Marriage on the decline
Marriage as an institution has been a hot topic of debate as of late. Most notable has been the increasing struggle over gay marriage, but there has also been the somewhat quieter decline in the number of people getting married. While the divorce rate has stabilized (and actually decreased slightly) lately, part of that may be due to the fact that fewer people are getting married.
The WaPo recently ran an article on the decline of marriage, especially among the lower class. The Post points to statistics showing that increasing it is college graduates with high incomes getting married, while everyone else is resorting to co-habitation.
There are a couple odd statements in the article. One is this:
Married couples living with their own children younger than 18 are also helping to drive a well-documented increase in income inequality. Compared with all households, they are twice as likely to be in the top 20 percent of income. Their income has increased 59 percent in the past three decades, compared with 44 percent for all households, according to the census.
Now, the article has already explained that fewer people are getting married and that only rich people are getting married. If that is the case, then the truth isn’t that married couples are making more money thereby increasing income disparity. It is that poorer people aren’t getting married, which means that the average wage of married couples is going to go up. The Post seems to have put the horse behind the cart here, missing the point of the very demographic information they are quoting. What is true that the increase in income disparity has increased enough (and one real way that it has increased is that earnings among the lower and middle class have been dropping) that only people riding the crest of the wave feel like they are stable enough to risk getting married.
Which I think is probably the largest part of this decline. Stephanie Coontz writes about the changing attitude towards matrimony in her book Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage. One things that she highlighted was that the goals behind marriage have substantially changed from being financial partnerships to being love matches. The result is an increasing sense of unhappiness with marriage: if getting together with someone is about true love, rather than ensuring a higher standard of living, then the grounds for complaint are greatly increased. It is easy to measure financial security. But assigning a value to emotional satisfaction is a much harder and more fraught exercise. One that is continually open to ‘the grass is always greener’ syndrome, among other things.
The change that Coonz highlights here is, I think, reflected in the declining lower class marriage rate. Marriage used to be about financial stability. The new perception of marriage is that it is about love and that love is fleeting. While marriage is not expensive, per se, divorce can certainly be and alimony most definitely is. Since marriage is now considered much more transient it make sense that only people who have the financial stability to survive a divorce are getting married.