Each January I ask the clerk of the Harrisonburg-Rockingham Circuit Court to give me the number of marriage licenses issued for the prior year and the number of divorces granted. The results for 2012 were 995 marriages and 455 divorces.
As you can see from the bar graph, I've been recording these statistics since 1996, and as noted in the post I did a year ago, the numbers really haven't changed that much, in spite of the significant growth population in our area.
This means that while our divorce numbers haven't really increased, our marriage rates, like those across the nation, are in significant decline.
Or more accurately, it is the number of documented marriages per capita that is in decline. We simply have no way of knowing how many couples are cohabiting and "wedded" in every way other than having gotten a formal license and had an actual ceremony. And the sad fact is that when these undocumented couples go through their distressingly frequent "emotional divorces", they pretty much experience the same heartache and distress their married counterparts do who break up.
I'm especially concerned about the semi-orphaned children who are an unwilling part of all the above divorces, legal and otherwise.
Here's a link to some other posts on divorce: http://harvyoder.blogspot.com/search?q=divorce.
Special thanks to Elmer Malibiran, an intern at EMU's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, for preparing the above bar graph.
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