Statistics

Weekly churchgoers aged 25 to 54 are 74% married, against 45% of adults with no religion. Barna's claim that Christians divorce as often as everyone else depends on counting never-married adults.

Our analysis of CDC National Survey of Family Growth data puts the typical age of first sex at 17 for women and men. Where the widely repeated 17.4 figure came from, and whether young adults are waiting longer.

Stopwatch studies of 500 couples put the median at 5.4 minutes from penetration to ejaculation. What sex therapists call adequate, what couples estimate and want, and where the two-minute idea came from.

About 9% of U.S. adults identify as LGBTQ+, and our analysis of CDC data gives lesbian, gay and bisexual shares for the 32 states that asked in 2024. Where the 10% figure came from, and why estimates range from 5.5% to 12%.

The United States collects no national custody statistics. The figure everyone quotes is a 2018 survey of lawyers, the Census Bureau publishes three different answers to the same question, and the fatherless-homes numbers cite agencies that never produced them.

Four in ten Americans who divorced in 2024 were 50 or older, yet on one consistent Census measure the gray divorce rate has not risen since 2008. State rates, marriage length, poverty after divorce, and the doubling, empty nest and AARP claims traced.

The 2015 Ashley Madison breach, traced to regulators and the court record: 36 million accounts, emails never verified, and only 2,522 settlement claims.

The 70% to 75% success rate quoted almost everywhere traces to a 1999 meta-analysis of four trials, three of them run by the founders of the therapy being tested. The longest follow-up found half of seriously distressed couples clearly improved five years later and about a quarter separated.

The 67% claim has no study behind it. Federal cohort data puts the lifetime figure at 39.1%, and our own Census analysis shows second marriages divorce at 22.4 per 1,000 a year against 11.7 for first marriages of the same age.

Almost every "average cost of divorce" figure online descends from one 2019 survey of a legal marketing site's own readers, with no published sample size. Federal wage, price and Census data answer the parts nobody measures.

Four in five US marriages now begin with the couple already living together. Whether that raises the divorce risk has been argued in the same journal for twenty years.

Only a third of married Americans reported weekly sex in 2024 and the median was two or three times a month. The two figures the internet repeats come from a study that found a plateau, not a target, and from survey data that ends in 2014.

Women want or file for about 69% of American divorces, an estimate that rests on 92 breakups in one survey. Complete court records from England and Wales show the female share peaked at 72.3% in 1992 and has fallen to 63.3%, and our own Census analysis shows what the year after a divorce costs each sex.

Oklahoma has the highest divorce rate in America and Maine the lowest. Our own Census analysis of all 50 states and DC, on both common measures, with margins of error.

The median age at first marriage is now 30.8 for men and 28.8 for women, both records. Where the number comes from, how far it varies by state, and the 1991 crossover almost nobody mentions.