Why The U.S. Divorce Rate Is Not Important

Every morning before I run out the door on my way to work, I do my best to catch up on the manosphere articles in my RSS feed.

One thing most of the blogs I read have in common is taking a critical eye toward marriage. Even the married writers spend a great deal of time offering guidance to their readers about divorce rates, how to choose the right woman if they must get married, and “marriage game” to keep her interested.

The most commonly cited statistic as a warning on marriage is the U.S. divorce rate or Western divorce rates in general. A recent article here at ROK on foreign brides got me thinking about American divorce rates v. the reported 80 to 85% success rate of Westerners who marry foreign brides, so I did a little digging.

The debate is endless regarding the true U.S. divorce rate. A quick google search will yield “proof” that the divorce rate is 18%, 31%, 47%, 50% and in a few cases, even higher. Being the intellectually curious chap that I am, I brewed a pot of coffee, logged in to my old University library with an account that still works for some reason, and started pulling raw divorce data, study abstracts, and other information on America’s divorce rate.

It turns out that the data are so damn muddled that I couldn’t reach any kind of firm conclusion. Frustrated, I turned back to the good old MSM to see if someone out there had put something together that didn’t reek of agenda. After trolling for a while, I came across this article that had some good information on divorce statistics and the interpretation thereof.

One of the problems with this measure of the divorce rate is that by using the total population as the base it includes children and unmarried adults which may distort the results.

Here we go.

The other problem is that in recent years several states discontinued reporting divorces and so in the last 10 years, these “missing” state numbers may be distorting the overall national profile.

And here’s where I stopped reading:

This number suggests that the divorce rate overall may be twice as large as the estimates by the National Center for Health Statistics.

Numbers “suggest” that they “may” be incompatible with another metric that “suggests” it “may” also be wrong, but is still twice the rate of another analysis that’s probably wrong too.

Now I’m fully aware of how difficult finding a true divorce rate would be given the variances in collection methods and incomplete reporting, so I’m not busting on the author’s article by any means. It just goes to show how nobody really knows what the U.S. divorce rate is.

I started thinking about my own friends and acquaintances and their divorce rates since I’m in that demographic of people who supposedly experience lower rates of divorce: I’m a white guy between the ages of 30 and 40, I got me one of them there fancy graduate skool degrees in a relevant subject that doesn’t suck ass, I have a big boy job that pays me a big boy salary, my parents are still married, and I have access to a lot of educated women.

I’m a certified, bonafide, sanctified SWPL kind of guy; a perfect candidate for marriage.

Put off by the fact that I wasted two hours of my life looking through bogus or incomplete divorce data, I decided to put together a list of my male friends and male coworkers who have been or are currently married *and* who also mirror my demographic. I came up with a sample size of N=31. It turns out that 35.4% of them have been divorced at least once.

Now that’s about as unscientific as it gets, and I know this. But the true realization for me came as I was looking at the list of men who were married and have never been divorced. These are the supposedly “good marriages” that will stand the test of time – though it’s important to note that the in-progress marriages in my sample ranged from 3 to 11 years. But here’s what struck me:

Out of all the currently married men (whether they had ever been divorced or not), I wouldn’t want to trade places with any of them.

Isn’t this the real metric the manosphere should be concerned about? Divorce rates be damned. How many of your married friends or coworkers would you want to trade places with? I’m not talking about your fathers and grandfathers, I’m talking about the men in your demographic – a true representative sample of yourself.

Yes, I have one friend who pulled a Christian girl off a farm in Southern Indiana seven years ago and they seem plenty happy. She went to local community college while living at home with her parents, and then finished her bachelor’s degree online, again, while living at home. She’s downright pleasant, they treat each other well, and you can tell they truly care for each other. I think she worked as a receptionist at a mom-and-pop shop that sells feed grain or some shit, then quit two months after becoming pregnant with their first child.

She’s also ugly as sin, but he’s a goober so it doesn’t matter. I’m not suggesting that her ugliness has something to do with her being a good wife, but I’m sure it doesn’t hurt.

So forget about the divorce statistics and ask yourself how many married men in your demographic would you want to trade places with. How many women have you banged that if banging them meant you’d be coupled with them forever, you would have just walked away? How often do you look into the glazed-over eyes of a married friend or coworker and thought to yourself “Man, I wish I could be that guy!”

That’s the metric we should be focusing on, and since it’s personal, it takes into consideration geography, age, and a host of other variables to create a customized risk assessment. In the area where you live, with the girls you and your peers have access to, how many married men in your age, education, and financial demographic would you like to eternally trade places with?

Disclaimer: The author formally recognizes that not all women are like that, your girlfriend, fiancée or wife definitely isn’t like that, and none of our female readers are like that. Furthermore, it is noted that any man who dies without having children is a biological loser who cannot be called an Alpha male since he will not have offspring to carry on his royal bloodline or defend the motherland against the Hittites. Finally, the author recognizes that all of our married reader’s relationships are uh-mazing due to their Alpha supremacy and tight game. In fact, just ignore this article completely. Thanks for reading.

Don’t Miss: Don’t Believe The Lies About Foreign Brides