IPFS News Link • Marriage
Most young adults expect marriage for life: study
• The Raw Story.com Eighty-six percent of young adults in the United States expect their
marriages to last a lifetime, even though half of all marriages end in
divorce, a study released Wednesday suggests.
The Clark University Poll of Emerging Adults also found that 57 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 feel it is wrong for two people to have sex if they are not emotionally involved with each other.
And 73 percent of the 1,029 respondents from across the United States who participated in the study believed that couples should walk down the aisle and exchange wedding vows before having a child.
Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a psychology professor at Clark University, a small liberal arts college in Worcester, Massachusetts, said the results indicated how optimistic young Americans feel about marriage.
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1 Comments in Response to Most young adults expect marriage for life: study
Could both "facts" be true? Although half of all marriages end in divorce, the population which is currently married includes many marriages among people previously divorced. An individual who has married three, four, or five times skews the statistic for marriage failure rate significantly. If only one third of first marriages fail, and on average the partners in a failed first marriage go on to experience one additional divorce, the overall marriage failure rate would be 50%. The overall marriage failure rate is not predictive of the chance of success for a first marriage! It may be perfectly reasonable for couples beginning their first marriage to have an 85% or better expectation of lifelong marriage.