Shifts in Marriage & Family
While 9-in-ten Americans rushed to be with their families for the annual Thanksgiving ritual, researchers reminded us that one-in-three children live in either single parent households or those where the parents are not married. And that while two-thirds believed in marriage, 39% said it was becoming obsolete, compared to 28% in 1978. In 1960, 70 percent of adults in the USA were married; today it’s 50 percent. Around 44 percent of people surveyed, revealed that they had “lived with a partner without being married; for 30-to-49-year-olds, that share rose to 57 percent.” An interesting finding was that 62 percent said that “the best marriage is one where the husband and wife both work and both take care of the household and children.” Contrast that view from 48 percent in 1977.
Time magazine, co-sponsor of the research, reminded us that “The wedding of the 20th century, in 1981, celebrated a marriage that turned out to be a huge bust. It ended as badly as a relationship can: scandal, divorce and, ultimately, death and worldwide weeping.
“So when the firstborn son of that union, Britain’s Prince William, set in motion the wedding of this century by getting engaged to Catherine Middleton, he did things a little differently. He picked someone older than he is (by six months), who went to the same university he did and whom he’d dated for a long time.”
That engagement exemplified some of the changes in marriage occurring over the past decades embodied in relationships of equals. The CEO of one of the major marriage educators’ organizations said: ”very few couples have had a chance to learn really what are the new rules of love and intimacy —not because the rules are so difficult to learn, just because no one told them.”
This entry was posted in Psychology.