Divorce Probabilities for First Marriages in the United States by Duration of Marriage, 1973 - 2013

Sources: 1973, 1982, 1988, 2002 and 2011-15 cycles of the National Survey of Family Growth. These surveys sample U.S. women, ages 15 – 44. The curves in this figure are cumulative incidence functions produced by survival analyses with widowhood as a competing risk.  Note that the time of a woman’s divorce is defined by the NSFG as the month that she stopped living with her husband rather than the date of the final divorce decree.  Because there are relatively few women in the NSFG with long first-marriage durations, cumulative divorce probabilities become less stable at marital durations greater than 17 or 18 years.