Wedding Bells Still Chime

If you believe marriage is in decline, think again. A new government report has found that 8 in 10 women will get married by the time they turn 40, a figure that is virtually unchanged from the 1990s, before the drop in middle-income jobs reduced the supply of marriageable men.

The report was based on findings from the National Survey of Family Growth, a survey of more than 22,000 men and women conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention between 2006 and 2010. It provides one of the best estimates for marriage and divorce in the United States, and drew considerable attention among researchers and news organizations when it was released publicly on Thursday.

But while many chose to highlight the most immediate finding, that 4 in 10 women between the ages of 15 and 44 are currently married, demographers who sifted through the numbers said the longer-term trend ? that most women eventually still do marry ? was more surprising, as it challenged the now commonly held perception that marriage is disappearing.

?The idea that marriage is on the decline and fading away, that picture is misleading,? said Andrew Cherlin, a demographer at Johns Hopkins University.

Lifetime marriage is far lower today than it was during the peak years in the 1950s, when more than nine-tenths of the adult population married at some point in their lives. But the new report suggests that the decline may have stopped in recent decades, Mr. Cherlin said, as lifetime marriage rates have changed little since the 1990s.

The figure of 4 in 10 women currently married may seem stark, demographers say, but it is simply a reflection of the fact that women are marrying later in the age spectrum. (The survey questioned men and women ages 15 to 44.) In 1982, the share of women currently married was 52 percent, and in 1995 it was 49 percent.

The story, Mr. Cherlin said, is more about postponement than abandonment. Marriage has declined precipitously among young women, both college graduates and women with less education. But most women do eventually marry. According to the report, 82 percent of women who ended their formal education after graduating from high school will marry by the age of 40. Among women with a college degree the figure is 89 percent.

Marriage has remained mostly intact, but childbearing in wedlock has not, a change that has opened a deep class divide. College-educated women tend to wait to marry before having their children. Less educated women do not, a choice that has driven a major change in American family structure. More than half of all births to women under 30 take place outside of marriage, according to Child Trends, a research group in Washington.

Just 8 percent of births to women over 18 with a college degree happen outside wedlock, compared to 57 percent of births to women with high school diplomas or less, according to Child Trends, which cited 2009 data.

Source: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/wedding-bells-still-chime/

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