Reasons for this vary, says Duncan, but time, interest and expense appear to be at the head of the list. We have to make these programs more accessible and more interesting especially to men. Traditionally, females have the strongest interest. Duncan has been looking at content and also at the marketing of such programs. Bryan Ramboz, a doctoral candidate at Utah State University, is developing such a premarital-education program and is negotiating with Cache County in hopes of requiring premarital counseling for couples where at least one of the partners is under age 19.
Adolescents are a high-risk group.
The divorce rate is twice as high for couples who marry in their teens as for those who marry later. For these couples, he would mandate a minimum of six hours of counseling with clergy or professional counselors. The Decline of Marriage Only 67 percent of American women aged 35 to 44 were legally married as of 1998. That people are staying single longer may stem in part from the option of living together without marrying, which has lost much of its stigma in recent years. But perhaps a more basic motivation is widespread pessimism about marriage, particularly among women, as noted by David Popenoe and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead of the National Marriage Project of Rutgers University.