Well this is a depressing way to start the day! According to a new report, less than half of adults in America are married. The number of married couples dropped 5 percent between 2009 and 2010 and has declined by more than 20 percent since 1960. That’s not good, guys! Marriage is such a beautiful thing! More details below.
The report, released Wednesday, showed that Americans are not only getting married less frequently, they’re doing so later in life. These findings mirror those observed in the UK in November, where researchers found that only 48 percent of adults there were married.
But what does this mean for society? And why does it matter at all? HuffPost Weddings spoke to Pew researcher and senior writer D’Vera Cohn to find out.
What are the major findings in this report?
We looked at three aspects of marriage and all of them had pretty notable numbers to them. We looked at how many adults are currently married — among people over 18, how many of them have a spouse — and we found that barely half of all adults now are married. That’s declined quite a bit from the past. In 2010, again it was barely half — 51 percent — in 1960, it was 72 percent. The second thing we looked at was how many marriages are taking place from one year to the next. We have some recent data about that from the last few years from a census survey. So our second finding is that from 2009 to 2010, the number of marriages declined by five percent, which is a pretty notable decline. We don’t know why, we can’t really say for sure that it’s the recession or bad economic times, but it’s certainly one more sign that marriage is less important than it used to be in the lives of Americans. The third thing we looked at was how old are Americans when they get married for the first time. Among men who get married for the first time, half are nearly 29 years old or older, and among women who marry for the first time, half are about 27 years old or older. Back in the baby boom days it was early-20’s, in the 1990’s it was mid-20’s, now we’re talking late-20’s, which means we’re seeing a substantial number of people not get married until their 30s for the first time.
Why aren’t people getting married?
There are a number of things going on that could play a role. One is that there are other kinds of living arrangements that are socially acceptable now that may not have been in the past, such as living with someone without being married, living on your own, or even living as a single parent. So people may feel they have options that they didn’t used to have. Another factor in some cases is that among Americans who complete college, or education beyond that, they may want to get their education done and get launched in a career before they settle down and get married. From some surveys we’ve taken, we’ve had people say that it’s important, at least for men, to be financially able to provide for a family before they get married. It may [also] be that some couples feel they don’t have the financial wherewithal to have a wedding yet.
