DIVORCE IS ACTUALLY ON THE RISE, and it’s the baby boomers’ fault.

A new paper out this month from demographers at the University of Minnesota challenges the traditional narrative. Sheela Kennedy and Stephen Ruggles have found that the divorce rate hasn’t declined since 1980, it has only flattened. And when they controlled for changes in the age composition of the married population (the U.S. population was younger in 1980, and younger couples have a higher risk for divorce), they found that the age-standardized divorce rate has actually risen by an astonishing 40 percent since then. . . .

The rise of divorce has not occurred evenly across all age groups. The chart below looks at what the authors call the prevalence of marital instability, which they define as “the percentage of ever-married persons who have ever been divorced or separated.” The line for 1970 is comparatively flat — there wasn’t much of a difference in the prevalence of divorce between young people and older people. But starting with the 1980 line you can see a bulge forming at the younger end of the age spectrum as the baby boomers started divorcing. Looking at the lines for 1995 and 2010, you can watch this bulge shift rightward as the boomers age.