ber of divorces relative to the «at-risk population» (that is, those who are currently married), it can be noticed a similar decline in the divorce rate over the last 25 years falling from a peak of 22.8 divorces per 1,000 married couples in 1979 to 16.7 divorces in 2005. The sustained decline in divorce over the past quarter century provides an ideal testing ground for assessing the validity of alternative theories of why the divorce rate rose in the late 1960s and into the 1970s; unfortunately, such tests are mostly absent from the existing literature [4, p. 39]. Asses the reasons of marriage and divorce, it necessary to look at material conditions of different generations and decades when marriage occurred. For those marriages that occurred in the 1950s through the 1970s, it is known a lot about their eventual outcomes, and the figure clearly shows that the probability of divorce before each anniversary rose for each successive marriage cohort until the 1970s. For marriages that occurred in the 1970s, 48 ??percent had dissolved within 25 years [5, p. 34]. For this specific cohort the popular claim that «half of all marriages end in divorce.» Yet for first marriages that occurred in the 1980s, the proportion that had dissolved by each anniversary was consistently lower, and it is lower again for marriages that occurred in the 1990s. While it will take several more decades for the long-term fate of recent marriages to be realized, it appears likely that fewer than half of these recent marriages will dissolve.of the concern over the high divorce rates in the 1970s stemmed from the impact of divorce on children. Indeed, as divorce rose in the 1960s and 1970s so too did the number of children involved in each divorce. In the 1950s, the average divorce involved 0.78 children; by 1968 that number had risen to 1.34. However, since 1968, the average number of children involved in each divorce has fallen dramatically, and in 1995 the average was 0.91, only slightly above the 1950 average. Similar patterns are evidence in data on the proportion of divorces that involve any children. While the collection of detailed national divorce statistics ceased in 1995, recent data from individual states suggest that the number of children involved in divorce has continued to decline over the subsequent decade [20, p. 194]. Statistics of the 21 st century shows increasing number of divorces among all social and age groups. All the reasons mentioned above continue to play huge negative impact on marriage institution in America.2008 35% of first marriages among women aged 15-44 were disrupted (ended in separation, divorce or annulment) within 10 years. Beyond the 10-year window, population survey data is lacking, but forecasts and estimates provide some understanding. It is commonly claimed that half of all marriages in the United States eventually end in divorce, an estimate possibly based on the fact that in any given year, the number of marriages is about twice the number of divorces. Using 1995 data, National Survey of Family Growth forecast in 2002 a 43% chance that first marriages among women aged 15-44 would be disrupted within 15 years. More recently, having spoken with academics and National Survey of Family Growth representatives, sociologists estimated in 2012 that the lifelong probability of a marriage ending in divorce is 40% - 50% [9, p. 45]. Rates have been dropping during the last few decades. Data indicates that marri...
