San Francisco Family Law Blog

Newsweek's story might be little remembered if it weren't for a line reporting that a 40-year-old single woman was "more likely to be killed by a terrorist" than to ever marry, first hastily written as a funny aside in an internal reporting memo by San Francisco correspondent Pamela Abramson. "It's true -- I am responsible for the single most irresponsible line in the history of journalism, all meant in jest," jokes Abramson, now a freelance writer who, all kidding aside, remains contrite about the furor it started. In New York, writer Eloise Salholz inserted the line into the story. Editors thought it was clear the comparison was hyperbole. "It was never intended to be taken literally," says Salholz. Most readers missed the joke.

Boston public-relations executive Sally Jackson is one example of a happily-ever-after that defied that flawed statistic. In the 1986 story, Jackson was happily single. She could find a man if she wanted, she figured, but she liked living alone. At 47, she married a man she'd known for years. Today she revels in having a travel companion, someone to talk to when they both awaken at 3 a.m., someone to love unconditionally who'll love her back. "I married a fabulous man and I'm crazy about him, and being blissfully married is better than being blissfully single, but not by that much," she said a few a weeks ago. Several days later she called back. That part about marriage only being a little bit better? She lied. "Being married is really a lot better," she says.

One striking aspect of this Where Are They Now exercise: none of these women divorced. Perhaps it's no coincidence. Statistically, people who marry at much higher-than-average ages don't have lower odds for divorce. But intuitively, some experts are starting to think that later-in-life marriages may have better chances of survival. "It makes sense-if you're getting married at a later age ... you'll have gone through a lot of relationships, and you'll know what you want [and] what you don't," says Elizabeth Gregory, director of the women's studies center at the University of Houston and the author of "The New Later Motherhood," to be published in 2007.

According to the research in the original article, a woman who remained single at 30 had only a 20 percent chance of ever marrying. By 35, the probability dropped to 5 percent. But those odds-she'll-marry statistics turned out to be too pessimistic: today it appears that about 90 percent of baby-boomer men and women either have or will marry, a ratio that's well in line with historical averages. And the days when half of all women would marry by 20, as they did in 1960, only look more anachronistic. Today the median age for a first marriage-25 for women, 27 for men-is higher than ever before. At least 14 percent of women born between 1955 and 1964 married after the age of 30.