x.com/WhiteBabyFac/status/2050292923728577017
1 correction found
Couples who spend less than $1,000 on their wedding have the lowest divorce rates.
This overstates the study it appears to reference. In the main wedding-cost study, under-$1,000 weddings did not have the lowest raw divorce risk; that lower-risk result only appeared after statistical adjustments.
Full reasoning
The claim appears to rely on the 2014 Francis-Tan/Mialon wedding-expenses study. But that paper does not show that couples spending under $1,000 had the lowest overall/raw divorce rates.
In the paper's bivariate results (the raw association without controls), weddings costing $0 to $1,000 had a hazard ratio of 1.367 relative to the $5,000-$10,000 reference group — meaning a higher, not lower, divorce hazard. The paper then reports that the picture changes in multivariate regressions: after controlling for demographic and relationship variables, spending $1,000 or less is associated with a lower hazard of divorce. So the post collapses an adjusted, correlational finding into a blanket statement about who "have the lowest divorce rates," which is not what the study's raw results show.
The authors and Emory's own coverage also stress that the result is purely correlational and does not establish causation. So the post is misleading both because it presents an adjusted association as a simple fact about divorce rates and because it omits the study's important caveat that the relationship is not causal.
2 sources
- “A Diamond is Forever” and Other Fairy Tales: The Relationship Between Wedding Expenses and Marriage Duration
The paper states that in bivariate regressions, 'having wedding expenses below $1,000 [is] associated with increases in the hazard of divorce,' and Table 2 shows total wedding expenses '$0 to $1,000' with a bivariate hazard ratio of 1.367, while the lower-hazard result appears only in multivariate regressions.
- Professors Study Marriage Economics - The Emory Wheel
Emory's write-up says the paper's main point is 'purely correlational' and that 'there is nothing in the study that determines causality,' underscoring that the result should not be stated as a simple fact that low-spending couples have the lowest divorce rates.