Marriage Trends

There are eight specific trends in marriage that have made a significant shift in the way families currently are vs. how they used to be. These trends are changing the family and the purpose of marriage, which was once for procreation and raising children. These are what the trends are becoming:

1. Delying marriage. Between the 1950s and '70s the majority of women married by age 20.5, and men by age 22.5. In 2007 the age for both women and men were 6 years older than previously at ages 26 and 28, respectively.
2. Cohabitation (un-married couples living together). By 2008 there were over 6.1 million couples cohabiting, this is an extreme rise from the 430,000 in 1960. Most of the couples cohabiting have children together, and some plan to eventually marry. There is a myth that cohabiting can test the compatability of a couple for marriage, trying to prevent divorce. I will explain more about this myth in a later post.
3. Birth rates have dropped by half between 1954 and 2008. There are some women delying their first child until their mid- to late 30s. This makes it harder for the woman to get pregnant because the capacity decreases with age. This rate is below the necessary natural replacement of a population, meaning that the population will begin to decline.
4. Non-marital births. Only 10% of women born in 1925-'29 had children before marriage, compared to over 25%of women born in 1965-'69.
5. Employed mothers. This increased from 23.8% in 1950 to 62.6% in 2007. The greatest increase was among women with children age 6 and older (school age).
6. Divorce has risen dramatically since 1970 when the no-fault divorce law was first enacted in the U.S.
7. Living alone, remaining single is a choice that more people are making. In 2009, 31.7 people lived alone. This is also in relation to the increase of cohabitation, which is unstable, therefore the separation causes people to live alone.
8. Household size. This correlates with low birth rates, divorce, and living alone. The household size dropped from 5.8 to 3.3  to 2.5 people from 1790 to 1960 to 2008.

Intimacy

Intimate relationships are the core of a person's life, due to us all being social creatures. These relationships can come from love, affection, caring o ra deep attachment to a friend, relative, or lover. One might disagree, that they are not social. My retort is to think of a time that you were lonely around strangers.
Loneliness can be emotional or social. Emotional loneliness (less intimate relationships) can come from that time you were lonely around strangers; you may have been around people, but because they were strangers that feeling was still not the same as if those people were close, intimate friends. Social loneliness (less interpersonal interaction) results from socializing with fewer people than desired.
For some people, loneliness can be persistent or temporary. Results can be anything from childhood experiences to moving to another location. Depression may come from persistent loneliness and consequences can become very negative. Those who divorce or separate decline in their emotional and physical well-being. Although when intimate relationships are abusive or troubled they can cause emotional or physical problems.