ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with first marriages, remarriages, widowhood, and divorce. A simple global measure of the marriages of single persons in a population is furnished by the proportion, for each sex, of single persons at different ages. A satisfactory statistical analysis and theory of nuptiality must be able to describe how the totals of opposite sexes and with given age compositions are paired off and matched in a manner leading to marital unions. It is usually impossible to observe the strict period conditions when dealing with marriage. Thus, a widow’s age at remarriage is not the most interesting datum: the remarriage takes place following widowhood, and the time elapsed since the death of the previous spouse is a much more important and essential piece of information. Sometimes a divorce rate for married persons is also computed, relating the number of divorces to the number of married couples.
