Committee on Ways and Means, Subcommittee on Human Resources, 5-22-01 Testimony

Statement of David Popenoe, Co-Director,
National Marriage Project, and Professor of Sociology,
Rutgers University, Piscataway, New Jersey

Testimony Before the Subcommittee on Human Resources
of the House Committee on Ways and Means

Hearing on Welfare and Marriage Issues

May 22, 2001

As the recent results of the Year 2000 Census confirm, marriage as the basis of family life continues to decline in America. Since 1970 the rate of marriage has dropped by about one third, the out-of-wedlock birth ratio has climbed from 11% to 33% of all births, the divorce rate has doubled, and the number of people living together outside of marriage has grown by over 1000%. With the exception of nonmarital cohabitation, which increased dramatically, the marriage-decline trends decelerated a little in the 1990s. But they have continued in the same direction. As of now, there is no tangible evidence of a turnaround, although a more pro-marriage attitude does seem to be gaining ground in the media and the culture at large.

Why should this marriage decline be of national concern? Principally, because of its effects on our nation's children. The social science evidence is now overwhelming that children fare better in life if they grow up in a married, two-parent family. Children who grow up in other family forms are two to three times at greater risk of having serious behavioral and emotional problems when they become adolescents and adults. Many of today's youth problems can be attributed, directly or indirectly, to the decline of marriage. This includes high rates of juvenile delinquency, suicide, substance abuse, child poverty, mental illness, and emotional instability. One important new study has found that the average American child in recent decades reported more anxiety than child psychiatric patients in the 1950s. Indeed, as former Senator Moynihan once observed, the United States "may be the first society in history in which children are distinctly worse off than adults."

Much of the linkage between the decline of marriage and the rise of problems in childhood rests with the absent father. The evidence is now strong that fathers do matter in the lives of their children. And, although there are many caring and responsible non-resident fathers, the alarmingly simple fact is that men are much less likely to stay close to their children when they are not married to their children's mother. Men tend to view marriage and childrearing as a single package. If they are not married or are divorced, their interest in and sense of responsibility toward children greatly diminish. Many studies have found that a high percentage of all unmarried or divorced fathers lose regular contact with their children over time.

Why is marriage so important to fatherhood? Because being a father is universally problematic for men in a way it is not for women. Put simply, as marriage weakens, fathers stray. While mothers the world over bear and nurture their young with an intrinsic acknowledgement of their role, fathers are often filled with conflict and doubt. Left culturally unregulated, men's sexual behavior can be promiscuous, their paternity casual, their commitment to families weak. Marriage is society's way of engaging the basic problem of fatherhood--how to hold the father to the stronger mother-child bond. As a cultural institution, marriage stresses the long-run commitment of the male, the durability of the marital relationship, and the importance of the union for children.

Our national goal should be no less than to rebuild a marriage culture, one in which as many children as possible grow up with their fathers and mothers providing care and nurture and stability. We should be every bit as much concerned with our nation's family environment as we are with our nation's economic and natural environments. Yet if ever there was a serious domestic problem almost entirely ignored by our national elected representatives, this is it. Despite the fact, for example, that many Americans believe the current state of marriage to be one of the major problems of our time, no high-level government body in memory has examined the issue. Indeed, in recent years the government even has cut back on the collection of marriage statistics.

Is the goal of renewing a marriage-based society impossible to achieve? It certainly will not be easy. Much of the needed change must come, of course, in the cultural, moral and spiritual realms. But there are many things that can be done at the federal level to smooth the path. Perhaps the most important is merely to recognize--as societies in the past have nearly always done as a part of public policy--that the benefits to children of having married parents are so great that the institution of marriage should be encouraged by every reasonable means possible. Fortunately, many ways exist to strengthen and stabilize marriage, to make marriage a more satisfying as well as more durable social relationship. And, of course, government should seek to do no harm in this realm. It should never institute policies, for example, that provide disincentives to marriage, or that fail equally to support children not in a two-parent family.

Some believe that pro-marriage policies can not be put forth without stigmatizing and penalizing those who for one reason or another, sometimes through no fault of their own, are not married. Yet the fact remains that the overwhelming majority of young people today wish to marry for life, and the parents of these young people, no matter what their marital state, also hold that goal for their offspring. There is actually an enormous reservoir of support for a marriage-based culture. In addition to the significant and enduring benefits for children, the evidence is clear that having a solid, long-term marriage greatly enhances the wealth, health, longevity, and overall happiness of adults.

More than 2000 years ago the Roman statesman Cicero noted that "marriage is the first bond of society." Surely this observation is no less true today.

What's Happening To Marriage?*

Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and David Popenoe
National Marriage Project
Rutgers University

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 of us will marry at least once in a lifetime. By the 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 couples relationship, marriages are more likely to be broken by divorce than by death. And 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 its 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 unpartnered singlehood over the course of a lifetime.

As an institution, marriage has lost much of its legal, religious and social meaning and authority. It has dwindled to a "couples relationship," mainly designed for the sexual and emotional gratification of each adult. Marriage is also quietly losing its place in the language. With the growing plurality of intimate relationships, people now tend to speak inclusively about "relationships" and "intimate partners," burying marriage within this general category. Moreover, some elites seem to believe that support for marriage is synonymous with far-right political or religious views, discrimination against single parents, and tolerance of domestic violence.

Among young women, social confidence in marriage is wavering. Until very recently, young women were highly optimistic about their chances for marital happiness and success. Now, according to youth surveys, their confidence in their ability to achieve successful marriage is declining. Moreover, they are notably more accepting of alternatives to marriage, such as unwed parenthood and cohabitation.

At the national policy level, marriage has received remarkably little bipartisan study or attention. During a four-decade period of dramatic historic change in marriage, no national studies, government commissions or task forces have been set up to examine the status of marriage or to propose measures to strengthen it.¹ Indeed the United States lags well behind England, Australia, and Canada in the level and seriousness of governmental response to the widespread evidence of the weakening of marriage.

The Marriage Relationship

One reason Americans prize marriage so highly is that it is the source of deeply desired benefits such as sexual faithfulness, emotional support, mutual trust and lasting commitment. These benefits cannot be found in the marketplace, the workplace or on the Internet.

Most people aspire to a happy and long-lasting marriage. And they will enter marriage with the strong desire and determination for a lifelong and loving partnership. While they are married, most couples will also be sexually faithful to each other as long as the marriage lasts. According to the most comprehensive study of American sexual behavior, married people are nearly all alike in their sexual behavior: "once married, the vast majority have no other sexual partner; their past is essentially erased."²

However, although Americans haven't stopped seeking or valuing happy and long-lasting marriage as an important life goal, they are increasingly likely to find that this goal eludes them. Americans may marry but they have a hard time achieving successful marriages. One measure of success is the intactness of the marriage. Although the divorce rate has leveled off, it remains at historically high levels. Roughly half of all marriages are likely to end in divorce or permanent separation, according to projections based on current divorce rates. Another measure of success is reported happiness in marriage. Over the past two decades, the percentage of people who say they are in "very happy" first marriages has declined substantially and continuously. Still another measure of success is social confidence in the likelihood of marital success. Young people, and especially young women, are growing more pessimistic about their chances for a happy and long-lasting marriage.

The popular culture strongly reinforces this sense of pessimism, even doom, about the chances for marital success. Divorce is an ever-present theme in the books, music and movies of the youth culture. And real life experience is hardly reassuring; today's young adults have grown up in the midst of the divorce revolution, and they've witnessed marital failure and breakdown first-hand in their own families and in the families of friends, relatives, and neighbors. For children whose parents divorced, the risk of divorce is two to three times greater than it is for children from married parent families. But the pervasive generational experience of divorce has made almost all young adults more cautious and even wary of marriage. The percent of young people who say they agree or mostly agree with the statement "one sees so few good marriages that one questions it as a way of life" increased between 1976 and 1992, while the percent of those who say it is very likely they will stay married to the same person for life decreased over the same time period for both males and females.³

Marriage as a Rite of Passage

For most of this century and certainly before, marriage was one of the most important rites of passage in life. It accomplished several goals associated with growing up: an economic transition from the parental household into an independent household, a psychosexual transition merging two selves and lives into one, and a social and legal transition from status as a single person to a spouse. Across time and culture, betrothal and wedding rituals reflected these economic, social and sexual dimensions of young people's coming of age.

Today, marriage has lost much of its role and significance as a rite of passage. For earlier generations of women, first sexual intercourse and marriage were closely linked and timed. Ninety percent of women born between 1933-42 were either virgins when they married or had premarital intercourse with the man they wed.⁴ For today's generation of young women, the timing of first sexual intercourse is increasingly distant from the timing of first marriage. Just over half of teenage girls have experienced first sexual intercourse by age 17.⁵ Teenage girls are sexually active for seven or eight years on average before marriage. Indeed, premarital sex has become something of a misnomer. Sex is increasingly detached from the promise or expectation of marriage.

Secondly, because young adults are postponing marriage until their late twenties, they pass through much of their twenties as never-married singles. They are likely to live apart from the parental household, as singles, in a peer-group household, or in a cohabiting relationship. Many have "their own lives and their own jobs" long before they marry.

During the years before first marriage, many young adults make the economic transition from dependence to independence. The National Marriage Project's recent study of never-married, noncollege young men and women in northern New Jersey finds that these young adults are not inclined to see marriage as a way to get ahead by pooling paychecks.⁶ Rather, they describe marriage as a relationship where each partner contributes to the maintenance of the household but keeps control of his or her own earnings. Moreover, these men and women believe that each partner has to demonstrate a capacity to take care of himself or herself economically before marrying. As one young woman in the group explained, "men learn to hate you if you try to live off them."

The pathway leading to marriage has changed as well. The pattern of mating used to follow a sequence: couple dating, going steady, sexual experimentation - sometimes including premarital sexual intercourse - and then marriage and children. Few people lived together before marriage, and most women were either virgins at the time of marriage or had premarital intercourse only with their future husband.

Today the pathway is more complex and varied, but it goes in roughly this order: In high school and college, young people socialize in coed groups with some pairing off for purposes of love and sex. First sexual intercourse occurs in the late teens but it is typically not premarital. In their twenties, young people are likely to enter a cohabiting partnership as a first living together union. Cohabiting unions are short-term. Either they break up or, more likely, lead to marriage. An estimated 60 percent of cohabiting unions end in marriage.⁷ Pregnancy and childbearing might occur at almost any point in this mating sequence.

Cohabitation is emerging as a significant experience for young adults. It is now replacing marriage as the first living together union. It is estimated that a quarter of unmarried women between the ages of 25 and 39 are currently living with a partner and about half have lived at some time with an unmarried partner.⁸ A growing percentage of cohabiting unions include children. For unmarried couples in the 25-34 age group, the percentage with children approaches half of all such households.⁹

Recent studies point to significant differences between never-married, childless, engaged cohabiting couples and cohabiting couples who have not set a definite date to marry. Prenuptial cohabitors seem to look a lot like married couples in the level of commitment, happiness and frequency of conflict. Non-nuptial cohabitors, however, are significantly more likely than married or prenuptial cohabiting couples to experience domestic violence, to be sexually unfaithful, to have lower expectations and levels of commitment.¹⁰

University of Chicago sociologist Linda J. Waite finds that cohabitation involves a different "bargain" than marriage. Compared to married couples, cohabitors expect less mutuality and sharing of resources, friends, leisure activities and goals.¹¹ They are less likely than married couples to "specialize" in their living together unions and thus to achieve higher levels of productivity. In many respects, cohabiting couples behave like roommates, sharing a residence and some household expenses, but remaining separate in many of their social and economic pursuits.

Marriage in the Life Course

Marriage occupies a significant proportion of the adult life span. Because of increasing longevity, one might expect the duration of marriage to increase in the future. But longer lives probably will not result in longer marriages, for several reasons. One is the later age of first marriage. Young people are postponing first marriage until they are well into their twenties. The second is the higher likelihood of divorce today. Still another is the decline in the rate of marriage and remarriage, especially for women. Finally, there is the rise in cohabiting unions after divorce or as an alternative to marriage. Older widowed or divorced individuals may choose to cohabit rather than remarry in order to avoid legal, economic and health-related entanglements. As a result of these forces, the lifetime proportion of marriage has declined slightly for women since mid-century, although the decline has been far steeper for Black women than others.

There are also some indications that lifelong singlehood may be increasing. The likelihood that adults will marry has declined dramatically since 1960. Much of this decline results from the postponement of first marriages until older ages, but it may also reflect a growing trend toward the single life. In 1960, 94 percent of women had been married at least once by age 45. If the present trend continues, fewer than 85 percent of current young adults will marry.

Another important trend toward singlehood is apparent in the status of single mothers. In the past, single mothers were likely to be widowed or divorced. For those who bore children out of wedlock, moreover, single motherhood tended to be a temporary status. They went on to marry and to have other children in wedlock. Today, single mothers are increasingly likely to have never married. And they are more likely to stay single, so unwed motherhood has become a permanent status for many women.

These convergent forces suggest that although marriage remains an important feature of adulthood, it no longer looms like Mount Everest in the landscape of the adult life course. It is more like a hill that people climb, up and down, once or twice, or bypass altogether.

Marriage as A Social Institution

Marriage is losing much of its status and authority as a social institution. According to legal scholar John Witte Jr., "the early Enlightenment ideals of marriage as a permanent contractual union designed for the sake of mutual love, procreation and protection is slowly giving way to a new reality of marriage as a 'terminal sexual contract' designed for the gratification of the individual parties."¹² Marriage has lost broad support within the community and even among some of the religious faithful. In some denominations, clergy avoid preaching and teaching about marriage for fear of offending divorced parishioners. Marriage is also discredited or neglected in the popular culture. Consequently, young adults, who desperately want to avoid marital failure, find little advice, support and guidance on marriage from the peer or popular culture or from parents, clergy or others who have traditionally guided and supported the younger generation in matters of mating and marrying.

This loss of broad institutional support for marriage is evident in the marital relationship itself. Not so long ago, the marital relationship consisted of three elements: an economic bond of mutual dependency; a social bond supported by the extended family and larger community; and a spiritual bond upheld by religious doctrine, observance and faith. Today many marriages have none of these elements.

The deinstitutionalization of marriage is one of the chief reasons why it is more fragile today. For most Americans, marriage is a "couples relationship" designed primarily to meet the sexual and emotional needs of the spouses. Increasingly, happiness in marriage is measured by each partner's sense of psychological wellbeing rather than the more traditional measures of getting ahead economically, boosting children up to a higher rung on the educational ladder than the parents, or following religious teachings on marriage. People tend to be puzzled or put off by the idea that marriage has purposes or benefits that extend beyond fulfilling individual adult needs for intimacy and satisfaction. In this respect, marriage is increasingly indistinguishable from other "intimate relationships" which are also evaluated on the basis of sexual and emotional satisfaction.

Women and Marriage

When we look at the state of marriage today, it is useful to consider the behavior and attitudes of young women. Historically, women are the normsetters in courtship and marital relationships as well as the bearers of the cultural traditions of marriage. (To test this proposition, simply compare the amount of space devoted to marriage in women's magazines to that in men's magazines.) So women's attitudes and expectations for marriage are an important measure of overall social confidence in the institution and a weathervane of which way the marital winds are blowing.

What do we know about the mating and marrying behavior of young women today? For one thing, women are older when they marry. The median age of first marriage for a woman is now 25, compared to 20 in 1960. For another, women who marry today are much less likely to be virgins than women in past decades. For yet another, most young women enter marriage after having lived with a partner, though not always their marriage partner. Finally, a significant percentage of young women have children outside of marriage. Women who become single mothers are less likely to ever marry.

Compared to men, young women are more disenchanted with marriage. This growing pessimism is particularly pronounced among teenage girls. For high school girls who expect to marry (or who are already married), the belief that their marriage will last a lifetime has declined over the past two decades while high school boys have become slightly more optimistic. Teenage girls are increasingly tolerant of unwed childbearing. Indeed, they outpace teenage boys in their acceptance of unwed childbearing today, a notable reversal from earlier decades when teenage girls were less tolerant of nonmarital births than teenage boys.

Women's disenchantment should not be taken as a lack of interest in having husbands. But their growing pessimism may reflect two convergent realities. One is women's higher expectations for emotional intimacy in marriage and more exacting standards for a husband's participation in childrearing and the overall work of the household. These expectations may not be shared or met by husbands, and thus the mismatch may lead to deep disappointment and dissatisfaction. The other is women's growing economic independence. Because women are better educated and more likely to be employed outside of the home today than in the past, they are not as dependent on marriage as an economic partnership. Consequently, they are less likely to "put up" with a bad marriage out of sheer economic necessity and more likely to leave when they experience unhappiness in their marriages. Moreover, because wives are breadwinners, they expect a more equitable division of household work - not always a fifty-fifty split but fairness in the sharing of the work of the home. Thus, the experience of working outside the home contributes simultaneously to greater economic independence and less tolerance for husbands who exempt themselves from involvement with children and the household. "I don't need a grown-up baby to take care of," is a complaint often voiced by working married mothers.

Some Good News about Marriage

Not all the marriage indicators are negative. Here and there, we find modest signs of positive change in attitudes or behavior.

Married couples today are somewhat less likely to end up in divorce court than several years ago. After one and a half decades of sharp increase, the divorce rate has declined slightly and stabilized in recent years. Although projections based on the current rate suggest that close to half of all marriages are likely to end in divorce or permanent separation, that projection could change if the divorce rate declines in the future.

The rate of unwed births has declined for the third year in a row, although the ratio of unwed and marital births remains the same. Mainly as a consequence of the modest reduction in both divorce and unwed births, the percentage of children living in single parent families has remained stable in the past two years (1996-98).

The percentage of young Americans who say that having a good marriage is extremely important to them as a life goal has increased slightly since the 1980s.

Conclusion: Marriage is weakening but it is too soon to write its obituary . . .

Taken together, the marriage indicators do not argue for optimism about a quick or widespread comeback of marriage. Persistent long-term trends suggest a steady weakening of marriage as a lasting union, a major stage in the adult life course, and as the primary institution governing childbearing and parenthood. Young people's pessimism about their chances for marital success combined with their growing acceptance of unwed parenthood also do not bode well for marriage.

Nonetheless, there are some reasons for hope. For example, given the increased importance of marriage to teenagers, it is possible that this generation will work hard at staying happily married. The decline in the unwed birth rate is also a good sign. And there are stirrings of a larger grass-roots marriage movement. Churches in more than a hundred communities have joined together to establish a common set of premarital counseling standards and practices for engaged couples. A marriage education movement is emerging among marriage therapists, family life educators, schoolteachers and some clergy. In the states, legislators are considering or have passed bills creating incentives for engaged couples to receive premarital education. Florida now requires marriage education for high school students.

This is not the first time in the millennial-long history of western marriage that marriage has seemed headed for the dustbins and then recovered. Certainly it is possible that the nation is on the cusp of a turnaround in some of the negative marital trends. Perhaps the last four decades have merely been a "great disruption," in the words of social analyst Francis Fukuyama, and Americans will respond to the weakening of marriage with renewed dedication and success in achieving the goal of a long-lasting happy marriage. The positive trends bear watching and are encouraging, but it is still too soon to tell whether they will persist or result in a comeback of this important social institution.

*From: The State of Our Unions: 1999, The Social Health of Marriage In America Rutgers University, National Marriage Project, June, 1999

1 For two "think-tank" reports that are notable exceptions to the general neglect of marriage in the policy world, see: Theodora Ooms, Toward More Perfect Unions: Putting Marriage on the Public Agenda (Washington, DC: Family Impact Seminar, 1998); and Marriage in America: A Report to the Nation (New York: Council on Families in America, 1995)

2 Robert T. Michael, John H. Gagnon, Edward O. Laumann, and Gina Kolata, Sex in America: A Definitive Survey (Boston, MA: Little Brown and Company, 1994), 105.

3 Norval D. Glenn, "Values, Attitudes and the State of American Marriage," Promises To Keep: Decline and Renewal of Marriage in America, ed. David Popenoe, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and David Blankenhorn (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), 21.

4 Michael et. al, 97.

5 Kristin A. Moore, Anne K. Driscoll, Laura Duberstein Lindberg, A Statistical Portrait of Adolescent Sex, Contraception and Childbearing (Washington DC.: The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, March 1998), 3. Figure is based on 1995 National Survey of Family Growth.

6 Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and David Popenoe, Why Wed? Young Adults Talk About Sex, Love and First Unions (New Brunswick, N.J.: National Marriage Project, Rutgers University, 1999)

7 Larry Bumpass and James Sweet, "National Estimates of Cohabitation," Demography 24-4 (1989): 615-625.

8Larry Bumpass and Hsien-Hen Lu, "Trends in Cohabitation and Implications for Children's Family Contexts." Unpublished manuscript, 1998. Center for Demography, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI.

9 Wendy D. Manning and Daniel T. Lichter, "Parental Cohabitation and Children's Economic Well-Being" Journal of Marriage and the Family 58 (1996): 998-1010.

10 Linda J. Waite, "Cohabitation: A Communitarian Perspective," unpublished paper presented to the Communitarian Family Task Force, Washington, DC, January 1999, 13.

11 Waite, 8-13, passim.

12 John Witte, Jr., From Sacrament to Contract: Marriage, Religion, and Law in the Western Tradition (Louisville, KY, Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), 209.