Marriage is Not a Game of Perfect
By Jeff Mullin, columnist Enid News and Eagle
Oklahoma is No. 1.
That is not unusual. The Oklahoma Sooners’ football team, for the 10th time in the history of the Associated Press college poll, begins the 2011 season ranked No. 1. That is more than any other team, ever.
It is good to be ranked No. 1 in football, for those who care about that sort of thing. It is better, of course, to be ranked No. 1 in median household income, average annual pay, personal income per capita, teachers’ salaries, gross domestic product by state, persons 25 years old and over with at least a bachelor’s degree and doctors per 100,000 population. Oklahoma is No. 1 in none of these categories, and, in fact, is ranked no higher than 29th in any of them.
This week Oklahoma learned it is No. 1 in yet another significant category. The Sooner State, it seems, is No. 1 in divorce.
The divorce rate for women in our state is 14.1 percent, second highest in the nation only behind Alaska’s 16.2 percent. For Oklahoma men the divorce rate is 12.8 percent, third highest, giving our state the distinction of being No. 1 overall in terms of splitting the sheets. Oklahoma Marriage Initiative, a public/private partnership providing services and support to help couples strengthen their marriages, says 32 percent of all Oklahoma adults who have ever been married have been divorced.
