One line of thinking has it that we have traded off permanence for happiness in marriage. Brad Wilcox reviews the evidence:
What happened during the divorce revolution of the 1970s and in its immediate wake is that average marital quality in the United States actually fell from the early ‘70s through the late ‘80s . . . .
What is especially striking about this decline in marital quality is that, according to progressive logic, marital quality should have improved in the 1970s as fewer and fewer Americans married and many supposedly subpar marriages were dissolved.