Unlocked

As often happens in societies, mores in the United States are undergoing change. And one of those changes is that marriage rates are declining. Although part of the change is driven by an increase in the number of people choosing to forego marriage entirely, it also happens that the age of first marriage has gone up; those people who do marry are marrying later in life. Researchers have noticed this, and so too has the news media; both Axios and National Public Radio have had stories on it this year.

The NPR story was interesting in the sense that it covered what honestly strikes me as filler content with a certain level of alarmism; their headline was "Americans' attitudes toward marriage are changing rapidly." This, despite the fact that the story didn't at all touch on the timeframe over which this supposedly rapid change was to have taken place. (Axios notes that it's been half a century since marriage rates peaked.) And at one point during her interview with Bowling Green State University's Professor Susan Brown (who was also references in the Axios piece), Michel Martin, referring to emerging relationship patterns, asked:

Now, I'm also interested in whether these patterns - these new patterns of living are a problem. I mean, is this something that we should worry about?

For the record, I find the question: "Is this something that we should worry about?" and its close neighbor "How worried should we be about this?" to be vapid even when dealing with serious concerns; anxiety never helps anything, and the phrasing of the question isn't designed to elicit a response that would lay out a plan of action. But here, what Ms. Martin is asking about are people cohabitating or what Professor Brown refers to as "living apart together" (non-coresidential relationships). What could possibly be going on there that anyone would need to be worried about? (Although I'm pretty sure that University of Virginia Professor W. Bradford Wilcox, who tends to view any step away from tradition as a problem, would have found something.) All that sort of thinking does is create control freaks and busybodies.

American society is not the same as it was 50 years ago. And 50 years ago, it had changed from what it had been 50 years before that. Some of those changes were for the better, some were for the worse, but many of them were simply changes. Marriage is a human institution, with reasons for being that tend to be bound up in questions of resource allocation, relationships between (sometimes extended) families and property (including sexual) rights. And like all human institutions, it changes over time. While there are people for whom those changes, in and of themselves, are cause for alarm, most of the supposed problems stemming from changes in marital patterns also have other causes. Assortative mating, for instance, has lessened income heterogeneity of couples. As a result, there are more couples where both partners come from non-affluent backgrounds; and money problems are a common cause of both difficulties in marriages and their dissolution. Black women looking to stay with the once-common pattern of "marrying up" and having Black husbands has resulted in a very low marriage rate, resulting in high single motherhood. Sure, one could make the point that some sort of social and/or governmental pressure and/or incentives could be brought to bear to get them to the altar with someone, but perhaps altering some of the social structures that have come to result in so many Black men being considered undesirable partners would be a better fix. A generalized anxiety about people making choices other than entering into state-sanctioned relationships and becoming a single legal entity isn't going to help address those concerns.

To a degree, the question feels like filler, and Professor Brown treated it as such; her answer didn't even touch on the question as it was asked. But still, indicating to people that these sorts of things are legitimate reasons for anxiety seems to be counterproductive.