Staying out of the ring: Barely half of adults wed

by Leanne Italie
Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — As a 20-something, Erin Turner feels she made all the right moves dating wise. She graduated from college and spent three and a half years with a boyfriend before they moved in together.

Their cohabitation bliss lasted only eight months.

“We broke up because when you live with someone, everything comes to the surface,” said Turner, who remains single in Chicago as her 30th birthday approaches in March.

“You start to see how people handle confrontation, financial realities, challenges, the housework load. If we had been married we would have been divorced, or fully on our way.”

While Turner hopes to marry one day, she’s not sweating it at the moment. Her parents divorced when she was young and she doesn’t want marriage badly enough to settle. She’d be sad if she never married, but she wouldn’t “implode.”

Heading into 2012, trend watchers note that barely half of all adults in the United States are married, and the median age at the time of a first marriage has never been higher— slightly more than 26 years old for women and nearly 29 for men.

In 1960, 72 percent of those 18 or older were married. The percentage fell to 57 percent in 2000, and today it’s just 51 percent, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of census data. Nearly three out of every five adults ages 18 to 29 were married in 1960, but now only one in five is.

Marriage also is on the decline in other developed countries, especially those in Europe, and the trend is starting to take root elsewhere around the globe.

In Mexico City, for instance, a recent proposal would allow couples to “test drive” marriage with a two-year contract, said Ann Mack, a trend watcher for JWT Intelligence, an arm of the marketing giant. If the trial marriage didn’t work out, the parties could walk away without lengthy divorce proceedings.

Women, in particular, are experiencing a mass marriage rethink, Mack said. “A growing number of women are taking an alternate life route that doesn’t include marriage as an essential checkpoint,” she said.

Among the more dramatic developments is a 17-point marriage disparity along education lines.

Nearly two-thirds of all adults with college degrees, or 64 percent, are married, compared with 47 percent with high school degrees or less, according to the Pew snapshot released Dec. 14. Fifty years ago, college graduates and those who had not gone beyond high school were about equally likely to be married.

For less educated and lower earning women in particular, Coontz said marriage is riskier than it used to be.

“Men’s real wages have fallen and they face a lot of job insecurity, so a woman who would have found a high school graduate a pretty damn good catch in 1960 now has to say to herself, ‘Would it really be smart of me to marry this guy?’ She’s choosing to focus on her own earning power.”

A separate Pew survey released last year found that while nearly 40 percent of respondents said marriage is becoming obsolete, 61 percent of those who were not married would like to be someday.

Pew also found that marriage statistics vary by race, with 55 percent of Whites, 48 percent of Hispanics but just 31 percent of Blacks married.

“I thought I’d be married by now, honestly,” said Keisha Pickett, who is 31, Black and single in Tampa, Fla. “In my circle of friends, they haven’t necessarily given up on it but they’re scared. You give it your all and it could all blow up in your face one day.”

Pickett is dating but has no special someone. “I had a honeybunch up until about four months ago. We had been back and forth for, like, three years,” she said. “It just came to a point where I felt like it was forced. I’m very outgoing and ambitious and he was kind of a complacent, in-the-house guy.”

The type is familiar to Mack, who notes a rise in the “omega” male, that perpetual adolescent of Judd Apatow movie fame. He’s fond of beer, video games and women in charge.

Pickett, who runs her own public relations company, isn’t interested.

“You want a honey who wants to go here or there and isn’t complaining about it all the time,” she said. “It was like pulling teeth. I couldn’t waste any more time.”

About Post Author

Comments

From the Web

Skip to content