James Sexton

you know, the world sort of came out of lockdown, there was a glut and backlog of divorces that happened.

So really you have to look at the data in a long-term way and you have to sort of try to control for all of those variables.

But the marriage rate has gone down.

The divorce rate has gone down as a function of the marriage rate going down.

But what's frightening in terms of what you'd call like the refined divorce rate is,

Is it's really the majority of Americans and people don't like to talk about that, but the majority of Americans don't have a college education and the college education framing is a very important piece of this because there is such a disparity in.

in the divorce rate when people are college-educated versus not college-educated.

And again, I'm not sure of the reasons behind that.

I'm sure there are people more qualified than me to answer that.

But if one in four planes crashed, people just wouldn't fly.

And so even if you just said 25% of marriages catastrophically fail in divorce, I think that would be a very frightening number.

But again, I still think legal separation and unhappily married, like there's what's called the Tashiro estimate, which was a psychologist named Tai Tashiro wrote a book called The Science of Happily Ever After.

He talks about the percentages of people who express real satisfaction in their marriage.

And I'll tell you, some of the stuff

that comes out of that is absolutely terrifying.

Because what you've got basically is 42 to 45% of people that formally divorce, 3 to 4% separate without divorcing, and 14 to 19% report their marriage as unhappy, loveless, feeling obligated to stay, and actually report that they dislike their spouse.

Now, I don't think anybody who gets married...

is saying that would be success.

That if I could maintain that level of connection, that would be success.

So again, are we looking at marriage as like an endurance race that if you don't divorce, you won?