One-in-five adults ages 25 and older have never married, up from 9% in 1960. Shifting public attitudes toward marriage, hard economic times and changing demographic patterns may have all played a role.
Given young adults’ strong preference for a dual-income marriage model and their positive attitudes about working women, we might expect that they would be more likely to embrace the dual-income model when they themselves are married. However, it’s not the case.
Barely half of all adults in the United States—a record low—are currently married, and the median age at first marriage has never been higher for brides and grooms.
This dramatic increase has been driven in part by the weakening of longstanding cultural taboos against intermarriage and in part by a large, multi-decade wave of immigrants from Latin America and Asia.