Changing Marriage Trends

     I find it hard to believe that marriage trends have changed so drastically in only 25 years. When I met my husband 26 years ago, having a baby outside marriage was still considered taboo. It was becoming slightly more acceptable (I knew of one girl who got pregnant during high school, whose parents allowed her to live at home and helped her with raising them) but for the most part, if a girl got pregnant before she was married, she was expected to marry the father or give the baby up for adoption. I should know, since I got pregnant at 16. My father’s reaction was to try to find an unwed mother’s home to send me to. He was unsuccessful so I stayed at home during the pregnancy but was told that I would not be allowed to live at home and would receive no help if I kept the child. That made adoption the only viable option, and was a much more common solution at that time. In our current culture, there is little to no stigma to having a child out of wedlock. Society used to recognize that a child born to a single mother (or unmarried parents) was at a disadvantage. As our culture has devalued marriage and families, cohabitation and single parenting have become acceptable offshoots.

     Nowadays, over 50% of children are born to unwed mothers. (The National Marriage Project and The Institute for American Values, 2012, p. 2) Many of these children will never know the security of a family with married biological parents. Because cohabiting relationships involving children break up at twice the rate of married couples, this is a concerning statistic for the stability of families.

     Another trend that has changed is the age at which people get married. Most of my peers (who wanted to get married) were married by the time they were 20-24, but now the ages for marriage average 27 for women and 29 for men. Couples seem to wait until they have graduated college and have a steady career going before committing to marriage. They no longer go through the traditional struggle of being poor, married college students. In my opinion, they miss out on a lot of growth opportunities by delaying marriage until everything in their lives is in place. For those who don’t attend college, it is far more common to live together than to get married, and those who do get married do so after years of cohabiting, pushing the marriage age back for those in this group also.

     The higher marriage age also contributes to the lower fertility rate in the United States. As of 2011, this rate is 1.89, which is below the replacement level of 2.1. (The National Marriage Project and The Institute for American Values, p. 84) I’ve seen the difference this makes in the areas that I’ve lived. In Cincinnati, they had to consolidate elementary schools because attendance was too low for the individual schools to remain open. The lack of children was also evident in our neighborhoods- there weren’t many children in our immediate neighborhood for our daughter to play with. This is in stark contrast to the number of children that lived near me when I was growing up. As a child, I was able to walk down the street to a friend’s house, or get a group of friends together within a couple of blocks, but now it’s almost always necessary to drive a child to their friends’ houses because they don’t live close by.

     Apparently I lived through the heyday of divorce (the early 1980s) but wasn’t aware of it. I knew of a few people who had been divorced, but the majority of my family and friends had parents who were still married. As a teenager I was aware of a changing attitude toward divorce. It was no longer the last option for a miserable marriage, but seemed to be viewed instead as an escape hatch in case anything went wrong.

Another trend is for middle class couples to eschew marriage in favor or cohabitation. More and more high school educated couples opt for the less permanent arrangement of living together rather than committing to marriage, even though research has concluded that children born to unwed or cohabiting parents are more likely to live in poverty.

     As “The Family: A Proclamation” states, “The family is ordained of God. Marriage between man and woman is essential to His eternal plan.” (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1995) Marriage isn’t meant to be one of multiple options for couples and families. It is the only institution designated by God as the way to raise His children. Moreover, “the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets.” We are already seeing the negative effects of divorce, cohabitation, disregard for children, and unwed pregnancies on our nation and its families.

Works Cited

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (1995, September 23). The Family: A Proclamation to the World. Retrieved from Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: https://www.lds.org/topics/family-proclamation?lang=eng&old=true

The National Marriage Project and The Institute for American Values. (2012). The State of Our Unions. Charlottesville.