Something disturbed my mathematical senses late last night: divorce rate. I had heard that the “Half of all marriages end in divorce” mantra that has plagued our society ever since I can remember, was in fact false. But I had not heard the actual numbers, and seen no real data to back up this claim.

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Given the ridiculous amount of disheartening statistics we hear on a daily basis, I thought it might be worth investigating this more. So I went to the best source I know for actual statistics of Americans: the US Census Bureau. On their website, I found this PDF of all the data regarding marriage from the 2001 census:

http://www.census.gov/prod/2005pubs/p70-97.pdf

I realize this data is a decade old, but considering how long the 50%-falsehood has been around, I see no reason to ignore it for this purpose.

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Table 3 in that PDF gives a very thorough breakdown of marriages and divorces, by number, sex, age, etc. Really, only the first column matters: the totals. Therein lies the truth.

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In 2001 as it turns out, among the total number of men and women surveyed (I averaged the percentages between the two groups), 72.25% had ever married and only 22% had ever been through a divorce. Obviously 22% is not half of 72%, but because percentages can be misleading, I ran some additional calculations:

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The total number of people surveyed was 219,627. Meaning 158,680 had married and 48,427 had divorced. In other words, only 30.5% of all marriages had ended in divorce! Or about 3 out of 10…

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The difference in 30% versus 50%? The difference is between betting your life on calling “heads” in a coin toss, versus rolling higher than a 2 on a die. I’m not much of a betting man, but I much prefer those odds…