State of the unions

Family law attorney Tiffany Lesnik says that divorce litigation follows a seasonal pattern. Spouses often try to put their differences on the backburner while children are home from school, according to Lesnik, but sometimes that’s a temporary delay.

“They’ve maybe been taking trips. That’s when tensions tend to rise,” said Lesnik. “And so we get back into September, late August, and then the divorce separation rates tend to pick back up again.”

New research says that, overall, the national divorce rate is going through more than a slow season—they have been trending down for several decades, slowing from their peak a generation ago. But studies have also noted that the good news of lower divorce rates also has a major downside: Fewer married couples are breaking up because fewer couples are tying the knot in the first place.

In late July, Focus on the Family published Marriage Health in America, a 31-page study on the status of marriage as an institution. Among a number of findings, the study reported that U.S. divorce rates are steadily dropping, 74% of married U.S. adults describe their marriages as healthy, and “convictional Christians” have the lowest probability of experiencing a marriage crisis.

The study considered respondents “convictional Christians,” a subset of a broader Christian group, if they said they attend religious services monthly or more often, read the Bible personally at least weekly, and agreed that Biblical truth trumped their own opinions. The report noted that this group scored highest in each of the 32 areas studied. “Clearly, a commitment to Christian faith and practice makes a positive contribution to healthy marriage outcomes,” the authors wrote.

Statistics show that fewer U.S. adults are getting married in the first place. In 1949, nearly 80% of households were headed by married couples. That number has steadily fallen since, staying below half of households since 2010, according to USAFacts.

This reversal has a lot to do with changing attitudes about marriage as an institution, according to Bob Paul, vice president of the Focus on the Family Marriage Institute. “Today, [marriage is] becoming increasingly something that people see as an achievement that you work toward,” said Paul. “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, often in pursuit of higher education or establishing high-earning careers. In March, the Heritage Foundation published a report on U.S. family trends, finding that, since 1960, the median age for first marriage has increased by eight years for women and seven years for men.

And then there’s the expanding cohort that doesn’t aspire to get married at all. Just 56% of the never-married Focus on the Family study participants reported that they want to get married someday. About one-third of today’s 18-year-old Americans will have never married by the time they reach 45, according to researchers.

Couples are still entering into long-term relationships, but many don’t believe it’s necessary to “put a ring on it.” As recently as 1996, just under 4% of couples living together were unmarried, per analysis released in February from the University of Pennsylvania. That number reached 9.1% in 2023 and is projected to hit almost 17% by 2040.

“Those who reported not cohabiting prior to marriage reported a lower incidence of marriage crisis than those who lived together prior to getting married,” the Focus on the Family report found.

Today, about two-thirds of couples who marry have already lived together, though premarital cohabitation doesn’t always lead to tying the knot. A 2015 study found that a little more than 1 in 5 cohabitating couples transitioned to marriage within a five-year period.

Since fewer people are getting married, marriage has become “this select institution for the upper third of the country,” said Rachel Sheffield, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

That may be good news for those who do get married. In a 2020 analysis of divorce trends, University of Maryland professor Philip Cohen wrote that, “the U.S. is progressing toward a system in which marriage is rarer, and more stable, than it was in the past.”

According to Sheffield, a decrease in stable marriages can negatively influence the rest of society. “You’re also seeing more instability in relationships for everyone else. … There’s more informal relationships rather than marriages taking place,” said Sheffield. She added that the fallout from those unstable relationships isn’t noted in official divorce statistics, distorting the overall picture of divorce rates.

Conventional wisdom has long held that half of marriages will end in divorce. But now, that’s likely an overestimate. According to the Institute for Family Studies, roughly 40% of the couples marrying today will eventually separate.

But low marriage rates dampen that good news. If current trends continue, the share of married adults is expected to drop from 46% to below 40% in the next 15 years.

Attorney Tiffany Lesnik is glad that official divorce rates are trending downward. “Divorce is never a good thing,” she said.

But she doesn’t foresee having to look for another line of work. “As family law attorneys, we’re always going to be employed,” said Lesnik. “It’s just the nature of our culture.”