The Nation - News from June 29, 1987

The widely held belief that about one out of two American marriages will end in divorce is “statistical nonsense,” and actually the American family is surviving, pollster Louis Harris reported. He said that government figures and his survey show that only one out of eight marriages will end in divorce. And, in any single year, he said, only about 2% of existing marriages will break up. Harris said that while 2 1/2 million marriages and 1.2 million divorces may occur during a year, “a much, much bigger 54 million other marriages just keep flowing along like Old Man River.”