OPPapers.com

Love

Americans haven’t given up on marriage as a cherished ideal. Indeed, most Americans continue to prize and value marriage as an important life goal and the vast majority will marry at least once in a lifetime. By their mid-thirties, a majority of Americans have married at least once. Most couples enter marriage with a strong desire and determination for a lifelong, loving partnership. Moreover, this desire may be increasing among the young. Since the 1980s, the percentage of young Americans who say that having a good marriage is extremely important to them as a life goal has increased slightly. But when men and women marry today, they are entering a union that looks very different from the one that their parents or grandparents entered. As a couple’s relationship, marriages are more likely to be broken by divorce than by death. Although one might expect that greater freedom to leave an unhappy marriage might increase the chances that intact marriages would be very happy, this does not seem to be the case. Marriages are less happy today than in past decades.
As a rite of passage, marriage is losing much of it’s social importance and ritual significance. It is no longer the standard pathway from adolescence to adulthood for young adults today. It is far less likely to be closely associated with the timing of first sexual intercourse for young women and less likely to be the first living together union for young couples than in the past. As an adult stage in the life course, marriage is shrinking. Americans are living longer, marrying later, exiting marriage more quickly, and choosing to live together before marriage, after marriage, in-between marriages, and as an alternative to marriage. A small but growing percentage of American adults will never marry. As a consequence, marriage is surrounded by longer periods of partnered or unpatented singlehood over the course of a lifetime. As an institution, marriage has lost much of its legal, religious and social meaning...