NEWS ORGANIZATIONS are heavily reporting the latest findings by the National Marriage Project, which show once again the continued decline of marital relationships among the lower middle class, with working-class whites increasingly resembling inner-city blacks in their family structure.

Cohabitation has grown fourteen-fold among parents since the 1970s. A quarter of American women with multiple children have children with more than one man. Out-of-wedlock births are uncommon among college-educated women. (The Marriage Project does not mention here that this is partly due to the greater acceptance of abortion among the educated.) Cohabitation is common among the highly educated but usually occurs before marriage.

With the growth in cohabitation, the divorce rate has decreased by four percentage points among couples in the first ten years of marriage. Cohabiting couples are more than twice as likely to break up before their first child is twelve and children who live with cohabiting adults have worse outcomes and a much higher incidence of behavior problems. 

Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project, calls for reform in divorce laws in a brief for the Brookings Institute dated today. The likelihood that easy divorce was a major factor in the rise in cohabitation is, however, not emphatically stated by the Marriage Project and seems to be lost in its press releases and summaries.

Wilcox calls for public education campaigns – similar to non-smoking campaigns – to promote the benefits of marriage.

But do people get married because its healthy? Do people marry because it’s economically beneficial or practical?

The answer is no. People get married because they can’t get something unless they marry and because marriage is unlikely to actively harm them, as unilateral divorce clearly harms its victims.

The National Marriage Project, in its many reports, never calls for a return to traditional sex roles despite overwhelming evidence that the decline of femininity and masculinity make marriage unappealing to ordinary people. 

A public education campaign is unlikely to make the case for marriage in a culture that does not create women and men.

Not only are fewer people marrying, but the number of men and women who say they are “very happy” in marriage has declined significantly since the feminist revolution of the early 70s. And yet marriage rates remain remarkably high in communities that observe traditional sex roles, among Orthodox Jews, Mormons and the Amish.

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