Thinking about starting a family? You might want to stay away from Arkansas.
Researchers looked through divorce data to identify the U.S. states where couples are most likely to file for divorce – and the Bear State outperformed them all.
The study, as Newsweek originally reported, indicates that the number of divorces per 1,000 married women in the United States peaked in 1979 at 22.6, but that since then, it has been continuously falling. With a 12 percent decline and a 40-year low of just 14 out of every 1,000 married women divorcing in 2020, divorce rates fell precipitously throughout the pandemic, and again in 2021. However, it is worth pointing out that these figures may be deceiving–indeed, meaningless– if not taken in correlation with the marriage rate, which in 1970 was at 76.5%, and today, it stands at just over 31%.
Nevertheless, the most recent data for 2022 indicates a modest increase in divorces across the country. In 2022, for every 1,000 married women, there were 14.56 divorces, as 989,518 women reported that their partnerships had been terminated by the courts. The report pointed out that in 2022, the average number of divorces per 1,000 women was still “below pre-pandemic levels,” with over 15 divorces occurring for every 1,000.
With 23.27 divorces per 1,000 married women in Arkansas in 2022, the state reported the highest divorce rate in the nation. The other territories with significant rates were New Mexico (20.56), Wyoming (19.96), Kentucky (19.52), and West Virginia (19.33).
Conversely, Vermont had the lowest divorce rate in the United States, with only 9.2 divorces for per 1,000 married women. The remaining four most loyal states were New Jersey (10.41), Alaska (10.49), Minnesota (10.91), and Wisconsin (11.70).
Notably, data show New York couples remain below the national average, with just 12.56 divorces per 1,000 married women.
More than 2 million women (2,322,727) married in 2022 – an increase of 269,921 women from 2021 (2,052,806).
