A nascent marriage renaissance?

Here’s the bad news: Nearly all indicators on marriage and married birthrates have been moving in the wrong direction over the last few decades across the United States. Marriage rates have been declining steadily, 54% overall since 1900. Seen another way, the 1920 marriage rate in America was 92%, almost triple its 2022 rate of 31%. Matrimony has declined markedly among the under-40 set since 1980. Additionally, married births dropped precipitously over this same time compared to growth in births to single and cohabiting mothers. Births to unwed women have sat steady at about 40% for the last decade. And cohabitation has rocketed over the last 40 years, with a shocking 80 percent of marriages entered today being preceded by cohabitation. People are also waiting longer to marry, with age at first marriage increasing today to 31 for men and 29 for women. It was 23 for men and 20 for women in 1950.

This bad news seems to be turning around however in some important measures, according to one of the world’s leading sociologists of marriage.

Brad Wilcox, a noted professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, director of UVA’s National Marriage Project and author of Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization has an important essay out in The Atlantic documenting how marriage “is showing new signs of resilience.” Professor Wilcox explains that “reports of marriage’s demise are exaggerated.”

Wilcox notes, “Rather quietly, the post-’60s family revolution appears to have ended.” He adds, “Marriage as a social institution is showing new strength—even among groups that drifted away from the institution in the 20th century, including Black and working-class Americans.” This turn is most notably indicated in two facts.

The first is that divorce has been declining for some years, and this has been well-established. Wilcox contends, “Since the early 1980s, the divorce rate has now fallen by almost 40 percent—and about half that decline has happened in just the past 15 years.” This is established by Wilcox’s own analysis and from recent U.S. Census data. What is more, divorce rates have been falling among black and working-class Americans, demonstrating the strength of this trend.

Wilcox also holds that the well-entrenched assumption that half of all marriages in the United States will end in divorce has no real basis today. Referencing recent work done by himself and colleagues at the Institute for Family Studies, Wilcox says the “proportion of first marriages expected to end in divorce has fallen to about 40 percent in recent years.” Good sociological research shows this risk is much lower for many convictional Christians because of the kinds of life choices they make and the homes they are more likely to come from.

The second fact regards the kinds of homes children are being born into. Births to unmarried mothers swelled from 5% in 1960 to 41% in 2009. It has ticked down to 40% where it has sat for years. Wilcox posits, “For children, less divorce and a small decline in childbearing outside wedlock means more stability.” But this is not the only encouraging trend on family stability for children.

Wilcox adds that married childbearing is seeing stronger gains. “After falling for more than 40 years, beginning in the late 1960s, the share of children living in married families bottomed out at 64 percent in 2012 before rising to 66 percent in 2024.” It gets better. The share of children raised in intact married homes for the duration of their childhood has climbed two percentage points from 2014 to 2024, from 52 to 54 percent. It’s a small but profoundly consequential turn because such homes are dramatically more beneficial for all children. And these benefits are increasing in power over the last decade or so.

Wilcox believes a third positive trend might be emerging, but the data here “is much less established than the first two.” The rate of new marriages for prime-age adults (25-55) hit a new height in 2023 for any year since 2008. Since 2023 is the most recent year for such data, we will have to see if this rise continues.

A final data point Wilcox shares bolsters the importance of these improving numbers. “According to the 2024 General Social Survey [the gold standard of sociological data], married men and women ages 25 to 55 are more than twice as likely to be ‘very happy’ with their life as their nonmarried peers” [emphasis added]. Sam Peltzman, an emeritus economics professor at the University of Chicago, recently documented the same strong finding, noting “a wide gap of around 30 points between marrieds and unmarrieds” concerning life happiness. Peltzman explains “there is a substantial marital premium for every [socio-economic] group and subgroup I analyze, and this premium is usually close to the overall 30-point average.” Cohabitation did not show the same benefit.

For love of neighbor and the well-being of our nation’s children, we should all pray that Wilcox is correct in what he discerns as a burgeoning marriage renaissance.