What is the divorce rate among celebrities?

Answer 1

According to a January 2016 study from the Marriage Foundation, the divorce rate for Hollywood celebrities is about 50 percent for the first 14 years of marriage. The analysis looked at 488 "A-list couples."

"Celebs become, no doubt involuntarily, high profile role models," Paul Coleridge, founder of the Marriage Foundation, told The Telegraph. "But this research shows that in their domestic lives these people experience even more pain and suffering than us lesser mortals and in this respect at least their lives are not to be copied or envied."

The 50 percent figure is noticeably higher than the national rate of marriage disruption (separation, divorce, or death) for a 10-year period, which is around 36 percent among women aged 15-44. However, national rates are tricky and not directly comparable to Hollywood numbers, since many divorced celebrities remarry (the aforementioned 36 percent figure only considers first-time marriages).

Another analysis from Medium’s Chiyuan Cheng estimated the celebrity divorce rate at 52 percent, and put the median length of a celebrity's first marriage at six years. Female celebrities had a divorce rate of 62 percent, while males had a rate of 50 percent. That analysis had a few statistical anomalies, which Cheng acknowledged, and it used limited data taken from Wikipedia, so take the results with a grain of salt.

Despite the limited research on this subject, it's safe to conclude that celebrities divorce more often than the general population. So...why is that, exactly?

Factors That Affect Celebrity Divorce Rates

There are a few likely reasons for celebs' higher-than-average divorce rates:

High Stress Levels - A 2015 study showed that relationships do worse when partners are stressed out. Relationships are especially likely to suffer when women have stress due to external factors (factors not directly related to the relationship).

Given their high visibility in media—tabloid websites, we’re looking at you—celebrities obviously have sources of stress that most of us will never encounter. It’s reasonable to assume that those stressors could affect their relationships.

High Work Demands - If you’re working long hours and spending weeks away from home, you have less time to work on your relationship. Interestingly, studies show when a husband works more during the first years of marriage, divorce risk decreases; when the wife’s working hours increase, so do the chances of divorce.

In high-profile Hollywood relationships, both partners are often working constantly, and relationship maintenance often takes a backseat to career demands.

Infidelity - In a study from the Austin Institute, the most commonly cited cause of divorce was infidelity. We don’t have evidence to show that celebrities cheat more often than non-celebrities, but given that they’re often followed by paparazzi and hounded by rumors of infidelity, it’s reasonable to assume that celebrities have trouble with this issue as well.

Remember, statistics are useful for studying segments of a population, but they’re less useful when evaluating individual marriages. There are plenty of examples of solid Hollywood marriages. Martin Sheen and Janet Templeton, for instance, tied the knot on Dec. 23, 1961, and they’re still happily married today. Jay Z and Beyoncé, one of the world’s most high-profile married couples, have kept their union intact for more than a decade, despite some highly publicized issues with infidelity.