Singles nation: Why so many Americans are unmarried

[Sage Ninja]

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/sin...8ERu?ocid=iehp

When Karin Denison was in her early 20s, it seemed that all her peers were coupling up and planning to live happily ever after. She spent the summers after college driving to friends’ weddings, she recalls. In small-town Minnesota, marriage was just what people did. It was expected.


Today, almost two decades, hundreds of dates, and untold hours on OKCupid later, Ms. Denison, who moved to Boston when she was 26, lives in a far different reality.



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“There are tons of single people in Boston,” she says. “You can be single in Boston and nobody really cares. I’ve never felt the pressure here to get married.”

Indeed, if there is any “normal” in the shifting, complicated world of American relationships, it arguably looks a lot more like Denison than her childhood friends who wed at 21. Last year, for the first time, the number of unmarried American adults outnumbered those who were married. One in 7 lives alone – about 31 million compared with 4 million in 1950 – and many of those are clustered in urban centers.

But even outside cities, there is a distinct rise of the “single.” Almost half of new births are to unmarried mothers. The number of parents living together but not married has tripled. And the number of American adults who have never been married is at a historic high, around 20 percent.

Meanwhile, only 30 percent of Millennials say that having a successful marriage is “one of the most important things” in life, according to the Pew Research Center, down from even the 47 percent of Generation X who said the same thing in 1997. Four in 10 Americans went ever further, telling Pew researchers in 2010 that marriage was becoming obsolete.

In short, academics say, American society is in the midst of a fundamental social and demographic shift, the “greatest social change of the last 60 years,” according to New York University sociologist Eric Klinenberg. It is a shift that goes well beyond the dynamics of relationships, affecting everything from housing and health care to child rearing and churches.

And although single women like Denison – educated, urban, and leading a full life – are often portrayed as the poster children of this new nonmarital world order (think “Sex and the City” and writer Kate Bolick’s new book, “Spinster”), the reality is far more complex. The way Americans now couple – or don’t – offers insight into not only evolving views of marriage and family, but into the country’s growing economic, racial, and geographic divides.

“Just as marriages are no longer alike, singleness is no longer all alike,” says Stephanie Coontz, director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families.

Understanding the various facets of the new Singles Nation, it turns out, is key to understanding much about America today.

• • •

There is little debate that American adults are far less likely to be married than they were two generations ago. In 1950, married couples represented 78 percent of households in the United States. In 2011, the US Census Bureau reported, that percentage had dropped to 48 percent. In 2014, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 124.6 million Americans 16 years and older were single, or 50.2 percent of the population, compared with 37.4 percent of the population in 1976.

But underneath those numbers, nuances exist.

One of the big ones has to do with when Americans get married. For years, the average age at which both men and women first marry has been creeping upward, to 27 for women and 29 for men. It was 20 for women and 22 for men in 1960. In other words, there may at any given moment be more single people who have never been married, but that doesn’t mean that those singles are going to stay that way.

But this seemingly simple demographic explanation belies a huge shift in culture. Particularly for college graduates, this delay in marriage has ushered in a new phase of life that sociologists are calling “emerging adulthood” or, less charitably, “delayed adolescence.”

This is a time when people focus on their careers and their own personal fulfillment, sociologists say: They go out to dinner, work late hours, and make close groups of friends that are sometimes dubbed “urban tribes.” And while there has been some hand-wringing about this, with worries about a lack of maturity among young American adults today, a number of scholars who study singles point out that this group is the antidote to another point of cultural anxiety: the decline in community.

College-educated singles are moving into old downtown buildings and spending money in revitalizing urban centers. In cities from Denver to Detroit to Boston, they are joining everything from kickball leagues to museum boards, neighborhood associations to volunteer organizations.

“People who live alone don’t want to be alone or isolated,” Mr. Klinenberg says. “So they spend an enormous time out in public.”

It’s a point that University of California, Santa Barbara professor Bella DePaulo has been trying to make for a long time. Dr. DePaulo, who is happily single, debunks what she says are myths related to the country’s “matro-mania.” Her research has found that contrary to conventional wisdom (and a number of studies) married people are no more happy and healthy as a group than their single counterparts. And it is singles, not marrieds, who are the most active in their communities.

“When people get married, they have less contact with their friends, their siblings, their neighborhood,” DePaulo says, adding that studies show this is true even with people who are married and don’t have children. “It’s just the opposite of the stereotype.”

Quite often, she says, single people realize that they enjoy living without a spouse. “People used to think of single life as where you mark time until you get married,” she says. “It’s not. It’s the real thing.”

• • •

But the definition of “single” is a bit vague. Statistically, it simply means unmarried. And that leaves plenty of room for different family structures.

DePaulo, who lives alone, is considered a single. So is Sarah Wright, the board chair of a singles’ advocacy group called Unmarried Equality, who lives with a longtime partner.

“I do not describe myself as ‘single’ because I’m not,” Ms. Wright says. “I am coupled.” When she gets government forms asking for her marital status, she crosses off all the responses and writes in “none.”

Tara Dublin of Portland, Ore., is officially single, even though she was married for years. Today, she says, “I am unmarried, unattached, and have no partner.” Still, she says, friends take umbrage when Ms. Dublin calls herself a single mom, since her ex-husband also cares for their sons.

Hugh Ryan is considered single, as well, even though he lives with two other men in New York, and the three consider themselves a family. (They recently bought a house in Brooklyn together.)

“We have the same stupid fights and the same wonderful stuff as in any relationship,” Mr. Ryan says. “There just happens to be more of it. Once you recognize that the two-parent, two-kid family that married at 22 and are together till the end of their lives is a rarity these days, everything else seems less unusual.”

Denison, for her part, describes herself as “single – sort of.” She has been in a number of relationships since she moved to Boston, some long term, some decidedly short. But she has always lived alone.

Two generations ago, this would have been highly atypical. A female college graduate getting an apartment on her own would have been seen as indecorous. But as Klinenberg points out in his book “Going Solo,” cultural attitudes have changed. Today, living on one’s own is a marker of adulthood.

While openly living with a partner outside of marriage would have been taboo – especially a same-sex partner, as in Wright’s case (not to mention a family such as Ryan’s) – today it is almost expected. The social penalties for sexual relationships outside of marriage have disintegrated, says Andrew Cherlin, a professor of sociology and public policy at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

“It’s less necessary to be married than it used to be,” Dr. Cherlin says. “Before, it was not acceptable to have any other sort of adult life. Now there are alternatives – living with someone but not getting married, not having kids, having kids and not being married. There are alternative ways of forming the family.”

Some pretty interesting stuff. There is actually a lot more to the article if you click on this link to read the whole thing. I think I might be heading in that direction as well. Not crazy interested in being married or have a kid just yet. By y age my mother was already married and given birth to me and my older sister. I'm still doing the college and do not plan on getting married until I have some years under my belt in my chosen profession.