The seven-year itch, popularized by the 1955 film of the same name, suggests that married couples and those in long-term relationships grow tired of each other at the seven-year mark.
How true is this sentiment? If the seven-year itch is a real thing, then it seems fair to expect that divorce rates would peak around seven years, or at least start to climb.
Maybe there is a way to see this through data.
The American Community Survey, from the United States Census Bureau, asks people if they were divorced in the past year. The survey also asks when respondents were last married.
Subtract one from the other and you get the number of years a person was married before divorce. I calculated using the latest five-year data, from 2019 to 2023.
Peak divorce appears to vary, depending on how many times a person married.
