Daily Citizen has been tracking the long, slow decline in divorce rates in America, here, here, here and here.
But what if that is not actually good news for marriage and the family? It seems like a counter-intuitive thought, but that is what a family scholar at the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) wants us to consider. She makes an interesting and important point.
First, let’s address two big misunderstandings when it comes to divorce.
Most people assume the risk of divorce for couples marrying today is 50%. It is not. It’s actually about 42%. But as research done by Focus on the Family demonstrates, many couples marrying today have a dramatically lower risk of lifetime divorce because they have made life choices and have advantages that dramatically elevate their risk of building a successful marriage.
The other misunderstanding is that almost nine out of ten people assume the divorce rate is rising in the U.S. but it is not. Divorce has steadily declined from its historic high in 1980, to a 50-year low today.
So, why might this remarkable divorce decline not be good news? Leah Libresco Sargeant, the author of the IFS piece, explains “the story of declining divorce isn’t primarily a story of stronger marriages, but of a failure to make matches in the first place.” She is correct on the decline of marriage.
The U.S. Census Bureau reports (May 2024) that married-couple households made up 47% of all U.S. households in 2022, down from 71% in 1970.
The National Center for Family & Marriage Research (NCFMR) at Bowling Green State University notes the U.S. marriage rate has declined 54% from 1900 to today. That rate peaked in 1920 at 92.3%, almost triple today’s rate.
Pew Research Center reports (2023) a dramatic 4-fold increase since 1980 in never married adults in the U.S., a record high. As of 2021, 25% of 40-year-olds in the United States have never married. This is a dramatic increase from 6% in 1980. While many of these unmarried 40-year-olds are living with a romantic partner, most are not. In 2022, 22% of never-married adults aged 40 to 44 were cohabiting. And 80% of marriages taking place today are preceded by some form of cohabitation. Singleness and cohabitation are the relational growth markets.
Sargeant highlights a trend graph by generational birth cohort from a new and important National Bureau of Economics Research working paper addressing why fertility is so low in high income countries. It’s related to declining marriage rates.
Marriage has been declining sharply for multiple generations. The noted economics paper explains “marriage and fertility remain tightly linked, even in high-income countries today.” The two authors, Melissa Schettini Kearney and Phillip B. Levine, note, “The data reveal that as a descriptive matter, the decline in fertility in high-income countries corresponds to a decline in marriage.”
So, when the population of people marrying declines, so does the pool of people who could possibly get divorced. Sargeant asks, “So, what would represent genuinely encouraging news about marriage in America?”
Her answer, “It would help to see the divorce rate decline while marriage rates rise. Then we might have reason to believe that people were getting better at being married, rather than that our culture was convincing people to give up on marriage.
She adds, “One statistic I’d like to see is how many people of marriageable age can point to strong examples of successful marriages, especially of peers just a few years ahead of them. …When marriage declines, young singles are in a negative feedback loop – they see fewer examples and so marriage becomes more abstract and less achievable.”
We must all lament that growing numbers of men and women are making choices away from marriage and parenthood. Sargeant concludes, “No matter how good that makes the divorce toplines look, that’s still bad news for American families and America’s future.”
As our nation works to recover in so many areas, rebuilding our crumbling marriage and fertility rates must be chief among them. Without families and babies, there is no nation, there is no future.
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