American marriages end in divorce 50% of the time?

A popular statistic that's commonly thrown around is "50% of American marriages end in divorce". Now, to the best of my knowledge, the actual American divorce rate has dropped significantly over the past decade due to a variety of reasons, one of which is that... well, fewer people are getting married in the first place. But let's assume the 50% probability is still relevant, just because. Part of this is exacerbated by people that get married and divorced multiple times, driving up the number. But all that aside, there's an interesting sociological observation to be found in this.

If anecdotal experience is any indication, the divorce rate in the military is significantly higher than that for the average population. Now, part of this is likely caused by exceptional stress, caused by things such as extended deployments, which would strain pretty much any marriage. However, another key factor is that the marriage rate in the military is also much higher than that of society in general. People marry early and often. To be perfectly frank, most of us aren't very good judges of character when we're young, so marrying your high school sweetheart statistically isn't going to end well.

So the question is: why are military personnel more likely to get married?

Well, one big reason is that married personnel get to live off base, and unmarried personnel have to live in the barracks. Anyone who's served in the military knows that life in the barracks... well, it fucking sucks. The AC is broken half the time (if you even have an AC unit in the first place!), you're subject to random inspections all the time, rooms get flipped (searched) for contraband for no good reason, and if your unit is next to an airfield, you get to enjoy helicopters and airplanes taking off and landing all the time! You can be of the same rank as another guy in the same unit, and enjoy vastly different standards of living.

When married, you get an allowance to help you acquire off-base housing, and away from all that. And you get health insurance, which isn't universal in America, and thus a strong incentive! If you tried to set up a system that would essentially encourage soldiers to get into terrible marriages, I'm pretty sure it would look something like this.

Now, the really interesting thing to me would be:
does the military/society have an interest in changing this? That is, do we want to change this system that creates an incentive to get married, with often disastrous results? Well, the cynic in me feels that the military actually likes this system, because it increases the number of kids raised in a military heavy environment, and statistically speaking, these kids are themselves more likely to enlist when they are old enough. And since society in general isn't interested in serving, having a hereditary "warrior class" works out nicely. No need for a draft if you can keep up the supply of fresh bodies to toss into the grinder.

So yeah. If you see that "50% divorce rate" in the future, you can thank the military for a large part of that.

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