The decline of marriage in the US


Kevin Drum has a graph over at jabberwocking.com of married couples as a percent of households in the US. It was inspired by an article in National Review the predictably blamed the Obergefell decision.
On casual inspection, it appears that marriage in the US has been in decline since a peak in 1949, and that Obergefell actually may have *stopped” that decline.Some folks speculate that the decline was the result of all the women who entered the workforce in WWII and realized they enjoyed the freedom and independence of a paying job more than the safety of domesticity. Others point to the Griswold decision (1965) that nationalized access to contraception, unmooring marriage from child-rearing. There’s also no distinction between divorced and never-married
My anecdotal observation is that a lot of folks are better off single and society is better off if fewer people end up in unhappy marriages. A FB friend pointed out that the federal gov’t only recognizes joint tax filing for married couples and not for couples in civil unions. That’s an anachronism that needs to change. https://jabberwocking.com/marriage-in-the-us-has-been-declining-since-1949/

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