Changing Life Styles: The Decline in Marriages

Changes in consumers' life styles have a major impact on their financial strategies and upon the financial institutions that serve them. Research recently published in American Demographics provides some rather startling data. The first sentence in the article provides a pithy summary of the findings: "Mae West was ahead of her time when she quipped that while marriage was a great institution, she wasn't fond of living in institutions." Over the past four decades, the number of marriages has steadily declined, while the number of divorces has risen as well as the number of cohabiting couples. A very significant result of these trends has been an increase in the number of children living in single parent households. The research study was provided by the National Marriage Project at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

Over the past four decades the number of marriages per thousand unmarried women aged 15 and older has dropped from 77 in 1970 to 50 in 1996, the latest year for which data are available. Other couples have delayed or avoided the institution of marriage. The average age of women at their first marriage has moved up from 20 in 1960 to 25 currently. Over the same period the average age for men at first marriage has risen from 25 to 27. A consequence of these trends has been a decline in the percentage of married couples 15 years and older.

Unfortunately, delays in getting married apparently do not lead to wiser choices of partners. Divorce rates per thousand married women aged 15 years and older have risen from 9.7 in 1960 to 22.6 per thousand in 1980, though the divorce rate dropped slightly to 19.5 in 1998.

An especially dramatic change has been the increasing number of unmarried sexual partners sharing a home, or cohabiting. Older readers may recall the term, "living in sin." The number of such couples has grown from 439,000 in 1960 to four million in 1998, a growth of about 1,000 percent. This may be contributing to a decline in the official divorce rate as couples form and dissolve partnerships without any official recognition. These trends have likely affected childbearing as well. Fertility rates of women in the U.S. have fallen from about 3.7 births per woman in 1960 to 2.1 in 1998.

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