I don't think this is all that shocking - it's a function of changing perceptions of how marriage works. Up until the advent of feminism, divorce was not socially acceptable so you had a lot of loveless marriages, women enduring abuse "for the children" and so on. With the advent of no-fault divorce in the 1960s and 1970s, and the shift in culture, it's absolutely no surprise that divorce rates went through the roof. It's also no surprise that as all of those "bad marriages" broke up in one big clump that the divorce rate would slowly fall after that. It wouldn't be a precipitous drop off, because logically speaking older women would still be more likely to get married for the wrong reasons (since they were socialized about marriage in a pre-feminist time), and "the message" about good reasons to marry didn't disseminate equally across the country.

Also - we shouldn't (at least in the US) underestimate the evangelical / fundamentalist movement. Whatever else you think about them, those movements have quite a bit of power, and while nobody would call them feminist movements, I do think it's fair to say that the modern versions of those movements have generally preached that it's not cool to hit your wife anymore and that women should be respected (even if their proper place is in the home). These movements haven't become perfect, but they have changed enough that the most egregregious abuses have stopped, giving women less reason to flee "Christian" marriages (and, of course, if their peer group is very religious they'll have even more pressure not to divorce). So, I think it's probably a combination of the spread of feminism (and the internalization of some feminist values and beliefs by men) making women more picky about marrying the right guy, for the right reasons, combined with the shift in religious fundamentalism that have made their marriages more bearable. Unfortunately this is one of those areas where causation is hard to test and even harder to prove, due to the difficulty in accurately measuring all the variables - but it's fun to speculate!

Ce n'est pas une pipe. C'est une signature.

I will do my part to reduce the number of divorces in the country...however small that part shall be.

I will NEVER get married again.

Nope...nope...never.

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine

...yesterday in which the federal government asked me to tell my children not to have sex until they are married. What a fucking waste.

It is easy to buy small plaster models of what you think life is like.