The Fairy Tale is Real: 50% of Marriages Don't End in Divorce

Everyone knows that 50% of marriages end in divorce. Except they don’t. It turns out that oft-quoted fact hasn’t been true since the ‘80s. Though it says social scientists have been trying to debunk the depressing myth for ages, the New York Times does its part to spread the word today, offering an infographic proving the dramatic decrease in divorce rates over the last twenty years, as well as an examination of why that’s so.

A variety of experts offer their take: Justin Wolfers, a University of Michigan economist, tells the Times that people are finally marrying for love instead of for practical or financial reasons, or even familial pressure. “We marry to find our soul mate, rather than a good homemaker or a good earner.” Stephanie Coontz, a professor at Evergreen State College, says, “the growing acceptance of single-parent families has reduced the number of shotgun marriages, which were never the most stable of unions.” And the Times points out that because people are waiting longer to marry and living together beforehand, they’re more clear on what they want and what’s best for them, leading to breakups before walking down the aisle—instead of after.

So romance isn’t dead. We want to believe in the fairytale—as evidenced by the epic number of Yahoo searches for celebrity weddings this year—and we can. “Of college-educated people who married in the early 2000s, only about 11 percent divorced by their seventh anniversary,” the Times says. Meaning the famous faces we saw got married this year, from George and Amal to Kim and Kanye, might actually make it. Click through to see whose wedding commanded the most attention in 2014.