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Dentin comments on [Link] More ominous than a [Marriage] strike - Less Wrong
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Perhaps not everyone, but definitely most. Most people, from my experience, view divorce as 10% likely. The 'relatively uncommon' statistics you reference above are on the order of 50%. That's a pretty big gap.
You're comparing the general population 50% with Bogus's "at least for mid-to-upper class folks." It makes a big difference, though I don't have statistics in directly comparable form.
I suspect there's a small part of the population which keeps getting married and divorced, and they skew the statistics.
The 50% divorce by 25 years statistic is for first marriages.
It also seems to be based on a statistical misinterpretation. The divorce rate and marriage rate per 1000 people have both been declining for decades, and the divorce rate hovers around half of the marriage rate, but this doesn't equate to 50% of marriages ending in divorce. Since divorces generally occur a significant time after the marriage, and the marriage rate is also declining, comparing the present rate of divorce to the present rate of marriage results in a misleading figure.
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to locate any raw statistics which would allow me to discern the true rate. This writer paints a much rosier picture, but he also doesn't link to the actual statistics he used or what process he used to determine the rates he gives, so I'd be wary about taking it at face value. I haven't found any other resource so far that attempts to put numbers to the true rate, although I have found some others which note the problems with the conventional statistics.
My number is from from Stevenson-Wolfers (alt alt), particularly Figure 2, page 37. It is not a misinterpretation. To be more precise, about 50% of first marriages from the 70s made it to 25 years. First marriages from 80s appear to a do a little better, heading for maybe 55%, but it is too soon to tell [this previously said that it was too soon only because of binning decisions, but that's wrong; the problem is that the data was collected in 2001].
That paper also reflects the consensus of all the other resources I've been able to find in that the rate of divorce seems to be declining since the 70s; it may be too early to be overwhelmingly certain, but the evidence suggests that not only are the odds better for a marriage in the 1980s than the 1970s, but that the odds are better still in the 1990s, and then better than that in the 2000s.
Could you point to the comparison of the 2000s to the 1990s? As to the 90s vs the 80s, the difference is trivial.
That the rate has continued to fall through the 2000s I did not take from that paper, but from the other sources I encountered while searching for the raw statistics. A bit more searching suggests some disagreement on the state of the trend between different agencies.
The raw divorce rate might fall purely for demographic reasons, such as the aging population. I think Stevenson and Wolfers talk about this.