Marriage in decline

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: the state of the unions.

Divorce rates have dropped since their peak in the 1980s, and couples marrying today have a strong chance of staying together.

But behind the good news…there’s a troubling twist.

Here’s WORLD’s Anna Johanson Brown.

ANNA JOHANSON BROWN: Family law attorney Tiffany Lesnik says divorce litigation follows a seasonal pattern.

LESNIK: So when the children are out of school, families are taking vacations. We’ll see a slowdown many times in divorce and separation.

Once the school year kicks back into high gear, Lesnik expects to see more couples file for divorce.

But overall, divorce rates have been slowing down for decades. Couples just aren’t separating as often as they did a generation ago.

Recently, researchers noted other positive trends about marriage. In late July, Focus on the Family published a 31-page report called “Marriage Health in America.” They found that the majority of couples are content in their marriages. Bob Paul is vice president of the Marriage Institute at Focus on the Family:

PAUL: So the surprising thing, which was kind of refreshing compared to all the bad news we get, is that 74% of the individuals that were surveyed rated their marriage as healthy.

Just 21% of the couples they surveyed believe their marriage is in crisis.

Conventional wisdom has long held that half of marriages will end in divorce. That’s likely an overestimation…though not by much. According to the Institute for Family Studies, roughly 40% of the couples marrying today will eventually separate. And even the apparent good news of decreasing divorce rates has a major downside:

PAUL: One of the reasons that we’re seeing the divorce rate falling is that people are just not getting married. So, you we're looking at the state of people that are married, but fewer and fewer people are actually even bothering to get married. Many people, young people today are seeing marriage, the institution of marriage is sort of an out of date institution. It's not relevant in their minds today.

In 1949, nearly 80% of households in the U.S. were headed by married couples. Today, that’s true in less than half: 47 percent of households are headed by a married couple.

Changing attitudes about the purpose of marriage have fueled that reversal.

PAUL: Today, it's becoming increasingly something that people see as an achievement that you work toward. Instead of finding someone to build a life with, you sort of build your life and then you find someone to join with you to go forward.

That’s why many single Americans delay marriage until their late 20s or early 30s. Many people wait to get married until after they earn advanced degrees or establish high-earning careers.

SHEFFIELD: It's more likely that you have college-educated, higher-income individuals marrying. So you have people who have more economic resources, and it's become this select institution for kind of the upper third of the country.

Rachel Sheffield is a research fellow with the Heritage Foundation. She says the good news is many of these selective marriages are likely to last. But the bad news is, if marriage is becoming more of an elite benchmark, that isn’t great for the rest of society.

SHEFFIELD: You're also seeing more instability in relationships for everyone else because there is less marriage.

About 10% of Americans live together but aren’t married. Many of those cohabiting couples never get married. And that leads to another problem: low birthrates.

SHEFFIELD: Married couples are much more likely to have children than single women are. So as marriage declines, the birth rate declines with it.

For those cohabiting couples who do have children, Sheffield notes that cohabitation decreases stability for them.

SHEFFIELD: So, if we, you we have the divorce rate, the official divorce rate, but then we also have just relationships, kind of families that are formed outside of marriage. And, know, there's not any official, you know, document or recognition of that to kind of count as a divorce rate.

Divorce studies miss this. Unmarried couples with children splitting up aren’t traceable with traditional methods. So, it’s hard to tell how many couples are actually separating.

If current trends continue, the share of married adults is expected to drop from 46% to below 40% in the next 15 years. This means that divorce will likely become less common too.

Attorney Tiffany Lesnik says that’s a net positive, especially for children. But there’s still a lot of work to do.

LESNIK: I mean, it's just the long-term damage to children's lives when their parents divorce. You know, it is devastating. And I think psychologically, we want to try to normalize the divorce process by saying, we just do like 50-50, have equal time, kids are resilient, they're going to be fine. And that's just the way that the culture is now that children are accustomed to having families with divorced parents. I think that's an excuse.

For WORLD, I’m Anna Johnanson Brown.

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