Good News on Marriage: A Recent Rise in Durability

Mary Frances Boyle / July 01, 2011

A new chart from Heritage FamilyFacts.org bears good news: Recent marriages are lasting longer. This is great for happily committed couples, and it also represents a boon for civil society because of the social and economic benefits marriage provides.

Commitment to marriage steadily declined from 1960 to the early 1980s, but as the chart highlights, this pattern is starting to reverse. Nearly 75 percent of the women who married for the first time in the early 1990s reached their 10th wedding anniversaries. This is a three-percentage-point increase compared to women who married in the early 1980s. (more…)