The Marriage Game

There is only one chance out of 11,705 that an American boy will get married when he is 14. If he does, there is a 20.2% probability that he will eventually be divorced. These are only a few of the statistics published last week in a new 92-page volume called Social and Economic Variations in Marriage, Divorce and Remarriage. Issued by the Bureau of the Census and based on a 1967 survey of 28,000 households scattered across the nation, the massive array of figures charts the probable course of marriage in revealing detail.

Some of the highlights: -- Among men who had married at least 20 years before the survey, 28% of those who married before the age of 22 were divorced--compared with only 13% of those who married after 22. Among women, 27% of those who had entered into teen-age marriages had been divorced, compared with only 14% of those who married in their 20s.

> Having children during the first two years of marriage doubles the probability of divorce. That high rate occurs, the bureau suggests, because in these cases the marriage was often brought on by a premarital pregnancy. -- The chances of divorce are twice as high among men who make less than $8,000 annually as among those who make more.

> The probability of a first marriage for a white woman reaches a peak between the ages of 22 and 24 and then declines sharply. For black women, the chances for marriage are good and remain about the same between the ages of 20 and 29, and then drastically diminish.

> A man's chances of remarrying are twice as great in the five years after his divorce as they are thereafter.

> In any given year, the odds that a divorced man will remarry are about 17 in 100. For a divorced woman, the figure is only 13 in 100.

> In 1967, 573,000 men and 706,000 women--about 1% of all those who had ever been married--had been married three times.

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