Is marriage dying? | Richard Reeves

- There has been a general decline in

marriage

, but behind that general decline is a more interesting story. I think it's important that we try to understand why people get married in the first place. For some people, of course, it is a religious issue: it is a covenant relationship. I think for a lot more people there's an economic element to it. Obviously there is companionship and love. You fall in love and want to spend the rest of your life with someone, so

marriage

has a romantic element. And another reason was because they became pregnant, the so-called "shotgun wedding." There was a sense that if you brought new life into the world, it had to be done within marriage.

And there's probably a little sign of status sometimes, and this may be more true today than in the past, that being married is a way of signaling success and status within a society. And so there are a mix of reasons between religion, romance, economics and status that have traditionally led people to the marital state. The old model of marriage was, for women, an economic necessity, especially if she was going to have children; be with a man who would be the provider. And obviously that has changed enormously now. And for the man, it was a way to get attached to the children.

If he was going to have children, he had to do it with a woman. She was going to raise the children, but if she did, he had to support them too. And so there was this complementarity with that traditional vision of marriage, which of course was based on a very deep inequality between men and women. That was a driving force: the women's movement, including people like Gloria Steinem, who were saying that the point is to make marriage a choice rather than a necessity, and to really free women from economic slavery, as they would have put it, of marriage.

And that inequality is what has been successfully destroyed, happily, by the women's movement. - 'We must all stand up together and say no more.' - The very institution of marriage, which is central to human societies, has been fundamentally transformed. It is one committed to very egalitarian principles; Women have enormous output power. I think it's important to know that women are twice as likely as men to file for divorce. So women are using the power to get out of marriage and are no longer trapped in bad marriages, which is a great achievement for humanity. But for men, of course, the old role of "Well, I'll help you while you raise the kids," that's out the window too.

And so the role of men in marriage and what it means to be "marriageable," to use a slightly ugly term from the social sciences, is very different now for men than it was in the past. And women are looking for something much more than just a salary. It's a bit like the kaleidoscope has been shaken and the patterns haven't quite settled yet. It is seen that gay and lesbian couples can choose to get married. A couple of years after the Supreme Court decision, we saw a majority of three in five lesbian and gay couples choose to get married.

You see a huge class gap opening up: fewer working-class and low-income Americans are choosing to enter the institution. What we have is what my colleague Isabel Sawhill calls: "One of the major class fractures in American society." No one expected that it would be Americans with more options and more economic power, and especially American women with more options and economic power, who would continue to get married and stay married. There is a very slight decline for those with four-year college degrees, but a really large decline for those with less education. The typical college-educated American woman is about as likely to marry as her mother, and if anything, slightly more likely to stay married than her mother.

So there really hasn't been a big decline in marriage at the highest levels of American society. Meanwhile, significant drops are observed further down. One of the other big changes has been a significant increase in the age of first marriage, approaching 30 today. And I think about my parents who got married at 21 and met at 17, something quite common. And in fact, as late as 1970, the majority of women who went to college in the US, which was a minority, of course, but most of them were married within a year of graduating from college. That is a world that is very difficult to understand now; where both men and women enter the labor market, achieve economic success and establish themselves.

In a way, you do all that first and then you get married. And so, marriage has increasingly become the cornerstone. Increasingly, marriage is a sign of everything that has led up to the ceremony, rather than the beginning of a journey. It is also the end of a journey towards a position where people feel they can get married now. We can no longer tell a single story about marriage in America like we did just 40 years ago. We have to tell different stories based on class, race and geography. We have seen this real divide opening up in marriage in the United States.

Americans are now much less likely to view marriage as something one has to do to be a complete person or have a good life. Only 1 in 10 Americans currently believe that it is essential to be married to have a fulfilling life. That is a huge cultural change. I think what we can say with confidence is that the model of marriage that was based on women's economic dependence on men is completely obsolete. Now, I think we have created family models that are much more egalitarian and fair, but perhaps not as stable in many cases. And the challenge we all face is finding ways to create more stability in our family lives, but without sacrificing the goal of equality that has animated the movement for the past 50 years.

I think what we should be looking at is how can we have strong relationships within which people can raise their children well? And if marriage has a role to play in that, then great. But there are also alternative models around civil unions and so on. What matters is fatherhood. What matters is how we raise our children. And I think it's very possible to imagine a renewed future for marriage based on egalitarianism between men and women, but with a shared commitment to children, but I think that's up to us to create. If marriage is to survive, it will be with a new model, not a restoration of the old model. - Get smarter and faster with videos from the world's greatest thinkers.

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