Marriage in Crisis: Why the Silence?

In February, President Barack Obama delivered a speech in Chicago about strengthening the middle class. He stated that rebuilding “the ladders of opportunity for everybody willing to climb them” does not start with the White House, the States, or the Public Schools – rebuilding “starts at home.”

“There’s no more important ingredient for success,” the President suggested, “nothing that would be more important for us reducing violence than strong, stable families – which means we should do more to promote marriage and encourage fatherhood.”

The President is correct - there is a correlation between stable homes and stable societies. This truth is strongly supported in research done by The National Marriage Project (NMP), a nonpartisan, nonsectarian, and interdisciplinary initiative located at the University of Virginia. 

The Project’s mission is to provide research and analysis on the health of marriage in America, to analyze the social and cultural forces shaping contemporary marriage, and to identify strategies to increase marital quality and stability. In preparing this commentary, I depended heavily on NMP data.

Annual surveys continue to report that high schoolers plan to marry one day and that having a good marriage is “extremely important” to them.

At the same time, we recognize the signs of change. The rising median age of first marriage, now 27 for women and 29 for men, is linked to a rapid rise in cohabitation prior to marriage and a dramatic increase in the number of children born outside of marriage. A growing number of couples, both young and old, now live together with no plans to marry eventually.

For first marriages recently formed, between 40 and 50 percent are likely to end in divorce. The divorce rate for remarriages is higher than that for first marriages. Yet amid these familiar trends, something astonishing has happened.

In “Middle America,” defined here as the nearly 60 percent of Americans aged 25 to 60 who have a high school but not a four-year college degree, marriage is rapidly slipping away. As historian Barbara Dafoe Whitehead recently wrote, “Four decades ago, these moderately educated Americans led the kind of family lives that looked much like the family lives of the more highly educated. They were just as likely to be happily married, and just as likely to be in first marriages. Today, they are significantly less likely to achieve a stable marriage, or even to form one in the first place.”

The plight of this population who once married in high proportions and formed families within marriage—and who still aspire to marriage but increasingly are unable to achieve it—is the social challenge for our times. And virtually no one is talking about it.

How dramatic is the change? As recently as the 1980s, only 13% of the children of moderately-educated mothers were born outside of marriage - by the late 2000s, that figure had risen to 44%. And earlier this year, a striking threshold was crossed. Based on a recent Child Trends analysis of data from the National Center for Health Statistics, a front-page story in the New York Times revealed that in the U.S. today among women under 30, more than half of births—53% - now occur outside of marriage.

As a nation we know of the benefits of marriage. We are inundated with statistics confirming that marriage sets the stage for happier, healthier and more stable living. The benefits of marriage are not only personal, they facilitate better societies. Then, “why is no one talking about it?”

Within recent years we have spent more time talking about redefining marriage rather than strengthening what we know works. We need more than the media to participate in the process of restoring rather than redefining marriage.

In this year’s State of the Union address, President Obama talked about ending marriage penalties for low-income couples. Actually, there are numerous disincentives to marriage for people who receive public benefits such as food stamps and housing allowances, sending the wrong message about marriage to low-income Americans.

In addition, we need to create a waiting period for divorcing couples combined with education about the option of reconciliation; and building upon marriage and relationship skills curricula. We’ve got to be more intentional if we sincerely believe a broad and sustainable middle class begins at home.

Interestingly, long before social scientists discovered the value of marriage in society, the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes concluded, “...two are better than one, because they have a good return for their work...” (4:9).

(I deeply regret my long absence from this weekly commentary. Thanks so much for your patience and expressions of concern.)