VRWC -
In fact, you are wrong about the percentages. No less an authority than the US Census Bureau has recently published figures that for those married between 1975 and 1979, 49.5% of men and 46.4% of women made it to their silver anniversary.
Some portion of that is due to mortality and the death of a spouse. But, many of those marriages would have happened when people were in their late teens or early 20s, which means most marriages did not even last until the 50th birthday.
Given the rise in what is now termed “Gray divorce”, with older couples divorcing at a rate higher than they ever have before, that minority of intact marriages still have many years left for those marriages to fail.
Adding just 5 years brings the number of intact marriages after 30 years down to 46.2% for men and 42.1% of women, with as much as 10-15 years left to go until retirement. To eliminate the mortality factor, the cooresponding figures for people who married 1955-1959, 20 short years earlier when the average lifespan was shorter than today, the figures were 67.3% and 63.5%.
