Posted on 07/18/2005 2:34:36 PM PDT by Indy Pendance
MOUNT LAUREL, N.J. (AP) - The divorce rate in the United States is falling, and a new study offers an explanation: More people are shacking up instead of getting married.
In a report released Tuesday, the co-directors of the National Marriage Project, a nonpartisan institute at Rutgers University that promotes marriage, said couples who get married are more committed to each other than those who are just live together.
The study analyzed data gathered by the U.S. Census Bureau and other researchers.
Nine of every 1,000 married women in the United States divorced in 1960, according to the study. The rate increased to more than 22 per 1,000 by 1980 and has steadily declined since, to a little under 18 per 1,000 in 2004.
Meanwhile, the number of unmarried, opposite-sex couples living together has climbed from 439,000 in 1960 to more than 5 million now.
And the marriage rate has fallen over the past three decades: Seventy-seven out of every 1,000 single women got married in 1976; last year, the number was fewer than 40 per 1,000, the study found.
Report authors David Popenoe and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead said they are glad the divorce rate is on the decline, but they are worry about the children of couples who are living together without marrying.
"The breakup rate of cohabiting couples is considerably higher" than that of married couples, Popenoe said. "As more and more cohabiting couples have children, that becomes more of a problem."
The number one predictor of divorce is marriage.
The utterly corrupt US Divorce Lawyer Industry has destroyed marraige.
In order to have a meaningful statistic, they should fold the cohabitating with common children group into the married group, and then give a composite number for the dissolution of the household. Marriage is simply not the most important factor here.
As marriage is defined down to the lowest common denominator, look for it to be an even less attractive institution for many people.
I'm not sure I buy that. Are divorce lawyers making people go to them? I don't live in the US, but where I live divorces are readily available and yet I haven't had one, nor do I feel a lawyer is pressuring me to divorce. But maybe you have a different kind of marriage.
Like everything else they get their greedy hands on. Health care for example.
No fault divorce opened up the flood gates.
So what are the stats on those couples that 'stay together'.
Oh, they just don't count their breakups as 'divorces'.
I don't believe it either. It's the free market - people want the services that divorce lawyers are selling.
Remember, "covenant marriages," where offered, haven't been as popular as the regular kind. If people didn't want divorces, they wouldn't get them.
Oh, please. Do you actually believe that they (evil divorce lawyers) create clients who want a divorce out of thin air?
With respect, I believe that you have confused correlation with causation.
Yet another statistic the left will use as an attack on the sanctity of marriage.
If the divorce rate is falling since cohabition has gone up, maybe having cohabiting couples marry will only lead to divorce in many cases. Couples who marry and couples who cohabit are not the same, you could argue that the latter places a lower value on commitment and getting a piece of paper would not magically change that.
And he would know this HOW?
There is no record, and no statistics on this. It stands to reason, but the only way it could be discerned is by extensive research on children's records (noteing different names and addresses for each parent) but most of these records are still protected.
Hey if everyone just shacked up, the divorce rate would be zeno.
I would be interested in seeing a study on the reasons cohabitating couples give for why they shack up instead of getting married. In my experience this is very much related to divorce. Many people my age (24) are the children of divorce. Some of them conclude from their parents' bad marriages that all marriages will fail and that the whole thing is a sham. So they use this to justify shacking up - in their eyes it is "safer" than marriage. This is nonsense, and long-term cohabitation leads to much more heartbreak and relationship dysfunction in the end for these people.
No, they're merely the beneficiaries. It's a what's injected into our culture by the degenerates who whether knowingly or not further Antonio Gramsci's goal of destruction of the family unit.
Take a look at the communist goals as written in the 1963 congressional record:
http://www.uhuh.com/nwo/communism/comgoals.htm
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
Common law marriage is only available in a handful of states today- and in most if not all of them, there is no time limit, just that the couple hold themselves out to be married.
Any male who has any real knowledge of the divorce lawyer industry's festivities in store for husbands and fathers will not soon (if ever) marry. I am firmly believe this anti-male bias in the divorce courts in killing marraige.
If they even have children.
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