Via: defendernetwork.com
Perhaps the country-pop ditty “Lookin’ for Love” was more of a commentary on Texas than we realized.
It turns out that people are more likely to marry in Texas — and in states across the South — than in the country as a whole. They are also more likely to divorce, according to a new report released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau.
“The two kind of go hand in hand,” said Diana Elliott, a family demographer at the Census Bureau in Washington and a co-author of the report. In other words, higher divorce rates result partly because there’s a bigger pool of married people who could possibly get divorced.
But Elliott said the analysis of 2009 data highlights regional and cultural differences, and that when it comes to marriage and divorce, the Texas experience looks much like that of the South. In Texas and the South, people tend to marry at younger ages, but in the Northeast, people tend to put off getting married. Texans also have longer marriages because they marry younger, Elliott said.
According to the report, Texas’ marriage rate of 21.5 men per 1,000 in 2009 exceeded the national rate of 19.1. Among Texas women, the rate was 20.4, compared with 17.6 nationally.
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