Marriage, Divorce, and Intimate Relationships

Marriage has undergone a remarkable transformation over the past half century, shifting from a near-universal adult status to one of several options for organizing intimate life. In the United States, the marriage rate has declined from approximately 72 per 1,000 unmarried women in 1960 to around 33 per 1,000 by the 2010s. The median age at first marriage has risen from 20 for women and 23 for men in the 1950s to 28 for women and 30 for men today. These trends are replicated, often to an even greater degree, across Western Europe, Japan, and other advanced industrialized societies.

Andrew Cherlin has described this process as the deinstitutionalization of marriage, by which he means the weakening of social norms that define people's behavior within marriage. In earlier eras, marriage was governed by clear, widely shared expectations about gender roles, sexual exclusivity, and the obligation to remain married. Today, the meaning and expectations of marriage are increasingly subject to individual negotiation, and the boundaries between marriage, cohabitation, and singlehood have blurred.

Cherlin argues that marriage has been transformed from a cornerstone institution, which people entered early in adulthood as the foundation for adult life, to a capstone institution, which people enter only after achieving economic stability and personal maturity. This transformation has important class dimensions: college-educated Americans continue to marry at high rates and experience relatively stable marriages, while those without college degrees increasingly forgo or delay marriage and experience higher rates of relationship instability.

Cohabitation has emerged as a major alternative to or precursor of marriage. In Scandinavian countries, cohabitation has become functionally equivalent to marriage, with cohabiting couples receiving similar legal protections and social recognition. In the United States, cohabitation has increased dramatically but remains a more ambiguous and unstable status, with most cohabiting relationships either transitioning to marriage or dissolving within a few years.