Time was that good salt-of-the-earth country folks never would get divorced. They'd just sit around, whittling and canning preserves and fantasizing about whittling down their awful spouse's dead body into tiny parts and putting those parts into jars and calling them "preserves," and fleeing to Brazil. They never would, though. They'd just think about.

Well, times change.

Forty years ago, divorced people were more concentrated in cities and suburbs. But geographic distinctions have all but vanished, and now, for the first time, rural Americans are just as likely to be divorced as city dwellers, according to an analysis of census data by The New York Times.

You can say all you want about evolving social mores and liberalized attitudes towards women and how this actually represents the end of marriages that, in the past, would have been endured in silent misery. But you also have to say some platitudes about the Breakdown of the American Family, to be polite. It's the country way.

[NYT]