Life after Divorce 205
Re-Tying the Knot: Some Pros and Cons
Choose your life’s mate carefully. From this one decision will come ninety per-
cent of all your happiness or misery.
—Anonymous
There was a fascinating 2007 Time magazine article that made a
rather compelling case for the fact that the American love affair
with matrimony is as strong as ever. According to Time, “more
than 90 percent of all women have eventually married in every
generation” ever since as far back as the mid-1880s. For even the
more cynical current generation of today’s women, it is projected
that at least 80 percent will marry. Just look at how much gets
spent on weddings... more than $50 billion dollars a year.
So on the one hand we still love love and the institution of mar-
riage. On the other hand, however, we face the frequently touted
and semi-shocking recent statistic that nowadays most current U.S.
households are no longer home to a married couple. This is indeed
an accurate demographic statistic—but only barely. Furthermore,
it also includes never weds, “later to weds,” and some entirely too
young widows. However you explain it though, married-couple
households today make up only 49.7 percent of America’s total.
Americans are also waiting longer than ever to wed. And it’s
undoubtedly no coincidence that the rise in marrying age almost
exactly mirrors the rise in life expectancy. In 1970 the average
American woman could expect to live 74.7 years; by 2003 she
could expect to make it to 80.1—a 5½-year difference. Similarly, in
1970 the median age at which women first wed was 20.8; in 2003
it was 25.3—a 4½-year difference. Similar trends apply to men.
Folks are waiting longer to get married, at least in part, because
they are living longer.
So it still appears to be true that Americans continue to love
marriage—and the conventional wisdom has always been that the
married state is good for you from a mental, physical, psychologi-
cal and financial standpoint. Lately, however, many have begun
to question whether being wed really does make you happier.
Bell DePaulo is a commentator in this field who claims that
people who marry, and then divorce, are not as happy as those