Did you know that people in Arkansas and Oklahoma tend to get hitched up more than most?
Yes, that's right. While nationally, 5% of adults who have ever been married have married three or more times, the share is about double (10%) for those states.
Texas can boast the largest number of adults who tied the knot three times or more--about 428,000 women and 373,000 men. These findings come from the Pew Research Center. They are based on the recently released 2008 American Community Survey.
A state's education level tends to be associated with the median age at marriage and inversely related with multiple marriage patterns. States with high percentages of college-educated adults tend to be those where men and women will marry at older ages. In contrast, states with low shares of college-educated adults tend to be home to adults who are more likely than average to marry three or more times.
Nationally, the share of Americans who are married is at its lowest point in half a century. Just 52% of males ages 15 and older and 48% of females in the same age group are married.
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Comments
Why is that?
I asked Stephanie Coontz, the author of Marriage, a History, why this was the case. And here's what she had to say.
"States with high proportions of poor people, low proportions of well-educated people, and high levels of religiously or socially conservative values tend to have less stable marriages," she wrote, "but also a higher belief in the importance of marriage for both self-fulfillment and social respectability." She notes that the ironic result is that people tend to marry younger, which is a big risk factor for divorce. If they divorce, they tend to remarry more quickly and more often.
While she wasn't sure why Arkansas and Oklahoma are the very top leaders in this regard, she said that they certainly fit the general profile of states where remarriages are more likely.
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