"Living in Sin" on the rise

[Jimmy Durante]

Divorce is on the decline in the USA, but a report to be released today suggests that may be due more to an increase in people living together than to more lasting marriages.

Couples who once might have wed and then divorced now are not marrying at all, according to The State of our Unions 2005. The annual report, which analyzes Census and other data, is issued by the National Marriage Project at New Jersey's Rutgers University.

The U.S. divorce rate is 17.7 per 1,000 married women, down from 22.6 in 1980. The marriage rate is also on a steady decline: a 50% drop since 1970 from 76.5 per 1,000 unmarried women to 39.9, says the report, whose calculations are based on an internationally used measurement.

"Cohabitation is here to stay," says David Popenoe, a Rutgers sociology professor and report co-author. "I don't think it's good news, especially for children," he says. "As society shifts from marriage to cohabitation - which is what's happening - you have an increase in family instability."

Cohabiting couples have twice the breakup rate of married couples, the report's authors say. And in the USA, 40% bring kids into these often-shaky live-in relationships.

"It is important now to think beyond the divorce rate to other kinds of couple unions and look at how stable they are," says Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, a social historian and report co-author.

"It's a pretty short period of time for that change (cohabitation) to have occurred and to have taken hold in the way it has," she says.

In the USA, 8.1% of coupled households are made up of unmarried, heterosexual partners. Although many European countries have higher cohabitation rates, divorce rates in those countries are lower, and more children grow up with both biological parents, even though the parents may not be married, Popenoe says.

The USA has the lowest percentage among Western nations of children who grow up with both biological parents, 63%, the report says.

"The United States has the weakest families in the Western world because we have the highest divorce rate and the highest rate of solo parenting," Popenoe says.

[Phlegm]

WTF, the divorce rate dropped from 2.26% to 1.77%. Those are not even close to the 50% divorce rate all those family advocates were whinning about earlier in the decade.

[Arlos]

To be fair, I think that the 2 statistics are talking to different purposes. The one quoted here is divorce rate per year. The one the far right wingnut "PROTECT THE FAMILY!" types were going off on is probably the total percentages of marriages that ultimately end in divorce, at some eventual point (even though it might take 30 years). Even then, I think that the 50% number was picked out of a hat, and bears no resemblance to reality.

-Arlos

P.S. Phlegm, how exactly did you end up with 160,000 goats?

[Phlegm]

a lot of hishi... a lot. Most of my goats are the result of playing a lot of NT's games.

[Captain Insano]

Marriage rates are way down?

I'm fucking shocked. Could it be most guys are onto womens complete line of bullshit, not to mention the thought of losing 60 percent of everything you own when the bitch decides to go start fucking the postman?

I think this is great. I love going to the bars in Orange County and seeing the 30+ never-been-married/divorcee bitches crawling on their hands and knees to meet a man to marry. Serves them all right for being useless.

I wonder what the increase of marriages of American men to foreign women is? I bet its through the roof.