The Nation - News from Aug. 29, 1988

About 40% of women who separated recently while in their 30s will never remarry, nor will about 70% of women who separated when older than 40, a new study projects. And although 72% of recently separated women will eventually go to the altar again, half will still be single seven years after the split, the projections suggest. The estimates, for women who separated in the early 1980s, were projected by Larry Bumpass, a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and colleagues James Sweet and Teresa Castro. Bumpass said the projections do not differentiate between women who seek to remarry and those who do not, nor do they count as remarried women who are simply living with a man.