Texas Leads the US in Thrice-Married Adults

Larry King might be a New York native, but his brand of matrimony -- the more the merrier -- turns out to be much more popular in states south of the Mason Dixon line. That's the word from this study on the state of marriage in America, which finds New York state actually has the country's smallest share of men married three or more times. In US-leading Arkansas, the share of thrice-betrothed is a whopping ten percent.

Our Richard Florida has the stats here and Catherine Rampell has a nice summary at Economix, but I wanted to pull up what I thought were the three most interesting factoids from this survey.
1) Gay people (still) aren't ruining your marriage.
Richard Florida runs the numbers and finds: "Multiple marriage was also less likely in states with high bohemian concentrations (-.49). So much for the libertine bohemian lifestyle - at least when it comes to multiple marriage that is. There was no correlation between multiple marriage and the share of the gay population." Florida finds that "serial marriage" is more likely in working class states with lower incomes and smaller college-educated populations.

2) I am a statistic.
Only 28 percent of men in the District of Columbia are married, by far the lowest in America. (But hey, at least we don't drive alone.) DC also has the highest median age of marriage at 32. In Idaho, the median marriage age is 25 and it leads the country in percent of currently married men.

3) Red state blues
"Texas is indeed home to more thrice-married adults than any other state, about 428,000 women and 373,000 men," Pew says. That's obviously a function of both percentages and population, but interesting nonetheless.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2009/10/texas-leads-the-us-in-thrice-married-adults/28720/