Statistics

The claim that Christians divorce as often as everyone else traces to Barna surveys that sorted people by a belief label. Sorted by church attendance, 50 years of General Social Survey data show a gap of about 15 points.

No study has measured one recovery time. The 11 weeks figure is a sampling window, the 18 months figure is a lifetime total from a food delivery poll, and tracked studies show a wide spread.

Married Americans are about twice as likely as the never married to call themselves very happy, in every income band and for both sexes. People in unhappy marriages are the least happy group of all.

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.