To what degree can the higher-than-historical-norms in the US divorce rate among Baby Boomers be attributed to unplanned marriages made by guys trying to be deferred from being drafted and sent to Viet Nam?

I don’t know, but I have often thought that part of the high divorce rate among military men and women is they often marry very young. Spouses get benefits, and so young men and women enlisting in the service are financially insentivised (I’m sure that is not a word) to get married to their girlfriends and boyfriends. They are young, and that is a strike against it likely working out.

Meh…maybe some, the boomer generation spans 20 years.
I’m a younger boomer, turning 56 in Dec. and I feel that most divorces take place for the same reasons regardless. Growing apart, a mismatch from the get go but people were too immature to recognize this fact. Hoping the other person will change, infidelity, abuse, the usual melting pot of reasons. Any marriage can fail for numerous reasons and most marriages of convenience benefit the parties involved so their really are no victims IMO.

The change in divorce rates also signifies a change in socially acceptable behaviors. Divorce used to be considered taboo, people stuck it out to the bitter end even if they had been miserable for decades but in the last 40 years or so it has become more acceptable to exit unhappy or unhealthy marriages without stigma. I think this has been a positive move, marriage should not be about martyrdom.

I agree with @Coloma . I think you are looking at a haystack and trying to put your needle in it. As divorce got more acceptable and as many women got more financially independent, the incidence of divorce among all age groups has risen. I was alive at the time of the Vietnam war and I didn’t hear much about people marrying for deferments; although I can believe it happened, I don’t think it was a huge phenomenon. And as @Coloma says, marriages begin and end for all kinds of reasons.

@janbb Yes, womens financial emancipation too, a good point I left out.

@JLeslie

You’re partially correct.

Insentivised is not a word.

But incentivized is. It’s the verb form of the noun incentive.

All I did was spell it wrong? I thought maybe it was not a word at all. Thanks!

This question is about forty years too late. Anyone who married to avoid the draft (frankly, something that was never talked about in terms of draft resistance, of which my older brother and I were involved in) would have divorced by 1975.

And the “historically high rate” has continued since the seventies, despite most married boomers having gone through their first marriage by the turn of the century. But Gen X’ers have kept the divorce rate at the sustained level.

I never heard of that draft escape plan.

@kritiper -

see the following

link1

link2

the order itself

@elbanditoroso So, just because it was an exemption, doesn’t mean that people used it to escape the draft. With hell would someone marry to avoid the draft, when there were other ways to do so? All you had to do was say you were gay and you were out.

And it certainly wasn’t the reason for the rise in the divorce rate.

@zenvelo Probably some people used the loophole.

@JLeslie It wasn’t a “loophole”, it was an exemption. But your response is strictly speculative and probabilistic, yet the question was if it was the cause of high divorce rates.

That is like saying the 2-S student deferment was the reason so many boomers got a college education and that productivity increased in the 70s.

I would guess that the biggest factor in the higher divorce rate is the entry of women into the workforce. Women who otherwise would have been stuck in an abusive marriage now had the option to leave. They also had greater opportunity to come into contact with other men.

@zenvelo I’m not saying it significantly impacted divorce rates, just saying probably some people did it. Just like some people marry to get someone a green card.

@zenvelo – don’t be so dismissive of the 2S deferments for college – it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if that were true.

Darned hard to prove, but I can see it is a contributing factor.

I’m a boomer and I remember nobody—absolutely nobody—who married to avoid the draft. I would venture to say that there were more bad marriages, by far, due to unexpected pregnancies in the decade before 1964, before the advent of the birth control pill, which became available about the same time the war started.

The draft certainly existed during the Kennedy Administration, but the war really hadn’t ramped up to an unpopular level until the mid-to-late Johnson Administration. The Tet, in January 1968, the release of the Pentagon Papers soon afterwards, and the resultant insertion of 500,000 new troops from the time of the Tet invasion to late summer 1968 was when shit really hit the fan and war resistance climbed to a frenzied peak, entered the everyday lives and language of the mainstream, and plateaued there for the next few years through My Lai and Kent State and until war’s end.

On January 20, 1964, exactly two months after the Kennedy assassination, Johnson sent 20,000 regular American troops into Nam. The troop levels slowly grew from that point on, but the war was still popular, It was very unpopular to resist, by any means, during the early years of the Johnson Administration. The war was popular in the beginning, but, like all wars, societal fatigue began setting in after three years. There was very little talk of mainstream resistance until the summer of 1968. The Tet changed everything. I really don’t think there was a significant rise of marriages for the reason you’ve posited in the early years.

@Espiritus_Corvus Yep, excellent post and those shotgun weddings never had a chance in hell, I agree.