The news that over half of the women in the United States are not living with their spouse made the headlines. What has happened to the institution of marriage?
According to Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at the Johns Hopkins University, a lot has happened to marriage over a long period of time that has led to these statistics.
But interestingly, he finds that, if anything, the prestige of the institution has actually increased, even as examples of marriages deemed successful in previous generations - long and stable - have grown scarcer.
Census bureau figures show that of the 117 million women age 16 and up, 63 million are married. But when you subtract the 3.1 million who are legally separated and an additional 2.4 million who are not living with their husbands for one reason or another, you come up with 51 percent of women living single.
"I think this is a turning point of sorts in the long trend we have seen since the 1960s of marriage becoming a less important part of family life," Cherlin says of that statistic. "But it is not fading away."
Cherlin arrived at Hopkins 30 years ago intending to focus on problems in urban areas.
"I started looking at families and cities and that led to a close examination of how the American family is changing," he says.
A graduate of Yale with a doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles, Cherlin has written three books on marriage and divorce and authored a standard textbook in the field, Public and Private Families: An Introduction, now in its fourth edition.
Cherlin says his own history - married, divorced, a decade as a single father of two, a second marriage - is illustrative of the changes in this venerable institution during the last few decades. So why is it that more women are living without spouses than with them? What's happened to marriage?
While it is true that people are spending more of their lives outside of marriage than ever, it is also true that 80 to 90 percent of all Americans will marry at some point in their lives.
One of the main reasons you see more women living without spouses is simply because we are living longer than we used to. There are many more elderly widows than was the case a half century ago. So, part of what is driving these statistics is not what young people are doing, it is how long widows are living after their spouse's death.
The bottom line is that people are spending more time outside of marriage for a variety of reasons: They are marrying later, they are living with someone without marrying them, they are breaking up marriages if they are unhappy, and when their spouses die, the surviving partner is living longer. You put all of those together and you get close to 50 percent of women unmarried. So is marriage less important than it used to be?
I don't think so. Marriage is still highly valued and important to people so they now take their time in doing it. And they feel justified, if they are not satisfied in a marriage, with leaving it.
Marriage is an important symbol to people of achieving a successful life. More than ever, they want their marriage to be a celebration. They want a big church or synagogue wedding. They want to show others that they have made it as adults.
When people get married these days, they tell sociologists like me that they do not want to "go downtown" for their wedding, they don't want to get married by some justice of the peace. They want that celebration for family and friends, a public announcement.
As an important symbol, marriage is prestigious, something to feel proud of, something the couple is doing even though they don't feel they have to be married, even though if they feel unhappy in a marriage they can leave it.
So I think Americans value marriage quite highly. They also value their own personal satisfaction. Sometimes those two can come into conflict. Is this a different role than marriage used to have in people's lives?
Marriage is less important economically than it used to be. It is now more of an achievement, showing people that you have made it. It used to be the case that it was hard to survive as an adult unless you were married. A single parent on a farm, whether male or female, was in big trouble.
A hundred or even 50 years ago, you needed to be married to have a decent standard of living. Now, marriage is more of a choice, not an economic necessity. It is still the case that dual-earner married couples are the wealthiest, but it is still possible to be unmarried and have a good standard of living.
In the 1950s, half of all women married as teenagers. It was something they did quickly and once married, they stayed married. People took a different view of marriage. They took pride in playing the roles of breadwinner and homemaker, of being a good husband or wife, and were less oriented toward their own individual satisfaction. That made it easier for them to stay together.
Back then, the path was to get married, then finish school and get a job. Now people do it in the reverse. It used to be viewed as the first step into adulthood. Now it is often the last step. Before you marry, you finish your education, you get a job, perhaps get invested in a career, possibly live with a partner - maybe not the person you will marry - perhaps even have a child. Then, if and when you feel you are ready, you get married.
And, just as it is no surprise now to have several different careers today, it is not a surprise to have several different partners. Do feelings about marriage vary with socio-economic status? Is it different in the city than the suburbs?
There is no question that marriage is just as highly valued in urban areas as in suburban. Those in the inner city marry less not because they value it any less, but because they do not see a way to do it successfully. I think Americans across all races and classes hold a very similar high value of marriage.
Those in higher-income areas see a path they can follow which is to go to school, get a degree, get a job, marry and have kids. Low-income individuals don't see that model working as well, don't see the clear path to a successful marriage that the middle class often have. So they tend to postpone or forgo marriage, but that is not because they don't value it.
It is certainly the case that men are still expected to be steady wage earners and those that are not do not do as well in the marriage market. In many of these neighborhoods, there are not that many men who have stable employment over time. A woman might not think she is going to find a marriage partner any time soon, so she decides to have a child outside of marriage.
These economic problems in low-income neighborhoods have led to cultural differences. Having children outside of marriage is acceptable. Postponing having children until the age of 30 is not seen as a good thing, but postponing marriage until 30 is acceptable.
So with these economic difficulties have come cultural shifts, the emergence of a new lifestyle of having children well before marrying, of not marrying at all. But that is not because marriage is not valued, it is just that the conventional path that the middle class follows to marriage does not seem to work in these neighborhoods. What sort of effect has the lack of stability in marriage, the rise in divorce, had on children?
Divorce raises the risk of some negative things happening to children, such as not graduating from high school or having a child as a teenager. But most children of divorce live their lives without these negative things happening. So, though divorce raises the rate of these negative outcomes, most children escape them.
Still, the fact that it raises the risk means that should be taken into consideration. It would be as if doing something raised the risk of a child catching a certain illness, though it is still unlikely that your child would catch it. Would you still do it?
So divorce is not some unqualified disaster on children, nor is it totally benign. It does some harm to some kids, and we need to be concerned about that, but we need to recognize that most children escape serious problems and go on to have good lives.
And remember, it is still the case that two-thirds of all children are raised by their two biological parents who are marriage partners. Marriage is still a stage most people pass through at some point in their lives. But it is not the be-all and end-all it was a half-century ago when it was the only proper setting for family life. Now there are several proper settings.
michael.hill@baltsun.com