from Hacker News

Portugal has a divorce rate of 94%

by michalc on 5/1/23, 4:32 PM with 25 comments

• by object-a on 5/1/23, 5:06 PM

  How is this calculated? Is this (#divorces/#marriages)? If so, you could get a really high rate if the number of marriages has dropped significantly, but divorces remain constant.

  In other words, it may not mean 94% chance of divorcing if you get married

  EDIT: Looks like the number was pulled from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorce_demography

  Which is calculated by the ratio of:

  # of divorces per 1000 people per year

  divided by

  # of marriages per 1000 people per year

  Looking at the table, Portugal has the lowest marriage rate per 1000 per year of all the countries listed, but an average divorce rate.

• by BasilPH on 5/1/23, 5:04 PM

  Here's some context [^0]:

  > While Portugal clearly has the most divorces per 100 marriages, looking at divorce rates per 1.000 inhabitants in other European countries alters the picture of the country as one unsettled by significant numbers of divorces. With nearly 1.7 divorces per 1,000 inhabitants Portugal has roughly the same divorce rate as Germany and the Netherlands. Interesting is furthermore that although marriages in Portugal tend to result in divorce lightly more often as in Luxembourg (80.3%), the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg experienced a 0.6 point higher divorce rate.

  [^0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/612207/divorce-rates-in-...

• by madaxe_again on 5/1/23, 5:15 PM

  I’ve lived here for three and a half years now and I’ve watched this play out in real time, several times.

  There are numerous factors.

  Most folks marry young, largely due to the expectations of the religious older generations. This has changed, but only recently - so there’s a dip in the marriage rate while the other causes of divorce remain constant.

  Additionally, most folks live with their parents until they get married. This… leaves people ill-prepared for many realities.

  Money is hard. A lot of people go overseas to find work, for months or years at a time. This has inevitable ramifications. Additionally, money worries stress relationships in general, and money worries are seemingly ubiquitous.

  Also, many older folks who have been married since the 70s or before have divorced in recent years, as they were often married due to the constraints of the estado novo - geography, socioeconomic class, lack of options or opportunity - and without children at home providing cohesion find they have little in common. Empty-nest syndrome but on a grand scale.

  Finally, the Portuguese legal approach to marriage makes it easy - more often than not, there is a complete division of assets throughout the marriage, and divorces can be executed quickly.

• by floxy on 5/1/23, 4:59 PM

  Wow, does anyone have the stats over time? Is this a recent thing, or has it been historically high? Is there some other factor that is driving this? Like you live together for 50 years as a married couple, but then you get divorced when one partner gets terminal cancer, so that you can get better government benefits or something?

• by olliej on 5/1/23, 5:09 PM

  I wonder what the social causes of this are. It’s a shame that it’s just a list of statistics with no coverage of underlying reasons (is divorce easier? Is their pressure to get married when it isn’t really appropriate? Are there legal benefits to being married that make short term marriage useful? Etc, etc)

• by allears on 5/1/23, 4:48 PM

  If your marriage has a 94% chance of ending in divorce, it hardly makes sense to get married. Unless, of course, it's socially unacceptable to simply live together, so marriage is the only practical way to do so.

• by belter on 5/1/23, 9:20 PM

  It's absurd this is flagged.

• by heldrida on 5/1/23, 5:05 PM

  Maybe it's a business...

• by chishaku on 5/1/23, 5:01 PM

  Is the data correct?