Stephanie Coontz: Couples are Marrying Later, But They're Still Marrying

Stephanie Coontz teaches at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and is director of research at the Council on Contemporary Families. Her most recent book is "A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s."

As of 2010, according to a recent report from the Pew Research Center, married couples had fallen to barely 51% of U.S. households, with a full 5% drop in new marriages between 2009 and 2010 alone. The data for 2011 aren't in yet, but if that decline continued last year, less than half of American adults are in a legal marriage now.

Is marriage going the way of the electric typewriter and the VHS tape? Not exactly....

True, there are more divorced people in the population than in 1960, but divorce rates have been falling for 30 years. It also appears that more individuals than in the past will remain unmarried all their lives — perhaps 15%, compared with the historical norm of 10%. But with more people marrying for the first time as late as their 60s, we can't even be sure of that. As gays and lesbians gain marriage rights, the proportion of married young adults may rise.

Still, the last half-century has seen a momentous change in the role that marriage plays in organizing lives. Marriage used to be almost mandatory, one of the first things people did when they left home. It was not a decision that required much deliberation or even deep knowledge of one's prospective partner. In the 1950s, the average bride and groom had known each other for only six months....