That’s great! Especially if you put all of that into savings to pay the lawyers if you decide to get divorced since 50% of marriages do end that way.

People like to throw that number out there but mostly I think they’re just innumerate or justifying their own marital failures. Sure, 50% of marriages end in divorce. But that’s just one dumb average, and when you look at the underlying factors that affect divorce rates you’ll find they’re not that surprising.

Getting married very young, getting married due to a kid, getting married after dating for a short period, working in shitty jobs, living in certain states, marrying someone who has ever been unfaithful, marrying someone who has ever experienced a divorce before.

Not trying suggest one should not necessarily avoid anyone who falls into the above. But, while I cannot find any raw datasets to try and estimate this for myself, most of this have independent effects of double digit drops. Assuming a practical amount of multicollinearity, I would wager my best predicted probability of divorce is lower than 10% without considering any personal beliefs on our relationship.

Heck just looking at single variable analyses from various studies I see reason to believe my predicted divorce rate is 30-60% lower than baseline.

Right. Everyone thinks they can beat the odds/that their relationship is stronger than average. Yet most people are average.

Nope. That is the opposite of what I just said. I said ignoring the state of my relationship, the odds are vastly in my favor. Average is not your friend.

First marriages have an average divorce rate that is 20% lower than the average rate. Marriages in my state have an average divorce rate that is half the US average.

You can do much better than the top level average.

Do note that the chance of a first marriage ending in divorce is a good chunk lower than the average marriage.

But if you save up an entire year's salary after a few years, that should be more than enough for some lawyers...

Some people divorce several times, so 50% of marriages ending with divorce may correspond to much smaller part of the population.

40% of first marriages end in divorce on a quick google. 60% of second marriages and 70% of third marriages.

Edit: not clear if a once-wed person marrying a newbie counts as a first or second though. I’d imagine that could be significant.

Depends on the lawyers haha

But more seriously… if you aren’t willing to take a guaranteed decently large pay increase (which scales with future income growth) with the added chance of losing more to legal fees and arbitration later on… you probably shouldn’t get married. You’re probably correct that for a middle class family the pure fiscal return will likely be positive if your marriage lasts just a handful of years.