Statistical Silliness: Wedding Dates and Divorce Rates
Weddings happen literally every day, but there are some days that are more popular than others. Romantics often get married on Valentine’s day. One of the folks that works for me got married on Friday, October 13th of the year 2000 because it was the only Friday the 13th that was a full moon and in the autumn until 2068. His mom and stepdad got married on 01/01/01 because they’re computer nerds and binary is a thing.
On the plus side, these dates clearly have meaning for the people who choose them. They’re not likely to miss an anniversary, or have difficulty figuring out how many years they’ve been married. But these kinds of dates may have a dark side: according to a Melbourne Institute study, if you picked a ‘gimmick’ date for your wedding, your risk of divorce is somewhere north of one-fifth greater than people who scheduled their wedding for whatever day as convenient.
This is not to say that the act of picking a day for your wedding somehow increases your risk of divorce. Rather, say the researchers, there are a number of “risk-associated traits” that make a couple both more likely to choose a gimmicky wedding date and more likely to get divorced. These traits include:
- Being on their 2nd (or greater) marriage,
- Having minor children from previous marriages still in their lives,
- Having a bride that is pregnant on the wedding day,
- Having bride and groom of dramatically different demographics (primarily age and education level.)
In other words, couples that are less focused on their compatibility and more focused on some other aspect of their relationship or wedding. They are also from groups that tend to feel more like divorce is a perfectly legitimate option for their future.
Does this mean anything at all? Honestly, probably not. Statistics is a fascinating field, but in general the majority of facts it is capable of generating are descriptive but not predictive. In other words, the study shows that there are a decent chunk of people who are in the “more likely to divorce” group and the “chooses a ‘gimmicky’ wedding day” group, but it doesn’t help you determine if any specific couple is in just the latter group, or in both.
So Why Talk About It At All?
What this study can teach us is this: couples who focus on the day-to-day compatibility of their relationship first, and put other concerns secondary to that, are definitively less likely to get divorced than others. So we can say with relative certainty that this study backs up the somewhat intuitively obvious claim that putting effort into making yourself compatible with your spouse is good for the long-term health of your relationship. Huzzah!
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