What if you had the option to renew your marriage license every five years?

Before you get all "She hates marriage!!1!1!" in the comments, know this: I loved being married, and I highly recommend it.

That being said, the way things are set up now just isn't working. The divorce rate is still increasing. Many people are choosing to start their families without getting married. People just aren't sold on the "marriage is forever" concept anymore -- look at how few role models there are today for a successful lifelong marriage.

I think we can all agree that we would like to see happier people and a lower divorce rate.

What if every five years, you and your spouse could decide if you wanted to "re-up" or not?

Let's start considering the possibility of offering the option of a renewable marriage license.

Potential benefits of a renewable license:

1. Having a renewable license may actually result in people being married longer. When you actively choose something, you are more likely to put time and effort into it. If every five years, you chose to stay married, wouldn't you try to make it worth it? And sometimes just knowing that there is an out makes you want to stay in. ...

3. Potentially less impact on kids. What could be worse than a "standard" divorce battle? With a renewable license, couples simply choose not to renew. Renewable licenses could make for fewer nasty divorce battles. Make a stipulation that upon non-renewal, couples automatically assume joint custody. If they aren't interested in joint custody, they can always opt for a traditional license. (And wouldn't you want to know ahead of time if your future spouse isn't really interested in joint custody?) Ask young adults why they are choosing to get married later in life or not married at all. Nine times out of 10 they'll mention their parents' divorce. What we are doing now isn't working.

Labels: children, cohabitation, culture, divorce, Marriage, parenting, temporary marriage

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U.S. married couples experience fewer advantages in psychological well-being and social ties than those who cohabit over time, researchers found.

Study co-authors Kelly Musick of Cornell University's College of Human Ecology and Larry Bumpass of the University of Wisconsin-Madison said earlier research compared marriage to being single, or compared marriages and cohabitation at a single point in time. This study focused on what changes occur when single men and women move into marriage or cohabitation, and the extent to which any effects of marriage and cohabitation persist over time.

The researchers used data from the National Survey of Families and Households, involving 2,737 single men and women, 896 of whom married or moved in with a partner during the course of six years. ...

"We found that differences between marriage and cohabitation tend to be small and dissipate after a honeymoon period. Also while married couples experienced health gains -- likely linked to the formal benefits of marriage such as shared healthcare plans -- cohabiting couples experienced greater gains in happiness and self-esteem," Musick and Bumpass said in a statement. "For some, cohabitation may come with fewer unwanted obligations than marriage and allow for more flexibility, autonomy and personal growth."

Labels: cohabitation, culture, Marriage, mental health

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After a couple years of sending my girlfriend a clear message of, "We're never getting married," I proposed. There are reasons it took me so long to come around, but none of them fell into those magazine/sitcom stereotypes (which can be summed up as, "He's having too much fun screwing around and doesn't want to commit").

In fact, I'm pretty sure that the people who write sitcoms and jewelry commercials and movies about bachelor parties don't have any goddamned idea how actual human relationships work. So for the women who have been conditioned to believe that we men are afraid of commitment because we don't want to give up our seat on the Saturday Night [expletive] Train, allow me to give you the real reasons marriage scares guys.

#5. We're Flooded with Anti-Marriage Messages

Labels: child support, children, cohabitation, culture, custody, divorce, Marriage, men, weddings, weddings vs. marriage

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With the share of married adults at an all-time low in the United States, new research by demographers at Cornell and the University of Central Oklahoma offers clues about what's preventing young adults from tying the knot.

Through qualitative interviews with 122 cohabiting men and women, ages 18-36, researchers found widespread apprehension about divorce -- even in those with no personal experience of divorce. More than two-thirds of respondents worried about their ability to form enduring marriages and feared facing the potential social, legal, emotional and economic consequences of a failed marriage, reports a new study published in the December issue of the journal Family Relations (60:5). ...

The authors interviewed 61 cohabiting couples in and around Columbus, Ohio, who had been living with their partners for at least three months. They classified respondents as either working or middle class based on educational attainment, occupational status and annual income. The researchers sought to understand the individuals' attitudes toward marriage, including how it differed from cohabitation and why or why not they hoped to someday marry.

Roughly 67 percent of the interviewees expressed concern about divorce. Most frequently mentioned was a desire to "do it right" and marry only once, to the ideal partner, leading some to view cohabitation as a "test-drive" before making "the ultimate commitment." The belief that marriage was difficult to exit was mentioned nearly as frequently, with examples of how divorce caused emotional pain, social embarrassment, child custody concerns, and legal and financial problems.

Respondents also suggested that the rewards of marriage were not worth the risk of a potential breakup. They cited high divorce rates -- including the popular myth that one in two marriages fail -- as a cautionary tale, with some saying that because of those odds they hesitated to marry and to "fix something that was not broken."

Labels: class, cohabitation, culture, divorce, Marriage

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Recently, social demographer Dr. Sharon Sassler, a Cornell University professor, set out to learn more about how couples decide to live together, and why. In interviews conducted with 122 people, Sassler saw a surprising trend: Though her questions were primarily focused on cohabitation, respondents consistently raised the subject of divorce, even though she and her team had not solicited information on the subject. Indeed, a full two-thirds of her subjects revealed fears about their own future marriages falling apart.

Her findings, published last month in the November Journal of Family Relations, seem to correspond with a recent Pew Research Institute report, which found that men and women are getting married later and later, and the number of people who do actually make it down the aisle recently hit an all time low.

So is one finding related to the other? HuffPost Divorce spoke with Dr. Sassler to find out more about how fears of divorce might be affecting national marriage trends.

What was the most surprising finding of the study?

We actually didn't have a specific question about divorce. We were asking about what the benefits of cohabitating are relative to marriage. The fact that divorce spontaneously arose in such a large proportion of the responses was what was surprising, because we weren't looking for it, and it kind of slapped us in the face. Also surprising was that, regardless of whether the cohabitators had personally experienced their parents' divorce, they expressed concerns about divorce themselves.

Is there evidence to substantiate a claim that these fears of divorce contribute to low marriage rates?

There are a lot of factors at play that contribute to low marriage rates. Most of our couples still planned to get married, so I'd prefer to say that our findings might help explain the delay of marriage...One of the factors my respondents gave in being reluctant to take that next step was being cautious about marriage or even jaded about marriage. Since the majority of young adults live together prior to marriage, I do think it tells us something about how anxious young people are today about their ability to maintain intimate relationships. They're being more cautious and they might want to take more time. ...

Where do these fears of divorce come from? How did they differ by gender and class?

The fears differ by social class and they differ by gender. For less-educated women, there are these strong concerns about being financially trapped in a bad relationship, and not having the means to exit it. And there were fears of what divorce would do to the children. There's also this concern that if they get married that they'd be expected to do more domestic work, and they're working women, so they viewed it as a double burden. Many of them thought, "why take on these extra responsibilities?"

Labels: age at first marriage, class, cohabitation, culture, divorce, economics, Marriage

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If current trends hold, within a few years, less than half the U.S. adult population will be married. This precipitous decline isn’t just a social problem. It’s also an economic problem.

Specifically, it’s an income-inequality and economic-mobility problem. The steadily dropping marriage rate both contributes to income inequality and further entrenches it. ...

It’s not only that those at higher education levels are far more likely to marry — they’re far more likely to marry each other. “Men used to marry their secretaries,” Sawhill observed. “Now they marry the woman they met in med school.”

As a result, Sawhill said, “These two-earner couples at the top are just making out like bandits and these single parents at the bottom have miserable lives. If the single parents were married, their life wouldn’t be so miserable. And at the top, if these high-earning professionals weren’t getting together and forming little collaboratives, they’d be worse off.” ...

Nor does the marriage gap seem destined to lessen. Pew found that 27 percent of those with college degrees say they consider marriage “obsolete.” But 45 percent of those with a high school diploma or less took that view.

A different arm of Pew, its Economic Mobility Project, found that among children who started in the bottom third of income, only one-fourth of those with divorced parents moved up to the middle or top third as adults. By comparison, half of children with continuously married parents — and, somewhat surprisingly, 42 percent of those born to unmarried mothers — moved up the income ladder as adults.

Labels: class, cohabitation, culture, divorce, economics, Marriage, poverty

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Why don’t Americans know how to get and stay married? Whatever we think the word means we still value marriage very highly: The National Marriage Project and the Gallup poll organization have found that between 80 and 90 percent of American teens want to get married someday. And yet we delay, we divorce, and we churn through relationships so quickly that in 2004 only 61 percent of American children were living with both of their biological parents. Why can’t we get and keep what we say we want?

Maybe we lack role models. As we wander around aimlessly, the pejorative term “extended adolescence” has become the euphemism “emerging adulthood.” Kate Bolick’s much discussed Atlantic article, “All the Single Ladies,” seems to offer this explanation for its author’s eventual surrender to singleness.

And yet two recent books argue that a big part of our problem is that we do have role models, conventions, cultural mores, and rules to follow. It’s just that the rules don’t work. Paul Hollander’s Extravagant Expectations: New Ways to Find Romantic Love in America and Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker’s Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, And Think About Marrying take very different approaches to the question of how Americans mate and marry. Extravagant Expectations is a work of pop-philosophy that muses about how modernity and the Romantic movement have influenced personals ads and internet dating. Premarital Sex is a research-based look at the sexual practices and beliefs of young Americans from a broad range of class, cultural, and religious backgrounds. Yet both end up arguing that Americans today are working from fairly well-defined “scripts” about love, dating, marriage—and selfhood. Perhaps, they conclude, our marriage problems ultimately spring from a flawed understanding of what it means to become an adult.

Labels: "emerging adulthood", cohabitation, culture, dating, Eve Tushnet, Mark Regnerus, Marriage, premarital sex, religion

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Three-fifths of young U.S. adults who cohabit eventually get married, researchers say.

Dr. Susan Brown, co-director of Bowling Green State University's National Center for Family and Marriage Research, said 63 percent of women cohabited versus 57 percent of men.

"Today, most marriages are preceded by cohabitation," Brown said in a statement. "It's really become a stage in the courtship process. It's unusual for couples to marry without first cohabiting."

Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, the study found 61 percent of U.S. adults have formed a family by age 25. ...

More than one-third of men followed a "traditional" pathway into marriage, meaning they did not cohabit or have a child before getting married, and it was more prevalent among Hispanics and less so among African-Americans. Twenty-six percent of African-Americans who married by age 25 did not live with their partner or have a child before getting married.

Labels: cohabitation, culture, Marriage, men, out-of-wedlock births, premarital sex, race

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Figures from the Office for National Statistics [pdf] show there were 119,589 divorces in England and Wales during 2010, an increase of 5 per cent on the previous year.

It means that one in three marriages now breaks down by the 15th anniversary, compared with a fifth in 1970, with more men and women in their early forties splitting up than in other age groups. The average marriage now lasts 11.4 years.

Half of the spouses had children under 16, while the proportion of divorcing men and women who have had previous failed marriages has doubled since 1980.

The increase in the number of divorces, the first since 2003, follows years of decline as more and more couples have chosen to live together rather than getting married.

It has surprised some commentators who believed couples could not afford to split up in tough economic times.

But others suggested that arguments between spouses over money and job prospects would have risen during the recent recession, leading to separation and eventual divorce last year.

Labels: children, cohabitation, divorce, economics, Marriage, United Kingdom

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The trend for marriage is steadily declining, with married couples now making up less than half the population, according to the Office of National Statistics (ONS).

Couples also appear to be choosing to separate increasingly later in life, with 17.6 per cent of all 53-year-olds now divorced.

The age at which the highest proportion of the population is divorced has risen dramatically, from 35 in 1971 to 40 in 1991 and 52 in 2009. It rose again in the 12 months to 2010 to 53.

The ONS said that it was a reflection of the ageing population as well as rising divorce levels that such a high proportion of 53-year-olds were divorced, when compared with 12.3 per cent of 40-year-olds in 1991 and just 2.1 per cent of 35-year-olds in 1971.

Equally, as fewer couples are choosing to marry, the divorce rate appears to be finally starting to drop. Just under 114,000 couples were granted a divorce in 2009, the lowest figure since 1974. ...

Anastasia de Waal, of the Civitas think-tank, said: "When interpreting these statistics it's crucially important to factor in the gap between what couples want to do and what they are doing in practice.

"Attitude surveys repeatedly show us that the majority of young people today would like to marry, an aspiration which is notably highest amongst cohabiting couples."

Labels: cohabitation, divorce, economics, Marriage, United Kingdom

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More people are getting married later and later. Last I read, the average age at marriage for men in the US was 28 and for women it was 27. (Clearly, women in their 20s dig older men.) There is an obvious and interesting implication of this that I first a sociologist talk about around 12 years ago. He noted that there exists this increasingly long period of time in human development between when people are sexually maturing (I only mean capable of having sex and making babies) and when people are settling down into marriage. It’s really pretty amazing to think about this. It has huge implications, since the average person is not settling into marriage until 15 years after when they become interested in, and capable of, having sex. ...

I’m not actually much interested in Vegas but I am interested in the Vegas mindset. The core idea, of course, is that what happens in Vegas does not touch the rest of your life. It’s a no-harm, no-foul, place with a firewall around it. You can do whatever you like in Vegas and it won’t affect the rest of your life. I have a theory about this. It has two parts.

Part 1. What happens romantically between the ages of 18 and 34 (or whenever a person settles down in marriage and family life) affects the rest of life.

Part 2. People are now more likely to believe than in the past that what happens before they settle down will not affect their prospects for life-long love and happiness.

Part 1 is really pretty easy to document. Part 2, then, is the hypothesis that matters here.

Labels: "emerging adulthood", age at first marriage, cohabitation, culture, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births, premarital sex, single parenting

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The final road to the altar for the four couples celebrating a group wedding in Long Beach on Sunday was a bit unconventional.

Most of the newlyweds, like high school sweethearts Angel Lewis and Christopher Woodbridge, had lived together for years and were raising families.

But the couple's plans to marry kept getting stalled, partly because saving money has been a struggle while raising five children. And last year, wedding bands they had purchased were stolen from their home.

So it was a godsend for them when the pastor at Parkcrest Christian Church, Mike Goldsworthy, announced during his sermon two weeks ago that the church would throw a free wedding and reception for any unmarried couples in the congregation who were living together.

"If your only barrier is the cost of a wedding, we will remove that," he said. ...

Sunday's church-financed weddings were a first for Parkcrest, Goldsworthy said. His offer was partly motivated by couples' reluctance to marry because of the costs involved. But he added he also wants members of his congregation to adhere to the Bible.

"We believe that God's plan for a couple is not to be living together, but marriage," he said.

Labels: California, Christianity, cohabitation, committed relationships, culture, economics, Marriage, religion, weddings

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Marriage, quite literally, is the lifeblood of the economy, according to a new report released Monday by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. The report, "The Sustainable Demographic Dividend," examined demographic data, such as census records and consumer expenditure surveys, and concluded that economic growth is dependent on healthy marriages.

The University of Virginia researchers found that when people get married and have children, seven sectors of the economy experience tenable growth. The specific sectors are: child care, life and personal insurance, household products and services, health care, food, home maintenance/home services, and pets and toys. By contrast, those industries suffer when marriage and fertility rates are low.

Since the recession hit, marriage and fertility rates have been waning. In 2009, the number of babies born in the U.S. dropped by 2.3 percent. Young Americans want to get married and have kids, says Brad Wilcox, lead researcher on the report, most just can't afford to do it given current unemployment, and underemployment, rates. ...

You seem to go back and forth in the report on the impact of women’s work outside the home on fertility; you suggest that it can both increase and decrease fertility. What’s your conclusion?

Historically, there was a very real tension between work and fertility for women. And that’s still the case; in most modern economies, women who do not work full-time in the labor force tend to have more kids. It’s also the case that the developed countries that have the highest fertility rates are ones where they give women more flexibility to combine work and family. I’m thinking here of places like Sweden. In the United States there aren’t a lot of public policies that help women to combine work and family but what’s exceptional about the U.S. economy is that it’s a lot more flexible when it comes to women moving into and moving out of the work force, as compared to many European countries where it’s hard both to move in and to move out of a job easily and quickly … For both of those different reasons, Sweden and the U.S. have comparatively high levels of fertility as compared to countries like Germany, Spain and Japan that haven’t had as strong a tradition of creating a flexible work-family culture for their women … The takeaway here is that from both the corporate end of things and the public policy end of things, we should pursue policies that allow families, including obviously women and especially mothers, to make the best choice for them and their family, and not to have a one-size-fits-all policy that would either favor stay-at-home parents on the one hand and households with both kinds of work on the other hand. ...

What can be done to encourage more stable marriages?

At the corporate level, companies do have a lot of power when it comes to shaping their internal culture; creating a culture that’s friendly to families, that makes it as easy as possible for people to work around their family schedules. Are they, for instance, offering their employees family plans that may be helpful to them as a couple and as a family, and make them better employees as well? They have even more influence when it comes to advertising. To go back to P&G again, it’s one of the biggest advertisers in the United States; are they thinking intentionally about how the message that’s embedded in their advertising does or does not encourage a family-friendly ethos?

On the public policy side of things, I would endorse things like efforts to increase the child tax credit, and keeping it fully refundable, which would put more money in the pockets of working-class and poor families. It would help to fill out, to some degree, the economic foundations of family life in many working-class and poor communities. But also it would be helpful to middle-class families. This idea of increasing the child tax credit from $1,000 to $5,000, and limiting that to kids who are in the household, would not be discriminatory but I think it would make family life more economical and it’s a concrete idea.

We could [also] do a lot better job in this country of improving our vocational educational system to bring it up to par with a country like Germany. That might seem kind of far afield, but the point is that I think one of the reasons we’re seeing marriages fail to form in the first place, and break down in the second place, is that many working-class and poor Americans don’t have the skills and training that they need to get a decent-paying job, and that has implications for their capacity to get and stay married.

Labels: cohabitation, corporate responsibility, culture, demographics, economics, education, government interest in marriage, Marriage, tax policy, W. Bradford Wilcox, work/family policy

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Whilst perusing the fine content on display at our sister blog in New York over the weekend, this editor couldn't help but notice this post, boasting about The City That Never Sleeps' booming population of people who aren't sporting wedding bands....

Labels: cohabitation, culture, dating, DC, Marriage, poverty, unmarried parents

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Couples in Mexico City could soon use "renewable" marriage contracts to try living with their other half before making a lifetime commitment.

Newlyweds would take a minimum of two years before deciding whether to cement their relationship or split up, under plans to alter the city's civil code.

If approved, the contracts would set out in advance marital duties, such as in childcare, schooling and budgeting.

Lizbeth Rosas Montero, who drew up the bill, hopes it will cut divorce rates.

Half of all marriages in Mexico City currently end in a split.

She believes the contracts, allowing couples to "renew or dissolve" the marital link after a pre-arranged term, would lead to more harmonious relationships and reduce the workload on family judges.

Terms governing healthcare provision, the way children are educated, how much money was needed to support the family, and how dependents would be looked after in the case of a break-up would be set out in advance.

Labels: cohabitation, common-law, divorce, Marriage, Mexico

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Before I had our first child, ten years ago, my partner David got down on one knee in the restaurant of the hotel where we were staying in the Lake District and asked me to marry him. And I said I would. I was so happy, I announced it to all the other guests and we got ridiculously drunk. I was going to get married!

But then, somehow, it didn’t happen. For some reason, life kept getting in the way. Every time we were about to get married, I’d get pregnant again, resulting in four beautiful children — but no ring on my finger.

Instead of pouring our energies into organising a wedding, we put heart and soul into building our lives together. We developed successful careers, bought a lovely home in London, made good friends and had happy children. On the surface, we had the perfect life. Marriage or no marriage.

In that regard, we were like an increasing number of middle-class couples who co-habit, have children and see no reason to formalise their shared commitment to a lifelong future with a wedding ceremony.

And yet, it seems it wasn’t enough. Because despite all those years together, and all those children, David and I are now in the process of splitting up. We are divorcing without ever having married.

There is no one else involved; just a general growing apart. The reasons are many, from his feelings of being unloved to mine of being under-supported. He says I don’t respect him. And I think he’s probably right.

So now he has moved out. The day he left was the saddest of my life. I wanted to reach out to him, as he got into his car, and tell him everything would be OK — but I couldn’t. Which left me wondering: how has it come to this? How can we be taking apart something we spent so many years putting together?

And herein lies an uncomfortable thought. While it pains me to say so, I can’t help thinking that our situation might have been different if we’d got married.

Labels: cohabitation, divorce, Marriage, United Kingdom

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Hi all, I'm so excited to have Brad Wilcox with us today. As you've probably heard and read, the rate of American couples who live together without being married are rising dramatically -- it grew 13 percent in 2010 alone. And while it may be a simpler, more convenient arragement for many couples, that doesn't mean it's without complexity -- especially when the couples break up.

Wilcox's report deals particularly with the ramifications cohabitation can have on children. We'd love to get your thoughts and questions on this societal shift. Has it worked for you? Do you see risks?

I'm also working on an upcoming story about the potential pitfalls of cohabitation, so if you have stories you're willing to share, I'd love to hear from you: mccarthye@washpost.com.

Okay, let's get going!

Labels: children, class, cohabitation, culture, divorce, economics, Marriage, parenting, single parenting, unmarried parents

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Marriage matters, but why?

For more than 20 years, social scientists have consistently found that children do better raised by their mothers and fathers united by marriage.

For most of that time policymakers have focused on the problem of "father absence," and it is a real problem. Very few boys and girls have involved, loving, supportive fathers if the man that made them is not married to their mama.

But a new crop of research is challenging the idea that the main or only problem with the decline of marriage is the absence of fathers. An equally big or even bigger problem may be the churning romantic lives of unmarried and divorced mothers. ...

Many family scholars, consistent with the liberal leanings of the academy, are responding to the accumulating evidence that marriage matters by urging society to make cohabiting and dating relationships as stable as marriages. Good luck with that one.

Here's the bottom line: When mothers' romantic lives churn, babies' and children's lives churn too.

Mothers, marriage matters because it restrains our romantic yearnings and our romantic losses. The restless search for soul mates is not really compatible with making your child feel he or she is the center of your world, infinitely beloved.

Labels: children, cohabitation, culture, dating, family structure, Maggie Gallagher, Marriage, motherhood, out-of-wedlock births, single parenting, unmarried parents

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Introduction
family from the 1950sH. Armstrong Roberts/Retrofile -- Getty Images Married with children: once the norm, now on the decline.

"The number of Americans who have children and live together without marrying has increased twelvefold since 1970," Sabrina Tavernise wrote in The New York Times recently, adding that "children now are more likely to have unmarried parents than divorced ones."

Is that cause for concern? Does marriage contribute to a stable environment, or is it simply a sign that a family was already stable?

Labels: children, cohabitation, culture, Marriage, parenting, unmarried parents

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The number of Americans getting married is at an all-time low, in line with other countries, and are also waiting longer to marry for the first time. ...

International figures indicate a distinct trend in waiting longer to legally become man and wife.

According to Statistics Canada, for instance, in 2003, when Ontario and British Columbia became the first two provinces to legalize same-sex marriage, the average age of marriage to someone of the opposite sex was 30.6 years for men and 28.5 years for women — an increase of about five years for both sexes since 1973.

In 2002, the average age of marriage in Canada was 30.4 years for men and 28.3 years for women, according to the data released in 2007.

In countries including the United Kingdom, Austria, Norway, Hong Kong and China, first-time marriages are now in the late 20s for women and early 30s for men. ...

Analysts also say younger people, in particular, may be increasingly choosing to delay marriage as they struggle to find work and resist making long-term commitments in the recent recession.

"People are no longer following some lockstep script about when it is time to get married," said Pamela Smock, a sociology professor at the University of Michigan.

As a whole, U.S. marriages are now at a record low, with just 52 per cent of adults 18 and over saying they were joined in wedlock, compared to 57 per cent in 2000, according to the U.S. census data. The never-married included 46.3 per cent of young adults 25-34 — the first time the share of never-married young adults exceeded those who were married, 44.9 per cent, with the rest being divorced or widowed.

Labels: age at first marriage, Canada, cohabitation, culture, divorce, economics, Marriage

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