For some, divorce is a long, long, long goodbye

The Boston Globe reports:

Half of all divorces take place in the first eight years of marriage, according to the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. Betsey Stevenson, a business and public policy pro fessor who researches marriage and divorce at the University of Pennsylvania, agrees with those statistics. While members of the Gores’ generation have experienced the highest divorce rates, the majority of those breakups occurred within the first 20 years of the marriage, she says.

Using US Census Bureau marital data from 1955 to 1994, Stevenson found that among recent divorces, 25 percent of the couples had been married at least 20 years; 4 percent of the divorced had been married at least 40 years.