A new study by the National Center for Family & Marriage Research (NCFMR) revealed that marriage in the United States has declined precipitously in the last half century — by nearly 60 percent.
While national marriage rates have continuously fluctuated between the 1890s and 1960s, with peaks and troughs in between, there has been a consistent decline since the 1970s.
Whereas the marriage rate in 1970 stood at 76.5 percent, today that has more than halved down to a paltry 31.1 percent.
Sociologist Andrew Cherlin of John Hopkins University noted that NCFMR’s findings reveal that the formal benefits of marriage are continuing to dwindle as the rise of cohabitation and co-parenting have eroded historic social pressures.
“It used to be a basic institution that everyone had to buy into in early adulthood,” Cherlin told Axios on Saturday. “You got married, then you moved in together, and then you got a job.”
However, “Marriage is now becoming the last step into adulthood,” Cherlin argued.
Surprisingly, academic studies about American social attitudes towards marriage have not changed considerably despite the rapidly changing wedding landscape. Whereas nearly three-quarters of seniors surveyed in 1976 expressed an interest in getting married, that number only dropped by three percent by 2020.
The new research paper also underscores divergent marriage rates by race and ethnicity. Although women as a whole have seen marriage rates decline since the 1950s, these changes have been particularly pronounced for blacks and Hispanics.
“This decline has been most dramatic for Hispanic and Black women, who experienced 33% and 60% declines in the proportion of women married, respectively,” the organization writes.
Moreover, currently, “the racial/ethnic group with the lowest proportion married is Black women (26%), and the group with the highest is Asian women (56%).”
Women getting hitched for the first time in their lives, a demographic group that falls between 40 and 59, have seen their numbers skyrocket in recent years. Since 1990, NCFMR co-director Susan Brown found that delayed marriages have increased by 75 percent.
In the last century, the United States experienced two notable baby booms following World War I in the 1920s and World War II in the 1950s.