that the United States has a 50% divorce rate.
It's enough to make you sour on the whole idea of marriage.
After all, if half of all marriages end in divorce, do love and marriage really go together at all? Fortunately, that's not really the case.
At the end of the day, the divorce rate is a statistic, and just like all other statistics, it can be construed to mean just about anything.
To quote Mark Twain: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
" The problem with claiming that 50% of divorces end in divorce is that it's such a broad claim that it's almost meaningless when you consider it in terms of your own marriage.
While it's true that, of all the marriages people enter into in the United States, roughly half of them end in divorce, it isn't the whole story.
When you factor in all first-time marriages, roughly 41% of them end in divorce.
One of the theoretical reasons for this is that people in the United States tend to get married at a younger age than those in Europe and Asia.
People who get married under the age of 24 have a nearly 50% divorce rate.
Marriages in which the partners were older when they got married have a much lower divorce rate.
Conversely, marriages which involve children are much less likely to end in divorce.
Another factor causing the divorce rate to be a bit swelled is that subsequent marriages after divorce have a much higher rate of divorce.
Second marriages end in divorce about 60% of the time, while third marriages end in divorce a whopping 70% of the time.
So, for the sake of statistics, let's say that a man gets married to a woman when he's 23.
They get divorced, and he goes on to marry another woman several years later.
This marriage ends, and he marries another time, which also ends in divorce.
That's a total of three marriages for him, all of which have ended in divorce.
Meanwhile, another couple married at 28 and have been happily (more or less happily, anyway) since.
Of the four marriages in question, three of them have ended in divorce.
In a way, the statistics tend towards a higher divorce rate, almost by nature.