The drift in America away from marriage as the central pillar of society has reached a crucial landmark with the proportion of young adults who have never married exceeding that of married couples for the first time since records began more than a century ago.
An analysis of statistics gathered from 2009 and this year by the Population Reference Bureau underlines the sea change that has swept across the US since the 1970s when the steady decline in marriage as a social institution began.
The PRB finds that in the past decade the proportion of American adults aged 25 to 34 who are married has fallen from 55.1% in 2000 to 44.9% last year. Meanwhile, the percentage of young people in the same age bracket who have never married marched inexorably in the opposite direction, rising from 34.5% in 2000 to 46.3% in 2009.
A similarly consistent trend is found among the overall US population aged 18 and above, with married couples dropping from 57% to 52% over those nine years.
The authors of the report, Mark Mather and Diana Lavery, put the recent drop in marital rates down to the economic collapse of 2008.
They suggest that young couples are delaying tying the knot or even putting it off entirely as a result of economic distress. The costs of the ceremony, combined with the longer-term expense associated with setting up home and having children, appears to be turning them off the idea.
Instead, cohabitation is becoming more prevalent as an American way of life. Again, this is part of a trend that has been going on for at least three decades but the report suggests it has accelerated in recent years because of feelings of economic uncertainty, particularly among men.
Regional variations indicate, however, that economic hard times do not explain the ongoing decline of marriage completely. In Michigan, for instance, the marriage rate fell by 9%, less than the national average, despite the fact that this rust-belt state has suffered hugely from manufacturing decline leading to one of the highest unemployment levels in the US.
North-eastern states, such as New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine, experienced the largest decreases in marriage whereas in the midwest and around the Rockies the institution held relatively steady. At city level, Cleveland and New Orleans had the lowest proportion of young married couples, at less than 20% – not wholly surprising given that both have a reputation for being liberal and convention breaking.