[bzbarsky]

> Divorce rate is 53% in the US

It depends on what you measure and how you measure it. Which exact measurement are you doing?

For example, based on table 5 at https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/article/marriage-and-divor... at age 45 56.3% (48.6/(1-.137)) of people who got married at all are still in their first marriage. The other 43.7% got divorced.

Some of those people remarried. Of people who married at least twice, 41.4% are in their second marriage. The other 58.6% got divorced. Note that this is much higher than the first-marriage divorce rate.

The upshot is that many measurements of divorce rates (again, depending on what you measure) are highly affected by people who get married and divorced multiple times. People who can't make one marriage work are much more likely to also not make another one work... The divorce rate for first marriages is not over 50% in any data set I've seen for the US. If you have a citation for it being higher than that, I'd love to see it.