Both Marriages and Divorces are Down During the Pandemic

and economic uncertainty. Then Steve Man, reporter at Bloomberg News joins us for why these rates may be falling and whether they might tick back up after the pandemic is over. Thanks for joining us, Ben, sure thing. I wanted to take a look back at what's been going on throughout this pandemic with regards to relationships, divorces, and marriages specifically. You know, when the pandemic started, we heard a lot

of things that we're gonna happen with relationships. One of the first things I remember hearing was that there was gonna be a huge baby boom. Well that didn't really happen. You know, in the first part of the pandemic, we're hearing about a lot of you know, possible fights in marriages that we're gonna lead to a lot of divorces. That didn't really happen either. According to some of the new data that we're getting, divorces and marriages both kind of trickled down a little bit. So then tell us

some of the numbers and what we're seeing here. Yeah, so we don't have the full numbers for the entire United States, but what we do have is a study that just came out that looks at five states, including one big one, Florida. It just looks at a few months of the year, most of the year and says, how does this compare to what we expected? And it turns out that marriages and divorces are way below previous year's trends. Marriages, maybe that's not surprising. A lot of

people postponed their weddings for obvious reasons last year. But with divorces, there was this idea that quarantine was putting a lot of stress on relationships. But so far, we're finding that, you know, we're not seeing the filings come through. In Florida, which is again the largest state that people looked at, marriages are thirty three percent lower than expected,

and divorces are twenty eight percent lower. If you extrapolate the numbers that we're seeing in these five states nationwide, you're talking about more than three hundred thousand marriages that probably would have happened but didn't and almost two hundred thousand divorces that basically were either postponed or aren't materializing this year. Yeah, this is a study that was coming

out of Bowling Green State University. The five states that they looked at, as you mentioned, Florida, Arizona, New Hampshire, Missouri, and Oregon, so they all saw these numbers dropped. I think Arizona was maybe an outlier and some of the numbers there, But you know, you kind of mentioned a little bit of you know, one of the big reasons why.

So a lot of things were postponed. Maybe there was a lot of closures government wide, government offices, so it was maybe harder obviously to even get those marriage plans going, and you know, you couldn't organize with large groups of people. But on the same side, divorces to even still hard to get all the paperwork filed and to go through all that. So you know, what you kind of see is a lot of couples maybe staying together for practical reasons,

money reasons, other things. Yeah, and when you think about a divorce, you know there is In some ways, you can imagine it being pretty simple to divide up your assets. But for a lot of couples who are going through divorces, especially people with children or businesses or complicated finances, this is a terrible time to get a divorce. I talked to divorce lawyers and they say a lot of these people are just sort of feeling stuck and they're not ready to make a big decision right now. So the

relationship might not be doing well. But for example, how do you decide on child custody issues right now? If daycares are closed or schools are closed. How do you decide what that business is worth if you know it's a restaurant that's closed or doing really badly. So a lot of those things are going to get pushed out, probably to next year, and you know, maybe we'll cease.

Maybe some people will actually work through their issues, and the divorces that they would have actually happened last year maybe never happened at all, and maybe people learn to stay together. One of a contrast in all of this, we look to China for some of their numbers, and that's why I guess this kind of makes a little more significant. You know, there were a lot of filings for divorce in China when they were coming out of quarantine, So maybe this is kind of a particular thing that's

going on in the United States only. Yeah, and it could be different in different parts of the country, So we might not have the full picture here, but I definitely think that we'll be looking forward, you know, looking one really kind of watching these numbers and saying, is there this pent up demand for divorce and marriage or to some of the divorces and marriages that were supposed

to happen, maybe they'll never happen. And you know, part of the longer term trend in the US, which might be different from other countries, is that divorce and marriage have both been declining for many years here, and so does that trend actually kind of accelerate because of the pandemic or maybe you know, people I've known some people who who have started dating this year and found people, So so maybe there's a pent up demand and maybe next year things will really bounce back. Yeah. You posed

a really good question in your article. You know, how many of these weddings that might have been called off in will eventually go ahead. You know, are those relationships going to continue and go that full route? And as you mentioned, kind of how you're staying with this generation right now, waiting longer to get married things like that, like how will this impact that trend? And that's just something that we're gonna have to wait to see, but

definitely something to watch out for. Yeah, for sure. I mean we've seen couples, especially young people, being much more selective about who they marry, and you have a lot of people who have just kind of foregoing marriage altogether. And you've also seen people who the people who actually end up getting married in the US these days are more likely to stay together because you know, they're sort of a self selected group of people who aren't just

entering into these relationships in a casual way. So we could see those trends continue or we could see a change. This has been a crazy nine months of our lives and it'll be fascinating to see how society changes and how attitudes change. Ben Steverman, reporter at Bloomberg News. Thank you very much for joining us. You're welcome. I'm Ascar Ramirez, and this has been reopening America. Don't forget the effort.

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