Americans remain committed to the institution of marriage

By Chris Carlson

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A Dec. 16 article in The Gazette reports that the proportion of married adults in the United States has reached an all-time low of 51 percent and warns that the proportion may fall below one half in a few years. The article is based on a Pew Research Center report, which is part of a series rather ominously titled “The Decline of Marriage.”

The Gazette article, as well as the report on which it is based, present an incomplete and somewhat misleading picture because they fail to place marriage trends in larger historical perspective. Many considerations of changes in family life, including the Pew report cited in the article, use 1960 as a starting point. The problem with doing so is that 1960 came at the end of an unusual decade.

In the late 1940s and the 1950s, the marriage rate increased substantially, so that by 1960 it had reached an all-time high for the century. In 1960, fully 71 percent of men and 67 percent of women were married. In contrast, in 1900 only 54 percent of men were married, and in 1940 61 percent were married. Among women the corresponding figures were 57 percent and 61 percent (http://www.census.gov/prod/99pubs/99statab/sec31.pdf).

So the current marriage rate of 51 percent, combined for men and women, is indeed at an all-time low, but it is a rate not dramatically different from some previous decades. It is also worth noting that nearly half of the decrease in the percent married since 1960 is a result of an increase in the percent of people who are divorced. Divorced people were once married and many will be married again. They may have abandoned their previous unhappy marriages, but they have not necessarily given up on marriage itself.

Should the decline in the marriage rate be a cause for concern, as perhaps implied by the title of the Pew Center series on marriage? The answer is yes and no.

On the one hand, a declining marriage rate has contributed to declining divorce rates. And although people who are married today report being “very happy” with their marriages at rates moderately lower than in the early 1970s, the proportion rating their marriages very happy has changed barely at all in the last two decades (http://stateofourunions.org/2011/social_indicators.php#marriage).

On the other hand, unmarried men engage in higher rates of various kinds of anti-social behavior (women thankfully being exempt from this propensity.) And children born to never-married women are more likely to be poor than other children.

This list of positives and negatives is easily expanded, and determining a “healthy” marriage rate for any particular era would be no easy task.

As for the possibility that the marriage rate will continue its downward trend, that remains to be seen. Predicting future behavior on the basis of past trends is fraught with difficulty. After all, demographers failed to predict the postwar baby boom and few predicted that the divorce rate would decline sharply in the 1990s.

We do know, however, that Americans remain committed to the institution of marriage and that the percent of people who will marry at some point in their lifetimes remains high. The Pew Research Center report itself shows that just over 60 percent of never-married people state that they hope to marry one day and that only 12 percent state they do not wish to marry (27 percent state, perhaps wisely, that they aren't sure).

The declining marriage rate may simply reflect an adjustment to post-1950s economic and social realities and the current rate may remain relatively stable in the years to come.

Chris Carlson, emeritus professor of sociology at Cornell College, Mount Vernon, and former vice president for academic affairs and dean of the college. Comments: ccarlson@cornellcollege.edu