Divorce is certainly more common in Tennessee these days than it was for previous generations. But that trend is true across the entire United States. Much of it simply has to do with the fact that couples can now use no-fault divorce laws. Because they do not have to come up with a cause for a judge to grant them the divorce, they have a lot more freedom to split up if they are simply unhappy.
That said, it is interesting to look at the way that different states rank compared to one another. Is Tennessee one of the states with a lower divorce rate, where couples stay together more in family units even though the law makes it easier to split up? Or is Tennessee actually one of the states driving the national divorce rate as high as it is right now?
Sitting in the top 10
What you’ll find is that Tennessee ranked as the state with the 10th highest rate of divorce in the country in 2021. It was tied with Utah. Both had a rate of 3.3 divorces for every 1,000 people in the state.
At the top of the list was Nevada, with a rate of 4.2 per 1,000 people. On the other side of the spectrum, you have Massachusetts, where only one person out of 1,000 is divorced. This was the lowest divorce rate in the country, just slightly higher than Illinois at 1.3.
Lifetime divorce odds
One of the problems with studying divorce statistics is that you can look at the number of couples who divorced in a certain year, but that doesn’t necessarily tell you the percentage of marriages that will eventually end. Many couples will stay together for years or even decades before getting divorced. Those marriages will eventually count toward the statistics, even if they do not today. That’s why studies look at the number of divorced individuals out of a certain group rather than the number of divorces in a given year.
Either way, divorce is very common, and it’s clear that you need to know what options you have if you are facing one.