224 DIVorCe wItH DeCenCY
• Home builders are predicting that by 2015, 60 percent of all
new residences will be designed with two separate master
bedroom suites (i.e., separate sleeping quarters for husbands
and wives). Query: what does that do for couples’ sexuality/
marriages?).
• One-half of all divorces happen by year seven of the mar-
riage. Second unions that end in divorce likewise do so after
seven years.
• Fewer than half the couples who first got married in the late
1970s made it to their 25th anniversary.
• Of the women who first got hitched in the late 1980s, only
57 percent reached their 15th anniversary, compared with 79
percent of brides in the late 1950s.
• Marital satisfaction increases with each successive year (once
you have made it past the first twenty-five years, that is).
• At any given time, twenty-six million people around the
globe are looking for love on the World Wide Web on-line
dating sites.
• The average working woman spends 102 minutes per day
caring for her family, versus 48 minutes per day for men.
• Eighty percent of Americans were married in 1950, now only
52 percent.
• One in five men with kids is a stay-at-home-dad nowadays.
• As of 2006, America’s annual national divorce rate has
dropped to 3.6 per 1,000 people, the lowest since 1970 and
well off its peak of 5.7 in 1981.
• The number of unmarried couples living together is up ten-
fold since 1960.
• The U.S. state with the highest divorce rate: Nevada at 6.9
percent. The lowest divorce rate, at 2.1 percent is in the state
of Pennsylvania.Here are some divorce statistics/factoids that are specific to
Hawai‘i where I practice. Many of them are comparable to similar
trends around the country.
• Approximately 5,000 divorces are processed per year in
Hawai‘i.