Changing Marriage Patterns Since 1970: What’s Going On, and Why?*

INTRODUCTIONFew topics have attracted as much attention from family scholars and demographers in the United States in recent years as the "retreat from marriage" (Schoen and Cheng, 2006). Americans are marrying less now than at any point in the recorded demographic history of the country. Our objective in this paper is to examine trends in marriage behavior in the United States since 1970, briefly discuss two quite different kinds of explanations for these trends, and finally place the American data in a comparative context that may help us to choose between competing explanations. No issues involving the causes of the downward trend in marriage rates will be settled here, but hopefully we can frame the questions in such a way that answers may be pursued constructively in future research.The most direct evidence of the retreat from marriage in the United States is seen in the declining marriage rate. In 1 970 there were 76.5 marriages for every 1 000 unmarried women age 1 5 and over. By 2000 this rate had declined to 44.4, and by 2008 to 34.8 (see Figure 1 ). So over the course of less than forty years, the proportion of unmarried persons who marry each year has declined by nearly fifty-five percent. By any calculation, that's a huge change in behavior in a relatively short span of time.There are several changes in marital behavior patterns underlying this secular decline in the marriage rate. One is that there has been an increase in lifetime non-marriage-that is, the proportion of people who spend their lives without marrying (Schoen and Canudis-Romo, 2005; Schoen and Cheng, 2006). While this trend has not yet affected those 65 and over, the percentage of the population ever-married has decreased since 1970 in all age categories up to 64 (see Table 3 below). The increasing prevalence of cohabitation (Bumpass and Lu, 2000; Seltzer, 2004), even among older persons (Brown, Lee, and Bulanda 2006), is part of this trend; cohabitation appears to be a substitute for marriage, rather than a prelude, in some segments of the population (Lichter et al., 2006; Manning and Smock, 2002). It is also likely that an increasing proportion of the population is unpartnered throughout the life course.Another major contributor to the declining marriage rate is the increasing average age at marriage (Kalmijn, 2007). In the United States in 1970, the median age at first marriage was 23.2 for men and 20.8 for women. These figures were actually up slightly from their low points (since 1 890) of 22.5 for men and 20. 1 for women in 1 956. But by 2009, the median age at first marriage had risen to 28. 1 for men and 25.9 for women (see Figure 2). These changes reflect an increase of roughly 21 percent for men and 25 percent for women since 1970, which again is a very rapid change in a short period of time. As is the case for lifetime non-marriage, much of this is driven by the increase in cohabitation, which now precedes marriage for more than half of all couples who eventually marry, thus delaying marriage (Bumpass and Lu, 2000; Smock and Manning, 2004).While higher ages at marriage are associated with lower rates of marital instability (Raley and Bumpass, 2003), a probable disadvantage of the increasing age at first marriage in the United States is that young adults are spending a greater proportion of their childbearing years without spouses. In the United States in 2007, nearly 40 percent of all babies were born to unmarried mothers (Hamilton et al., 2009); this is up from 1 1 percent in 1 970 (Martin et al., 2002). Although there isn't universal agreement on this, one well-documented argument among demographers is that the increase in nonmarital childbearing in the U.S. is entirely attributable to the increase in the proportion of the population that is unmarried (Gray, Stockard, and Stone, 2006). And we know that children born to single mothers, and/or children who live with unmarried mothers, are disadvantaged in many respects (material resources, educational and occupational attainment, psychological adjustment and wellbeing, etc. …