A new report from researchers at Bowling Green University has found that the U.S. divorce rate has fallen for the third consecutive year, dropping to its lowest point in more than 35 years.

Bloomberg is reporting on the new data, released late last week, which found that the divorce rate is down from 17.6 in 2014 to 16.9 in 2015. This is compared to the divorce rate of 23, the highest on record, which occurred in 1980. The latest numbers reveal that the divorce rate has decreased by 25 percent between 1980 and 2015.

At the same time, the marriage rate has increased from 31.9 marriages for every 1,000 unmarried women age 15 or older in 2014 to 32.3 marriages in 2015. This was the highest rate since 2009 and suggests that after several decades of decline, the marriage rate could be stabilizing.

“The decline has stopped,” said Wendy Manning, co-director of the National Center for Family & Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University.

While the numbers are promising, researchers are unable to determine exactly what’s behind the trend. Some factors could be the aging of the U.S. population, changing gender roles, and the fact that there are simply fewer marriages to break up.

“Baby boomers, for example, married young and have continued marrying and divorcing even at older ages, while it isn’t clear yet whether millennials and Generation X will follow suit,” Bloomberg reports.

Another reason the divorce rate has fallen so steeply over the last few decades is that younger generations are waiting until they are older to get married which means there are fewer marriages to end in divorce.

It’s also interesting to note that divorce and marriage rates vary among different segments of the population. Washington, D.C., and Wyoming have the highest divorce rates in the country, followed by Nevada, Arkansas, and Alaska. The lowest divorce rates were in Hawaii, followed by Wisconsin, Rhode Island, Delaware, and New Jersey.

As for marriage, the lowest rates are found in the northeastern U.S. while Utah has the highest. In fact, Utah’s marriage rate is nearly three times that of Rhode Island.

“Marriage has been holding steady for the past several years, but weddings are still half as common as they were in the 1970s and early 1980s,” Bloomberg reports. “What are Americans doing instead? Some are staying single and living alone, but many couples are doing what used to be called living in sin, sharing a home without officially tying the knot.”

Living together isn’t just a phenomenon among youth. According to a recent study by the National Center for Family & Marriage Research, the number of Americans over the age of 50 who are living together almost tripled from 2000 to 2014 to 3.2 million.

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