News: In 2005 married couples constituted a minority of American households

“Americans now spend half their adult lives outside the bonds of matrimony. The total of American women now living with a spouse is 57.5 million, compared with 59.5 million who are not. ”

In a New York Times article of January 16, 2007, the author, Same Roberts, states that in 2005, 51percent of married women said they were living without a spouse. That marks an increase from 35 percent in 1950 and 49 percent in 2000.

And, since the fact that in 2005 married couples constituted a minority of American households. this development could change the ways in which the government and employers distribute benefits. That would have large social and workplace consequences.

There are several factors at work behind this statistical change. For example, women are marrying later today or they are living with unmarried partners more often or for longer periods. In addition, women are living longer as widows, and they are more likely than men to delay remarriage after a divorce.

Then, black women have low marriage rates.

The result is that Americans now spend half their adult lives outside the bonds of matrimony. The total of American women now living with a spouse is 57.5 million, compared with 59.5 million who are not.

But, that is not the whole of the story, or, perhaps, its main feature. When it comes to marriage the two Americas are not divided by gender, but by class. There is a marriage gap, but it is between the well-off and the less so.

Kate Zernike, also writing in the New York Times newspaper, says statistics clearly show that college educated women are more likely to marry than non- College educated women – although, they marry a bit later. She also claims that women with more education are becoming less likely to divorce than those with less education. And, they are even less likely to be widowed, less likely to end up alone.

This difference includes race lines: black women are less likely to marry than white women, but college educated black women are more likely to marry than non-college educated women

The class gap exists in large part because, as Christopher Jenks, a professor of social policy at Harvard, attests, “like marries like.”

If that is true, why have things changed so much for women who don’t have the choices that educated women have? Well, marriage used to be something you did before launching a life or career, now it is seen as something you do after you are financially able – when you can buy a house, for example. This is true for all classes, but the less educated may not get there.

Perhaps, in the past, a man with little education may have held a good- paying manufacturing job, with health care and a pension plan. Today, that is most often not the case. And, at the present time, people who are high school dropouts will, most likely, have a higher propensity to drop out of marriage.

The better educated tend to share intellectual interests and economic backgrounds, as well as ideas about the division of household rules. They have more earning power and tend to enter more stable marriages.