As you’ve likely heard, if you live in the United States (and possibly elsewhere), same sex marriage has now been legalized. And it’s legal in Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Canada, South Africa, Norway, Sweden, Portugal, Iceland, Argentina, Denmark, France, Brazil, Uruguay, New Zealand, Britain, Luxembourg, Finland and Ireland already. The trend to legalize same sex marriage started in 2001. And it’s been gaining popularity. At some point, it’s likely that same sex marriage will be universally legal. But when?
Let’s ask Excel, using polynomial trendlines. To get started, let’s look at how many countries have legalized same sex marriage. The below spreadsheet lays out how many countries have legalized same sex marriage to date, and when.
To then see a trend line, we’ll add a chart element, selecting Add Chart Element and then select More Trendline Options…
At the Format Trendline pane, click Polynomial and check the box for “Display equation on chart”
Then copy the equation into your clipboard and pasties into the formula bar. Next, we’ll remove the y and convert the symbols into formula elements.
This results in wrong numbers because we’ve got years instead of ascending numbers and we’ve got missing years when same sex marriage wasn’t legalized in any countries. So, we’ll convert the years into a number starting with 1 and going up (where 1 is 2001, etc).
Keep adding rows and copying the formula into each new row and you’ll find that same sex marriage will be universally accepted in 2035, by summing up the numbers and looking for 206 countries.