"In 2003, 57 million married-couple households resided in the United States, representing 76 percent of family households.

...For 25- to 34-year-olds, married life was the most likely (52 percent) type of living arrangement.  In 2003, 48 percent of men and 57 percent of women in this age group were married and living with their spouse. Living alone also occurred for both men and women at these ages: 11 percent and 8 percent, respectively, in 2003.  Some 25- to 34-year-olds lived with at least one of their parents: 14 percent of men and 7 percent of women."

(Source:  Jason Fields, America's Families and Living Arrangements: 2003, Current Population Reports, P20-553, November 2004, U.S. Census Bureau, Washington, DC; http://www.census.gov/prod/2004pubs/p20-553.pdf.)

"I always thought it would be dramatic to live through a moral revival. Great leaders would emerge. There would be important books, speeches, marches and crusades. We're in the middle of a moral revival now, and there has been very little of that. This revival has been a bottom-up, prosaic, un-self-conscious one, led by normal parents, normal neighbors and normal community activists.

The first thing that has happened is that people have stopped believing in stupid ideas: that the traditional family is obsolete, that drugs are liberating, that it is every adolescent's social duty to be a rebel.

The second thing that has happened is that many Americans have become better parents. Time diary studies reveal that parents now spend more time actively engaged with kids, even though both parents are more likely to work outside the home.

Third, many people in the younger generation, under age 30 or so, are reacting against the culture of divorce."

(Source:  David Brooks, "The Virtues of Virtue," The New York Times, August 7, 2005; http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/07/opinion/07brooks.html?th&emc=th.)

Conventional wisdom says that divorce is more likely during the first seven years of marriage, but is less clear about factors that contribute to young couples breaking up. Yet a study in the Netherlands finds that divorce is significantly more likely to occur within ten years of marriage when a couple - during the first five years of marriage - reverses traditional sex roles with the husband working less than the wife and the wife working more than the husband.

Using data from the 1998 Divorce in the Netherlands survey, Anne-Rigt Poortman of the Vrije University in Amsterdam focused on 1,296 Dutch women who married between 1943 and 1997, of which 1,024 eventually divorced between 1949 and 1998. In her five statistical models, the researcher consistently found that the more hours the husband works, and the less hours the wife works, the less likely they were to divorce (p <.05 for all ten measures).

These robust correlations held true even when the husband earned less than other men, providing no support for the theory that lower earnings of a husband bring financial stress to a marriage that would increase the risk of divorce. It also held true when a husband worked overtime, nixing the theory that overtime work might also reflect financial pressures that might increase divorce risk. Financial stress, however, was found to contribute to divorce when husbands worked fewer hours than their wives. Poortman nevertheless maintains that this financial stress plays only a minor part in the higher divorce risk (she estimates 15 percent) as husband's fewer working hours "continue to increase the risk of divorce when the resulting financial strains are taken into account."

The study also found no support for the theory that the increased divorce risk when wives work more than their husbands is due to the corresponding decrease in couples' interaction time. "The results of a direct test for the mediating role of marital interaction time confirm that low marital interaction time does not explain the destabilizing influence of a wife's working hours."

While they discredit more than document theories that seek to explain the link between work patterns and divorce, Poortman's findings nonetheless provide additional evidence that reversing sex roles do not a successful marriage make.