The divorce rate has fallen because the demographics of marriage have changed
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Women used to do that, for their own protection - now men must do the same, and obviously the mating pool shrinks.
In many cases, you can actually save more money by filing separately, and instead of getting legally married, just become "domestic partners". Health insurance treats domestic partners just like spouses (so you can still add each other to the primary person's insurance if you want).
Many of the other "benefits" of marriage can be solved by intentionally creating a living will where you state how you want medical issues to be handled, and where you have named the other person as your benefactor if you die. You can even list your domestic partner as the benefactor on your life insurance policy.
As for kids, you don't lose your parental rights just because you aren't married. It's still your kid, and you still owe child support regardless. There are plenty of people who are divorced and have kids. Being in a domestic partnership with kids works just fine.
Honestly, I don't even know why anyone gets married these days. The laws regarding marriage in many states are so antiquated and nonsensical. A lot of the laws and protections in marriage are designed around the antiquated idea of stay-at-home moms who can't work or provide for themselves. That's not the modern world we live in anymore.
My significant other and I have been in a relationship for over 5 years now, and we have a 3 year old kid. We keep almost all of our finances completely separate (with the exception of a shared savings account just for household and childcare expenses). She makes her money, and I make mine. We track all of our shared household and childcare expenses using Splitwise, and we file our taxes separately. When we do our taxes, we figure out who gets the bigger refund that year (when filing for head of household and adding the childcare expenses), and then we split the refund difference.
Everything is totally fair, and everyone pulls their own weight in the relationship. We split all of the household duties, and we split things like childcare duties, too. For example, she watches the kiddo all day on Saturday (giving me a day off), and I watch him all day on Sunday (giving her a day off). We also play World of Warcraft together in the evenings after the kiddo has gone to bed. Life is great!
I went to a wedding recently and it made me think about my marriage and the thought that occurred to me was how insanely dependent I've become to my wife. It's like I've cut off a leg, given it to someone and said "Yeah, you use that and just give me a hand whenever I need to hop around."
Honestly that's not the weird part for me though. The weird part is that this woman I depend on so much surprises me so much. I've known her for 20 years. Almost every night I got to sleep knowing I can just reach over and she'll be there. And still she'll say something and I'll think - How can she believe that? Or she'll do something and I'll wish I was that kind. Or be happy I'm not so stubborn. :-)
I'm in Europe, so most of my friends with children aren't actually married. They know what you wrote above. Most of them still get married at some point, because it's an effective way to reinforce the internalized relationship status by externalizing it, which is in general is valuable to long-term couples.
One could also establish an LLC for the purpose, or not merge assets, of course.
I have two kids. The idea of raising them by myself seems nearly impossible. Maybe it's doable if you're already independently wealthy or can heavily rely on nearby family or both. Still doesn't sound as healthy as having two dedicated parents.
I'm not sure the divorce rate agrees that this constitutes a promise.
> Makes it a little harder for one partner to just leave.
I think that is more than enough to support the claim of: 'a little harder to leave'.
But, getting married (after 7yrs with SO) had 2 powerful effects:
1. The power of social contract as a signal to family, friends, society etc is huge. It's also really nice to celebrate with loved ones. There's not enough ceremony in our lives as it is...
2. The power of agreement with SO had an immensely positive impact on our relationship. Words have power, agreements have even more so. Just choose carefully and intentionally the agreement that you're entering with your partner.
I can't say it has affected our everyday life in any way but it is an experience that you end up sharing forever and becomes a part of your relationship.
That said I'm lucky that we both wanted a small ceremony. I may not have fared as well if we were dropping tens of thousands of dollars and spending months planning a wedding. That'd be a whole different animal.
Which is not necessarily good. If your marriage fails, it's 'regretting forever'.
I'm not saying you have to get married to make a relationship feel serious and long-term-ish, but it certainly enforces that feeling.
Many people now just do the civil ceremony and skip the religious ceremony. It was interesting to see all the couples outside the government office waiting to get married on whatever day marriages were performed.
I am aware of one reason to get married. US Immigration does not recognize common law spouses as spouses for visa purposes. You want to travel to the US because your partner has gotten a job at Google? You must be married to have the relationship recognized.
First, children who grow up in an intact, two-parent family with both biological parents present do better on a wide range of outcomes than children who grow up in a single-parent family. Single parenthood is not the only, nor even the most important, cause of the higher rates of school dropout, teenage pregnancy, juvenile delinquency, or other negative outcomes we see; but it does contribute independently to these problems. Neither does single parenthood guarantee that children will not succeed; many, if not most, children who grow up in a single-parent household do succeed.
That, coupled to the fact that marriage improves stability. You have less incentives to overcome disagreements and other issues if not bound by law.
Put it another way, there’s a reason marriage has existed and was pervasive on every continent every human was on, even prior to the Columbian exchange. You can go against the grain and say the government has no place qualifying your relationship, but it does have some say in that and for some good reasons.
I’d want a source on this because an algorithm matching people does not seem to be the most effective. yes there are special occasions where lifetime partners have met online but I don’t think online dating is the sole purpose behind the decline of marriage.
Currently waiting for class to start so I can’t search for a link right now but iirc, the economy health is one of the main driving force behind marriage numbers dropping. In a healthy economy, more people are willing to marry, start a family, purchase land, etc. When economy is bad, all of these extra costs become more of a risk than before.
A system which showed people to each other in a totally randomized way would still drastically increases the number of people you can superficially evaluate, and even a tinder style photos + blurb profile is rich in personality/cultural clues to base evaluation on.
Is this really the ultimate goal for online dating? To expose us to a plethora of options in order to choose which one is best fit. It reminds of how Hot or Not could be seen as an early type of online dating that exposed us to randomized people, although without the option of being able to communicate with them beyond.
(Anecdotally, having used multiple apps, there is one that seemed to effectively "learn" my preferences and was successful in showing me women I was interested in meeting at seeming better than chance. But that's a single data point, and it's possible I'm "oddly predictable" from their model's perspective)
Instead, I have what appears to be never ending choices which makes it very unlikely I'll ever feel confident committing because 'the next one could be better', leaving me contently or unhappily single.
So, it seems like a wash now that I frame it in my own life...
I never presented this as scientific fact, nor based on the algorithms. I agree with akavi comment on your post. That has been my experience.
KMCB
edit many seem to presume there are not alternatives to marriage: a de facto partnership should offer the same legal protections/restrictions without the concept of a couple registry needing to get involved.
When modern couples got married but both continued to work in their careers, the taxes were actually a bit higher on their incomes (mostly on high earners but also on middle class). This is described by my conservative family as "anti-marriage" tax policy.
However it could better be described as "pro-family" because if the couple has a child and the wife stops working to take care of the kid(s), then the tax situation becomes favorable in order to benefit the children.
It's old fashioned, but it made sense. With the changes to the tax code in the Trump era, I don't know if the situation still holds, I haven't looked closely at it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_splitting
> doesn't it seem discriminatory to those who don't want to institutionalise their relationship?
That is not a protected class of people anywhere that I am aware of, and there are plenty of justifications for a government only recognizing formalized relationships. If the government were to recognize informal relationships, then fraudulently claiming a deceased person's benefits or inheritance of estate (especially in absence of a will) would be as simple as claiming to have been a secret girl / boyfriend of the deceased.
This statement is a bit old-fashioned I think? Most of my friends with children/long-term relationships never married because where I come from there is no benefit to do so, a legal status is offered in kind (de facto partnership). Marriage has become something quaint and mostly considered a waste of money when house prices etc are demanding down-payments instead. I see none of my friend's kids suffering because there is no marriage certificate in the house. This may vary by country, I'm sure.
I think there's also something to the cultural tropes and propaganda we've seen since then portraying marriage as dull, monotonous, and oppressive while lifting up devoting one's life to an office job, travel, and 'exciting' flings as the path to self-fulfillment. When nothing could really be further from the truth - there's a reason millennials and gen-zers are horribly depressed and dying enough deaths of despair from drugs and suicide to bring down the average lifespan.
Are you saying marriage is happiness? I was cohabitating with my partner for 5 years before we married. There was really no difference in quality of life.
Is that the idea?
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/163802/marriage-importance-drop...
Our culture tells us the opposite. But our culture is insane and wants you to be an isolated, rootless, consumer wage slave.
And congratulations.
But you are not a useless worm and this is not a piece of dust.
This is true only if the finances are there to support it and both people really want it. In which case any "institution" can be considered wonderful and the fruit of it a "gift."
Most people can't get out of the consumer wage slave trap, it's their only opportunity or the only one they know about or can use to try to be in a better economic situation.
Children strain things and make things less happy between the mom and dad in a lot of marriages unless there's enough money.
They had to stay together because they couldn't afford to live without the other. They were already in a small ass apartment, they didn't have assets to liquidate. They were slaves to each other because they needed the money.
Unfortunately some of my close friends are stuck in a similar situation. Luckily they like each other more than the case above and have pretty much always struggled financially. But it's clear they need each others income to survive, and they just had a kid. Hoping they can maintain the love.
Perhaps this is true for you personally. How do you know that this an "universal truth".
I don't think simply being married equates to happiness though. The institution is probably irrelevant when held up to the quality of the actual relationship.
LOL! You can keep 'em.
I'm happy it works for you, but it's not for everybody.
Historically, most humans did not marry and were engaged in collective child-rearing, rather than foisting the responsibility on a single pair of parents that were either biologically or legally bound to a child. These practices only emerged with the agricultural revolution. I think it's easy to imagine that children would have a far more enriching experience of growing up if they were cared for by a larger group of people with a wider range of age, experience, skills, etc. Not to mention that it would help with the problems of children growing up in "broken" or single-parent households, where they may experience poor or insufficient care and attention due to economic hardship or parental absence.
See also: Jihad vs. McWorld by Barber, it is essentially a discussion of that phenomenon. Forcing everyone into a consumer role is liberating in some ways if you're someone who never had those rights (dalits in India, housewives in the West), but now you're just another wage slave competing against everyone else for their slice of the profits.
It's interesting that they think to factor in cohabitation when when looking at overall breakup rates, however they go the opposite direction and fail to account for how well-paying jobs actually relate to college degrees over the years:
> Chen connects this trend to the decline of well-paying jobs for those without college degrees, which, he argues, makes it harder to form more stable relationships. Indeed, Cohen writes in his paper that marriage is “an increasingly central component of the structure of social inequality.” [...]
In 1960, 22% of Americans ages 25 to 34 had some college or more. By 2009, it was 60%. [0] For the sake of argument, let's say we have 100% employment among this age group and that those with college degrees always get the best paying jobs. We'll define a "well-paying job" as the top 50% of jobs by wage.
That means that in 1960, the college folks get the top 22% well-paying jobs. That leaves the remaining 28% of well-paying jobs to those who skipped college. In 2009, we have all well-paying jobs filled by the college folks, and they actually spill over into the non well-paying jobs, since we have so many now.
So yes, there is technically a decline in well-paying jobs among those without college degrees. However, that's only because there are a larger proportion of those with college degrees in kind! If you want to consider "social inequality", it makes more sense to look at the proportion of those with well-paying jobs compared with those without, which is 50% in both theoretical scenarios.
[0] https://trends.collegeboard.org/education-pays/figures-table...
The author posits that it's a "bad thing" because:
* ... the decline of well-paying jobs for those without college degrees makes it harder to form more stable relationships. And thus, marriage is “an increasingly central component of the structure of social inequality.”*
And yet, those "well-paying jobs" that led to "more stable relationships"... were more likely to end in divorce before. So if the decline is due to a socioeconomic class less likely to get married, that class historically saw higher rates of divorce.
I get what the author is going for, but anchoring to divorce rate (which is dependent on socioeconomic mix and the underlying marriage rate) seems backward versus just talking about marriage rates in the first place.
It's the divorce RATE that is declining, not the number of divorces.
The reason,as stated, is that the people who are getting married tend to be more mature and economically stable than they typically were years ago.