Marriage in America is on the rocks.
So finds a new report, the first in what is intended to be an annual review of the institution, by a Rutgers think tank.
We endlessly analyze so much of our culture, from fashion trends to TV characters, but an activity as fundamental as marriage has gotten short shrift, according to this group, The National Marriage Project.
“The State of Our Unions” report, released in July, is based on existing data from the U.S. Census, a University of Chicago survey, and another from the University of Michigan. But the Rutgers report, says sociology professor David Popenoe, examines those old numbers through a new filter – what they say about marriage.
Though Popenoe, who wrote “Life Without Father,” and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, co-director of the National Marriage Project and author of a famous Atlantic Monthly article titled “Dan Quayle Was Right,” receive funding from mostly conservative foundations, he insists they’re not pushing a right-wing agenda. “We just want more national discussion about this, that’s all,” says Popenoe, 66.
Q: What was your most significant finding?
A: That marriage is a weakening institution. There are not too many signs for optimism, although there are some. Because marriage is so central to the family and the family is so central to society, we should be talking about and finding ways to help people, especially young people, to have stronger marriages. That, by the way, is what the huge majority of them still want to have. Perhaps the most surprising finding is that for young people, high school seniors, two things are going on. They seem to hold marriage in even higher esteem than in previous decades. But, at the same time, young people, and girls especially, are more pessimistic about ever achieving that goal.
Q: Your report shows the marriage rate is down by 35 percent since 1970. What does this mean?
A: The major thing that’s going on here is that people are delaying marriage. The age of marriage is going up. And in societies where marriages begin to be delayed, the actual marriage rate also begins to drop. People wait too long. Then they just give up. They don’t marry. Or they live together outside of marriage. You have a tremendous growth in non-marital cohabitation, and that begins to signal to people that maybe we don’t really need marriage. The breakup rate of cohabiting partners is far, far higher than marriage partners.
Q: Is marriage, the institution, soon to end?
A: Certainly not in any time we can foresee. It really has weakened very much in recent decades and every indication is that it’s going to continue to weaken. I think it’s something we should be talking about and looking into–the benefits of marriage. In a situation where you had a nearly 50 percent divorce rate and a nearly 32 percent out-of-wedlock birth rate, if you had those types of things in some other area of health, it would be a national disaster. But, here, with marriage, we talk about it sort of benignly. And actually, we don’t talk much about it.
Q: Is there anything wrong with not getting married?
A: Certainly not, for a lot of people. For the health of society, and for the good of children, though, it certainly is good to have a lot of marriages. They generate substantial benefits to society. The alternative–living together outside of marriage or non-marriage–leads to substantial social costs to society. The good societies, so to speak, would have a high marriage rate.
Q: The report showed that young people still hope to get married some day, but how does that fit with the other finding–that many of them, young women especially, simply don’t think they will marry?
A: I think that we can, as a nation, build on the fact that there still is this drive or desire to get married. At the same time, we should be worried that there’s all this growing pessimism. In the sense that it’s realistic, there’s not much you can do about it. More and more people who are mating today have never seen a good marriage.
The nature of marriage has changed so much. It has become a kind of a close friendship with a sexual relationship between a man and a woman. That’s a change.
Before, it was a multifaceted institution. A partnership which was legally bound, typically a religious partnership, and a partnership between two families. Just because the husband and wife didn’t get along wasn’t a reason to break up. Also, in times past, men, by and large, had mostly male friends and women had mostly female friends.
Today, we’re together in an entirely different way. It’s stripped down, mainly, to the two of them. They’re best friends, often isolated, alone, and this is something pretty new. When it works out, it’s wonderful. When it doesn’t, which is 50 percent of the time, it breaks up.
Since marriage has changed–I think for the good–we have an educational job to do.
Q: What’s wrong with people marrying later?
A: Absolutely nothing. As long as they have marriage clearly in mind. I’ll take that back, not nothing. The studies show that young marriages, especially in teen years, have an especially high rate of divorce. Once you get to the mid-20s, those youthful concerns cancel out. Of course, there are lots of good reasons to delay. The downside is that you get used to living as an independent single person–and increasingly as a single person in a live-in sexual partnership with someone. When marriage finally comes in the 30s, it’s a big shift, and that’s difficult for people. So I don’t know. My grand design is for people to marry relatively late, but to somehow be fixed in their minds to be eventually married and to be planning for it, rather than just be partaking in this freewheeling single way of life.
Q: Your report shows that divorce, most recently, is down slightly and that the rate of unwed mothers is too. Isn’t that good news?
A: It is good news. You don’t quite know whether this is a blip or whether we’re on the cusp of a turnaround. The main reason the divorce rate has dropped is because people are delaying marriage. The second reason is higher education levels, which are associated with lower divorce rates. As for the out-of-wedlock birth rate, there are many explanations for the decline of the birth rate from abstinence programs and more use of contraceptives.
Q: Can single people be happy?
A: Oh sure. There have been happy–what we used to call–spinsters who can do all sorts of admirable things going through life. You certainly don’t need marriage for happiness. On the other hand, married people do tend to be happier across the population. Not only happier, but healthier, wealthier and more long-lived. There really is a benefit to having another person permanently to go through life with you. We’ve barely even talked about children. There’s a tremendous benefit to children having a stable family structure they can rely upon.
Q: Are you married and for how long?
A: Yes. For 40 years.
Q: You have daughters who lived with people before marriage. What did you say to them?
A: I wasn’t even particularly opposed to cohabitation when they did it. Then we looked at all this data (from a February study on cohabitation) and we began to rethink the issue. You know, I’m not some sort of diehard anti-cohabitation person. I do think it’s something that we really should consider more carefully and not just accept it as some new stage in the life cycle. It doesn’t seem to be a particularly good way to prepare for marriage, by the way.
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An edited transcript
