Causes of Divorce the United

Causes of Divorce

The United States' escalating divorce rates can be attributed to several factors, the greatest of which is the tendency of couples to get married too early, and later in the marriage, the increasing frequency couples where one or both marriage partners engage in adultery is the single largest influencer of increasing divorce rates according to Amato & Wallin (2001). During the first four years of marriage in fact, those partners who married at or before 18 have a 9.6 times higher risk of divorce according to David (1997) and also the findings of the CDC (1997) and their extensive research on the topic.

Many researchers point past the readily apparent reasons for divorce including alcohol and drug abuse, lack of communication, physical and verbal abuse to a more fundamental point that drives the growing divorce rate, and that is the shared levels of education and religiosity, a finding by Niehuis & Huston (1999). These researchers also contend and show through a series of primary research projects that the best predictor of divorce happening early in a couples' married life is if the marriage occurs before the age of 18 (which aggress with other studies) and the in each phase of the marriage, religiosity is what makes or breaks the marriage itself. In other words the researchers are saying that the single best predictor, apart from adultery, of a divorce occurring in the later in a marriage is a major philosophical difference between mates on the issue of religion. This is so strong of a correlation in their analysis that it generated an R2 correlation coefficient of.84 at the.01 level of confidence according to Niehuis & Huston (1999). In summary, the escalating divorce rate is attributable to the action of partners, yet more fundamental than that, where a difference in religiosity occurs at any point, yet most typically at the later stages of a marriage, the higher the divorce rate.