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American divorce rates rose from the 1950s to the 1970s peaked around 1980, and have fallen ever since. The mean age at marriage also substantially increased after 1970. I explore the extent to which the rise in age at marriage can explain the decrease in divorce rates for cohorts marrying after 1980 using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, and National Survey of Family Growth. Three different empirical approaches suggest that the increase in women's age at marriage is the main proximate cause of the fall in divorce rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the legal history of the fathers' rights social movement in America as of 2016, and it mentions issues related to family inequalities and the nation's domestic relations and divorce laws. According to the article, middle-class white men responded to increasing divorce rates in the U.S. by working to reform the country's divorce laws and welfare policies. Gender and class inequality are assessed, as well as the impacts of socioeconomic changes on the marital bargain.

This Article offers the first analysis to date of national data evaluating whether defense of marriage acts (mini or super-DOMAs) preserve and stabilize the family. After finding that they do not--just as same-sex marriage does not appear to destabilize families--the Article analyzes what variables are, in fact, associated with family stability. Specifically, those variables are: families below the poverty line; men and women married three or more times; religiosity; percent conservative versus liberal in a state; disposable income; percent with a bachelor's degree; and median age of first marriage. States that are more likely to have enacted a DOMA are also more likely to have high divorce or never-married rates. And in turn, these same states are more likely to include poor families, in which people marry young, are highly religious, and are politically conservative. Next, the Article applies the sociological concepts of moral entrepreneurism and moral panic, defined, respectively, as the practice of political groups labeling certain behavior as deviant, and the reframing of a social phenomenon in moral terms to create an exaggerated sense of fear. These concepts serve as the theoretical explanation for mini-DOMAs' continued entrenchment, even in the face of the U.S. Supreme Court's Windsor decision that struck down Section 3 of the federal DOMA. Finally, the Article offers pragmatic recommendations for achieving family stability in light of mini-DOMAs' inability to succeed in this goal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically evaluates the available data on trends in divorce in the United States. We find that both vital statistics and retrospective survey data on divorce after 1990 underestimate recent marital instability. These flawed data have led some analysts to conclude that divorce has been stable or declining for the past three decades. Using new data from the American Community Survey and controlling for changes in the age composition of the married population, we conclude that there was actually a substantial increase in age-standardized divorce rates between 1990 and 2008. Divorce rates have doubled over the past two decades among persons over age 35. Among the youngest couples, however, divorce rates are stable or declining. If current trends continue, overall age-standardized divorce rates could level off or even decline over the next few decades. We argue that the leveling of divorce among persons born since 1980 probably reflects the increasing selectivity of marriage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With divorce rates in the United States hovering at around 50%, there are clearly issues creating rifts between spouses, and domestic abuse accounts for some of this statistic. However, abuse in which the female is the primary instigator is less recognized even though common (Archer, 2000). The purpose of this continuing memoir (see Farris & Baghurst, 2013a,b) is to provide an account of one man's experiences of an abusive wife. In this section, details are recounted of mistrust, a near-death experience during a high speed chase, physical separation, efforts to discuss the marriage with church leaders, reunification, and eventual permanent separation. The overarching aim of this section of the memoir is to better understand how one man struggled to reach a decision to divorce, while overcoming some of the stigma that accompanies males who claim abuse by their partners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unmarried parents have less stable unions than married parents, but there is considerable debate over the sources of this instability. Unmarried parents may be more likely than married parents to end their unions because of compositional differences, such as more disadvantaged personal and relationship characteristics, or because they lack the normative and institutional supports of marriage, thus rendering their relationships more sensitive to disadvantage. In this article, we evaluate these two sources of union instability among married, cohabiting, and dating parents following the birth of a shared child, using five waves of longitudinal data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. Using discrete-time event history models, we find that demographic, economic, and relationship differences explain more than two-thirds of the increased risk of dissolution for unmarried parents relative to married parents. We also find that differential responses to economic or relationship disadvantage do not explain why unmarried parents are more likely to end their unions than married parents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of culture in determining divorce by examining country-of-origin differences in divorce rates of immigrants in the United States. Because childhood-arriving immigrants are all exposed to a common set of U.S. laws and institutions, we interpret relationships between their divorce tendencies and home-country divorce rates as evidence of the effect of culture. Our results are robust to controlling for several home-country variables, including average church attendance and gross domestic product (GDP). Moreover, specifications with country-of-origin fixed effects suggest that immigrants from countries with low divorce rates are especially less likely to be divorced if they reside among a large number of coethnics. Supplemental analyses indicate that divorce culture has a stronger impact on the divorce decisions of females than of males, pointing to a potentially gendered nature of divorce taboos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States, low marriage rates and high divorce rates among the poor have led policymakers to target this group for skills- and values-based interventions. The current research evaluated the assumptions underlying these interventions; specifically, the authors examined whether low-income respondents held less traditional values toward marriage, had unrealistic standards for marriage, and had more problems managing relational problems than higher income respondents. They assessed these issues in a stratified random sample that oversampled low-income and non-White populations (N = 6,012). The results demonstrated that, relative to higher income respondents, low-income respondents held more traditional values toward marriage, had similar romantic standards for marriage, and experienced similar skills-based relationship problems. Low-income groups had higher economic standards for marriage and experienced more problems related to economic and social issues (e.g., money, drinking/drug use) than did higher income respondents. Thus, efforts to save low-income marriages should directly confront the economic and social realities these couples face. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]