ld be seen in conditions that allowed divorce for alcoholism, drug addiction, or nonsupport. Another tendency permitted divorce if both parties gave ofvoluntarily separating and living apart for a specified period of time. For example, in 1967, New York allowed divorce for couples who had been legally separated for 2 years, eliminating the search for a guilty party. In 1969, California permitted divorce when "irreconcilable differences" arose, thus becoming the first state with a "no-fault" divorce law. Nearly all the other states soon added no-fault divorce options to their existing laws. Published statistics show that the United States has the highest divorce rate in the world, and in recent decades it has held fairly steady. In 1975 the rate was 4.9 per 1,000 people (over twice that of Great Britain) and in 1990 it was 4.7 per 1,000. It is sometimes said that in the United States, for every four marriages, a divorce occurs. Divorce statistics, however, tend to be misleading. In 1990 about 2.4 million marriages tookplace in the United States and about 1.2 million divorces -- about one divorce occurred for every two marriages. It would be equally true, however, to say that 80 percent of all married people are still in their first marriage. Statisticians speak of the "crude" divorce rate -- the number of divorces per 1,000 population. The crude divorce rate of 4.7 in 1990 in the United States may be compared with a crude marriage rate of 9.7 (9.7 marriages per 1,000 population). An even better measure is the number of marriages or divorces per 1,000 "population at risk," that is, the total number of persons who are in fact married at the time. In the United States in 1987, there were 123 divorced persons for every 1,000 married persons; in other terms, the divorced portion equaled about 12 percent of the married portion of the population. When marriage and divorce rates in several countries several factors must be taken into a...
