Divorce is the legal ending of a marriage. The United States has one of the highest divorce rates in the world. In the second half of the twentieth century, attitudes toward divorce in the United States changed drastically. In the middle of the century, shortly after the end of World War II, there was a brief increase in divorces, followed by a decline. Starting in the 1960s the rate of divorce began to increase, and accelerated in the 1970. By the end of the 1980s it had leveled off. In 1998 United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National Center for Health Statistics reported that there were about 98,000 divorces during the year down from 104,000 in 1997. This means that 4.3 out of every 1,000 new marriages ended in divorce in 1998 (4.5 per 1,000 in 1997). This rate per year has remained fairly stable for the past ten years.

Looking at divorce statistics from another view...