Is marriage in trouble? Well, it depends on your socioeconomic status, according to a new study.
Middle class Americans, those 58% of adults who have a high school degree with the possibility of some college education, but without a four-year college degree, are losing faith in marriage. Conversely those American deemed to be “highly educated” marriage appears to be getting stronger and considered a more stable institution.
A new survey says that 40% of Americans believe marriage to be obsolete. That up from 11% when the study was done last in 1978. Not surprising, young people – those between the ages of 18 and 29 – are leading the charge that marriage has become superfluous with 44%.
Ross Douthat wrote a recent edition of the New York Times:
“This means that a culture war that’s often seen as a clash between liberal elites and a conservative middle America looks more and more like a conflict within the educated class–pitting Wheaton and Baylor against Brown and Bard, Redeemer Presbyterian Church against the 92nd Street Y, C. S. Lewis devotees against the Philip Pullman fan club. But as religious conservatives have climbed the educational ladder, American churches seem to be having trouble reaching the people left behind. This is bad news for both Christianity and the country. The reinforcing bonds of strong families and strong religious communities have been crucial to working-class prosperity in America. Yet today, no religious body seems equipped to play the kind of stabilizing role in the lives of the ‘moderately educated middle’ (let alone among high school dropouts) that the early-20th-century Catholic Church played among the ethnic working class.”
ABC News correspondent Jessica Hopper quotes sociologist Andewe Cherlin:
“Marriage is still very important in this country, but it doesn’t dominate family life like it used to.” Or as Douthat says, “The long-running culture war arguments about how to structure family life (Should marriage be reserved for heterosexuals? Is abstinence or ‘safe sex’ the most responsible way to navigate the premarital landscape?) look increasingly irrelevant further down the educational ladder, where sex and child-rearing often take place in the absence of any social structures at all. This, in turn, may be remembered as the great tragedy of the culture war: While college-educated Americans battle over what marriage should mean, much of the country may be abandoning the institution entirely.”
“People are rethinking what family means,” Cherlin said. “Given the growth, I think we need to accept cohabitation relationships as a basis for some of the fringe benefits offered to families, such as health insurance.”
Source: ABC NEWS
Cultural and social factors, not just wages, are paramount in marriage choices. Men and women from the dis-advantaged backgrounds who attend college appear to be caught between social worlds — hesitant to “marry down” to partners with less education, and unable to “marry up” to those from more advantaged upbringings, meaning they could face a lonely future once they leave school.
