Is marriage dying? | Richard Reeves

There's been a general decline in marriage, but behind that general decline is a more interesting story. I think it's important we try to understand why people do get married in the first place. For some people, of course, it's a religious matter—it's a covenantal relationship. I think for many more people there's an economic element to it.

There's obviously the companionship and love. You fall in love and want to spend the rest of your life with someone, and so there's a romantic element to marriage. Another reason was because they got pregnant, the so-called "shotgun wedding." There was a sense that if you were bringing a new life into the world, that that should be done within marriage.

And there's probably a bit of status signaling too, and this may be more true today than it was in the past, that being married is a way of signaling success and status within a society. And so there's a blend of reasons between religion, romance, economics, and status that have traditionally led people to the marital state.

The old model of marriage was, for the woman, an economic necessity, particularly if she was gonna have children; to be with a man who would be the provider. And obviously, that has hugely changed now. For the man, it was a way to attach himself to children. If he was gonna have children, he had to do that with a woman. She was going to raise the children, but if she was doing that, he had to provide for them too.

And so there was this complementarity to that traditional view of marriage, which, of course, was founded on a very deep inequality between men and women. That was a driving force—the women's movement, including people like Gloria Steinem, saying the point is to make marriage into a choice rather than a necessity, and to actually free women from the economic bondage, as they would've put it, of marriage.

And that inequality is what's been successfully shattered, gladly, by the women's movement. "All of us must stand up together and say no more." The very institution of marriage, which is central to human societies, has been fundamentally transformed. It's one engaged into in very egalitarian principles; women have huge exit power.

I think it's important to know that women are twice as likely as men to file for divorce. So, women are using exit power from marriage; they're not stuck in bad marriages anymore—which is a huge achievement for humanity. But for men, of course, the old role of "Well, I'll just provide while you raise the kids," that's out of the window too.

And so, men's role in marriage and what it means to be "marriageable," to use a slightly ugly term from social science, is very different now for men from what it was in the past. Women are looking for something much more than just a paycheck. It's a bit like the kaleidoscope has been shaken, and the patterns haven't quite settled yet.

You see lesbian and gay couples being able to opt into marriage. Within a couple of years of the Supreme Court decision, we saw most three out of five lesbian and gay couples choosing to get married. You see a big class gap opening up: fewer working-class and lower-income Americans opting into the institution.

What we have is what my colleague Isabel Sawhill calls: "One of the main class fractures in American society." No one expected that it was Americans with the most choice and the most economic power, and especially the American women with the most choice and economic power, who would be the ones who were continuing to get married and stay married.

There's a very slight decline for those say with four-year college degrees, but a really big decline for those with less education. The typical college-educated American woman is almost as likely to get married as her mother was, and if anything, a little bit more likely to stay married than her mother was. So, there really hasn't been much of a decline in marriage at all in the top ranks of American society.

Meanwhile, significant declines lower down. One of the other big changes has been a significant shift up in the age of...