Divorce rate in Maine

As fewer couples in Maine have gotten divorced, the price of a pint of lager in Britain has risen, a transatlantic correlation of -0.987 that connects the stability of New England marriages to the instability of British pub prices with the geographic ambition of a coefficient that has clearly never seen a map. One pictures a couple in Portland, Maine, deciding to stay together because they heard that pints in London are getting expensive, which is precisely the kind of reasoning this website exists to mock.

Maine's divorce rate declined from about 4.2 per 1,000 people in 2010 to roughly 2.5 by 2022, part of a nationwide decline driven by delayed marriage (people who marry later divorce less), changing social norms, and the simple mathematics of fewer marriages producing fewer divorces. UK pint prices rose from about £3.00 to over £4.60 during the same period, driven by operating costs and inflation. One metric declines, the other rises, and the negative correlation is the mathematical consequence of their opposite monotonic directions across eleven years. Maine marriages and British beer share nothing except a chart.

Eleven years of Maine divorce and UK pint prices is a correlation that spans the Atlantic, connects two entirely unrelated trends, and achieves a coefficient of -0.987 through nothing more than opposite directions and shared timing. The marriages stabilize in Kennebunk, the pints inflate in Kensington, and the chart notes both with the mathematical composure of a coefficient that has never been married or drunk. The decree is not issued. The tab is.