Is Fear of Divorce Keeping Us From Getting Married?
There are a lot of reasons not to get married these days. It’s a down economy. We’re living in the friends-with-benefits generation. And who really wants to endorse an institution that shuns gay couples and supports money-grubbing Kardashians?
Not surprisingly, a recent Pew study announced that just 51 percent of Americans are married today, the lowest percentage in our history. According to W. Bradford Wilcox, the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, marriage had been “in retreat” in the last 40 years, and that the decline had accelerated since the recession started in 2008.
“Marriage is less likely to anchor the adult life course,” said Wilcox to ABC News. “It’s less likely to ground children’s experience with family life. It plays a less central role as an institution in American life.”
The question, for at least some of us, is why we’ve started shying away from “til death do us part.” Now, a new study by Sharon Sassler, Cornell professor of policy analysis and management, and Dela Kusi-Appouh, a Cornell doctoral student in the field of development sociology, may have found the not-so-earth-shattering answer: we’re afraid of getting divorced.
According to the study, “The Specter of Divorce: Views from Working and Middle-Class Cohabitors,” which was published in this month’s issue of Family Relations, more than two-thirds of cohabitating couples admitted to concerns about dealing with the social, legal, emotional and economic consequences of a possible divorce.
In particular, lower-income women expressed fears of being caught in the “trap” of marriage, worried that it would lead to more domestic work for them without any benefits. Working-class couples were also twice as likely to view marriage as “just a piece of paper,” no different than their existing relationship.
The news is hardly surprising—it’s hard to commit when you don’t have a job—but it is noteworthy because it shows how a sustained recession can take its toll on more than just our finances. While I don’t believe we’re ever going to become a nation of singletons, it’s clear that the definition and importance of marriage is evolving in these changing times. The question is whether we’re going to adapt along with it.
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