Spousal Alternatives and Marital Dissolution

Abstract

The authors draw on three different data sources to explore the effects of the quantity and quality of potential remarriage partners available in the local marriage market on the risk of marital dissolution. First data from the National Survey of Families and Households are used to demonstrate that among recently-divorced couples a substantial percentage of husbands and wives had been romantically involved with someone other than their spouse prior to divorcing. Then microlevel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth are merged with aggregated Public Use Microdata from the US census to examine directly the impact of marriage market characteristics and other contextual variables on the risk of marital disruption net of conventional individual-level predictors of divorce. Proportional hazards regression models reveal that among nonhispanic Whites the risk of dissolution is highest where either wives or husbands encounter abundant alternatives to their current spouse. The labor force participation rate of unmarried women and the rate of geographic mobility in the local marriage market also decrease marital stability. In general the results suggest that many persons continue the marital search even while married and that the distribution of spousal alternatives embedded in the social structure influences significantly the risk of marital dissolution. (authors)