Figure 3 in this NCFMR paper on remarriage rates doesn’t include the actual values of the data being charted, so I pulled the chart into GIMP, blew it up, and estimated the point values based on the pixel height of the bars. The values may be slightly off, but this should be very close*.
What I’ve wanted to do for some time is compare the shape of the women’s divorce rate curve with the remarriage curve. With this more granular data on divorce rates by age, I can now compare the divorce rate curve I calculated using the Census and ACS data with the remarriage curve. I set them with separate scales so the shapes of the curves are easier to compare**:
Edit: The slope of the remarriage curve is steeper than the slope of the divorce curve in the chart above. This isn’t obvious because I’m using different Y axis scales. I should have made this more clear. Here is a chart using the same scale for both:
I’ve focused on the stats for women because it is women who are driving the divorce rates. As you can see, divorce rates track very closely with women’s opportunity to remarry. Note also that the old canard that as women age their desire to be married goes away; if this were true the divorce curve would slope upward, not downward.
*I’ve contacted the NCFMR asking for the actual data points, and if they provide them I will update the chart in this post.
** For the < 25 category this represents 20-24 for remarriage rates and 15-24 for divorce rates.
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