They weren’t sure about you. That means you either passed muster or they gave up.
I’m adopted. My birth parents never married (were actually married to other people for years) until they got in touch somehow (i’m a little fuzzy on the details) to look for me…and got married, and still are as far as i know. We haven’t talked for a couple of years.
My adoptive parents have been married for 40-something years, and really probably shouldn’t be.
My mom would rather have died than given my dad a divorce. They remained married even though they dated other people and then my dad died. This was all 30 years ago, but Mom never remarried.
My parents made it almost 25 years, but divorced when I was in high school. My mother remarried once but has since divorced and my parents remained on good terms until recently when my mother somewhat arbitrarily decided to sever ties completely with my father. Since it’s her, no logic was required.
Why does the question ask about birth parents? Wouldn’t it be more informative to see if a person’s adoptive parents are still married, in situations where the distinction is relevant?
Nope. Each of my 4 siblings on my mom’s side are half siblings as well as 2 on my biological father’s side. That about sums it up. Hehe.
I could have sworn the divorce rate was closer to 50%. Could someone find a reliable source?
That’s where I have always seen it as well. But that might be 1996 numbers or something.
The Wikipedia article on this one just doesn’t look very solid (based on a quick read), has that feel of someone with an odd agenda, but maybe it is right:
In the United States, in 2005 there were 7.5 new marriages per 1,000 people, and 3.6 divorces per 1,000, a ratio which has existed for many individual years since the 1960s.[1] As many statisticians have pointed out, it is very hard to count the divorce rate, since it is hard to determine if a couple who divorce and get back together in that same year should be considered a divorce, so there is in fact no predictive relationship between the two annual totals. This method does not take account of the length of marriage, just the fact that a certain percentage of people were divorced and a certain number of people are married, rendering the statistic problematic. Nonetheless, the claim that “half of all marriages end in divorce” became widely accepted in the US in the 1970s, on the basis of this statistic, and has remained conventional wisdom. Pollster Lewis Harris in his 1987 book “Inside America” wrote that “the idea that half of American marriages are doomed is one of the most specious pieces of statistical nonsense ever perpetuated in modern times.”
To establish an actual divorce rate requires tracking and analyzing significant samples of actual marriages through decades, which is not an easy task. Recent US scholarship based on such longterm tracking, reported for example in the New York Times on April 19, 2005, has found that about 60% of all marriages that result in divorce do so in the first decade, and more than 80% do so within the first 20 years; that the percentage of all marriages that eventually end in divorce peaked in the United States at about 41% around 1980, and has been slowly declining ever since, standing by 2002 at around 31%. Some have attributed this decline to the popularity of co-habitation without marriage[citation needed]. While in the 1960s and 1970s there was little difference among socioeconomic groups in divorce rates, diverging trends appeared starting around 1980 (e.g., the rate of divorce among college graduates had by 2002 dropped to near 20%, roughly half that of non-college graduates).[2][3][4]
However, this site also suggests it has dropped a great deal, and is closer to 1/3 than 1/2.
http://www.divorcereform.org/rates.html
One thing that appears to make it more difficult is that a lot of the articles, trying to be sensationalist (my interpretation), say that 1/2 of new marriages will end in divorce, which is obviously forecasting.
Poor poll options, since one of them is dead. But they were married until the death of my father.
One of my parents is married.
Same, 'cept my mom passed a couple of years back.
Yeah, dad is dead, so I guess I was hatched.
Qt3 is hardly a random sample. We’re richer and whiter than average, and instead of stressing our parents out too much we were probably just playing games as kids, heh.
I don’t have a source but from a lecture I attended a few years ago the professor mentioned that while 50% of all marriages end in divorce this statistic includes people who have divorced before…and people who divorce once are much more likely to divorce again.
I thought I heard not to long ago too that the US had a 50% divorce rate in some quip on news radio.
As for me, birth parents were divorced when I was young and my mother’s 2nd marriage (of about 15 years) sadly ended a month ago when my stepfather passed away. My sister (only sibling) divorced a couple years ago.
I recall the problem with that statistic being that they take the total number of marriages per year and compare it to the total number of divorces rather than actually tracking marriages.
Mom and Dad were married 51 years ago this week.
Dad still can’t believe the most gorgeous woman in the world married him.
Here they are at age 21:
My parents remained married until my mother’s death. My father and my stepmother have been married since 1990.
Dad married the girlfriend shortly after Mother died. The girlfriend had a few notable qualities, she was wealthy, older, a loner, and all the members of her immediate family died of cancer at an early age.
My parents have been married for 29 years, and I don’t see that stopping any time soon.