When Marriage Disappears: The Retreat from Marriage in Middle America: The State of Our Unions 2010

When Marriage Disappears: The Retreat from Marriage in Middle America: The State of Our Unions 2010

In middle america, marriage is in trouble. Among the affluent, marriage is stable and may even be getting stronger. Among the poor, marriage continues to be fragile and weak. But the most consequential marriage trend of our time concerns the broad center of our society, where marriage, that iconic middle-class institution, is foundering.

For the last few decades, the retreat from marriage has been regarded largely as a problem afflicting the poor.[1] But today, it is spreading into the solid middle of the middle class.

The numbers are clear. Wherever we look among the communities that make up the bedrock of the American middle class—whether small-town Maine, the working-class suburbs of southern Ohio, the farmlands of rural Arkansas, or the factory towns of North Carolina—the data tell the same story: Divorce is high, nonmarital childbearing is spreading, and marital bliss is in increasingly short supply.

Cohabitation. Moderately educated Americans are increasingly likely to choose living together instead of marriage (see Figure 4). From 1988 to the late 2000s, the percentage of women aged 25–44 who had ever cohabited rose 29 percentage points for moderately educated Americans—slightly higher than the 24-point increase for the least educated. Over the same period, cohabitation grew 15 percentage points among the highly educated. When it comes to cohabitation, then, Middle America again looks more like downscale than upscale America.

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Nonmarital Childbearing. Moderately educated mothers are moving in the direction of the least-educated mothers with respect to unwed births (see Figure 5). In the early 1980s, 13 percent of children born to moderately educated mothers were born outside of marriage, and 33 percent of children born to least-educated women were born outside of marriage. Only 2 percent of children born to highly educated mothers were born outside of marriage. By the late 2000s, nonmarital childbirths accounted for 44 percent of children born to moderately educated mothers, 54 percent of children born to the least-educated mothers, and 6 percent of children born to highly educated mothers. Over this time period, then, the nonmarital childbearing gap grew between Middle and upscale America and shrunk between Middle and downscale America.