Census: Arkansans the remarrying kind

State leads nation in retying the knot

— Arkansans remarry more than residents in all other states, new census numbers show, a tendency that researchers say is partly the result of a high divorce rate most closely tied to marrying young.

More than 418,000, or 18 percent, of the state’s residents 15 and older said they had been married twice, the largest share of all states. Another 174,000, or 7.5 percent, indicated they had been married three or more times — also the largest proportion recorded of all states.

“Arkansas has a high share of people who have been married more than once because people marry for the first time at younger ages than in many other states,” said Andrew Cherlin, a leading researcher on marriage and a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

In Arkansas, the median age of marriage for men was 26.2 years and 24.7 for women. Both median ages were within the five youngest among all states.

“Studies show that people who marry early have a higher risk of divorcing. And they also have more years of life in front of them after their divorces, so they have more time to find a partner and remarry,” said Cherlin, the author of the 2009 book The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family Today.

Benjamin Karney, a social psychologist and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the remarriage numbers reflect Arkansas’ high divorce rate — 12.6 percent — as well as familial research that shows people who marry and then divorce are more likely to want to give marriage a second try.

“Put those two things together, and you would expect Arkansas to have high rates of remarriage, as is the case,” said Karney, who has studied the stability of personal relationships, particularly in the early years of marriage.

The multiple-marriage findings come from responses to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey during 2008 through 2010. Combined responses from those three years of surveys — which go out to about 3 million households annually — provide detailed demographic information about places with populations of 20,000 or more.

The latest numbers, released last week, were the first for those 20,000-or-more populations that gave detailed information about the marital history of residents during those years.

According to the survey figures, Arkansas’ proportion of people who have been married multiple times was significantly greater than the national average.

The percentage of U.S. residents 15 and older who have been married twice — 13.3 percent — is nearly 5 percentage points lower than in Arkansas.

Only 3.6 percent of U.S. residents have been married three or more times, nearly half the percentage-point rate for the state.

While widowhood makes up for a share of those who remarry, the majority have been divorced, researchers say.

William Bailey, an associate professor in the school of human environmental sciences at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, said the tendency for the state’s residents to remarry is strongly tied to religious pressure.

“That is, being a very conservative Christian state, there is a lot of expectation that one will marry rather than co-habitate,” he said.

“We do know that a religious or spiritual attitude is more likely to strengthen the chance of getting married,” he said, noting that researchers have found a correlation between regular church attendance and a tendency to marry rather than live together as unmarried domestic partners.

The trend is largely dominant in Southern states such as Arkansas that often have high marriage and divorce rates.

About 74 percent of Arkansans 15 and older have been married at some point, the fourth-highest of all states and well above the 68.4 percent nationally. The state’s divorce rate of 12.6 percent was also higher than the national average of 10.7 percent.

The census numbers and other research suggest that women and men approach remarriage very differently, Bailey said.

In Arkansas, more men than women said they had never been married, while women made up a larger share of those married once, twice and three or more times.

Bailey said the numbers were mildly surprising because men tend to remarry sooner than women after a divorce.

“If women remarry, it’s typically four to five years after the divorce. Men, in many cases, on average [marry] within the first 12 to 18 months. As they say, they’re addicted to love,” Bailey said.

“Men also marry younger women on average, and as a result they have a bigger target market,” he added.

Women also face another obstacle to remarriage. In most divorces involving children, the mothers get primary custody.

“That makes it much more difficult for them to get into a long-term committed relationship because they have the children, whereas men are ‘free to roam,’” he said.

State and national numbers have shown changes in family structure, most commonly toward step-families. The change affects the amount of stress on children, he said.

“Some research indicates that step-families are really not stable, and they generally have not dealt with most issues they face until after seven years into the relationship,” he said. Those issues include grief, financial stress — including child support payments — and emotional conflicts.

That stress can grow when a child is exposed to a second or third divorce, he said.

“If you have what I call serial monogamy — people getting married multiple times across time — and there’s kids involved, you’re asking kids to go through a second trauma or grief period,” he said. “I don’t care how they feel about the step-parent, there is some sense of attachment and security that comes along with that, and then that second exposure to a divorce is very detrimental.”

Paul Kelly, a senior policy analyst at Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, said the stability of a child’s family is a key indicator of his future success.

A child “needs some consistency and ongoing structure and some certainty in their life in order to address all the problems that kids come up against at school or just in their development,” Kelly said.

Being raised within a marriage doesn’t always mean a child is better off, he added.

Marriages that are “highconflict” can be more detrimental than a child being raised in a single-parent or step family, he said.

Also, he said, “the majority of kids who even go through these things, divorces, are coming out just fine. It’s just they’re more at risk than others who have not experienced something like that.”

For children, the overall goal is maintaining a “low-conflict” marriage, Bailey said. And, in general, longer and more successful marriages start before the nuptials, Bailey said.

Premarital counseling that includes learning how to fight “the right way” and discussing marriage and children with already married couples can increase the likelihood of a lasting marriage, he said.

Most of that counseling comes in religious settings, he said, noting that Catholics, who require couples counseling sessions and months of discussions with other already married couples, have lower chances of divorce.

Other types of counseling with psychologists or trained marriage and family counselors also helps, he said.

“Premarital work in my point of view is preventive,” he said.

But the data suggest that the majority of American and Arkansas marriages don’t start with careful planning because couples are in a rush or don’t have access to counseling or can’t afford it.

“It’s like America cleans up car wrecks, but we very seldom put in the right stop signs until it’s too late,” he said.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 10/30/2011

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