Your life can set up a disaster or can make it worth so much. In David Popenoe and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead’s article “The State of Our Union,” the topic of marriage and divorce are discussed. This paper shows and discusses the chances of divorce, the statistics on cohabitation, and economic benefits of being married. This paper is a summary of the article. This topic is important because it affects our everyday lives (Popenoe and Whitehead 390-402).…
As stated in our text, various factors can bind married couples together, such as economic interdependencies, legal, social and moral constraints, relationship, and amongst other things. In the recent years some of these factors have diminished their strengths. The modern generation sees marriage in a different perspective altogether. Individuals today feel they are stable independently, they do not need to rely on their spouse for emotional or financial support. Many are career driven and soar to conquer their dreams over settling down with a family. Such untraditional views have increased divorce rates.…
Not only is there a drop in the total number of marriages but also a decline in marriage rates (the number of people marrying per 1000 of the population aged 16 and over). Marriage rates are at their lowest since the 1920’s and further plummeting. In 1994, the marriage rate was 11.4 but this had declined to 10.3 by 2004. The male rate declined from 36.3 in 1994 to 27.8 in 2004 whilst the female rate declined from 30.6 to 24.6. Once more, surveys emphasis that most people, whether single, divorced or cohabitating still see marriage as a desirable life-goal and therefore will get married eventually especially if…
In order to assess reasons for the changes in the patterns of marriage and cohabitation; it is necessary to first establish the term marriage and cohabitation. Marriage is traditionally conceived to be a legally recognized relationship, between two consenting adults, that carries certain rights and obligations. Cohabitation is an arrangement whereby couples who are not legally married live together in partnership within the common law. Cohabitation has become so widespread that the term itself is now rarely used. I will now critically examine the changes in the patterns of marriage and cohabitation in the last 40 years or so.…
David Popenoe and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead’s evolved thesis statement is, “ Americans are living longer, marrying later, exiting marriages more quickly, and choosing to live together before marriage, after marriage, in between marriages, and as an alternative to marriage,” (27). More and more people are getting divorced each year. There are a lot of people who never get married and live either single or unmarried. The “State of the Union” shows how divorce and living style of marriage has…
Marriage has gone through profound changes over the last five decades, but we continue to speak about it as though it's the same old familiar pattern. To see how much has changed; I am going to look at the shift from the forties, to the sixties, to today. In 1968, less than a year after the famous Summer of Love, as they used to say out in the country, "The times they were a-changing." The sexual revolution, Viet Nam, drugs--the youth of the day were convinced the world would never be the same again. Yet they didn't think about how such changes would affect marriage. It seemed as if they thought it would be about the same as it had been for their parents, except better because they (like most youth of most times) thought they were better than…
Over the last 40 years marriage rates have declined significantly while the number of couple’s cohabitating has risen rapidly. This is due to our changing society where equality, laws, social acceptance and religions have all contributed into the way we view marriage and relationships. In the 1970’s there were around 400,000 first marriages whereas, in 2011, there were 248,000. The average ages of people getting married have also increased from 25 for men and 23 for women in 1961 to 36 for men and 33 for women in 2011. Cohabitation is a big factor in the decreasing number of marriages with people using it as either an alternative to marriage entirely, or a ‘trial marriage’ which just delays the time of a couple’s marriage.…
By the 1920s, there was evidence of an increased divorce rate. In today’s world, we have the highest divorce rate of all time, rising over 50%. According to surveys of the college students in the 1920s, the young believed that marriage should end in divorce if their marital relationship did not fulfill their expectations. Today’s society has a throw away marriage concept, with the majority of children being raised between two sets of parents or single parent households.…
Imagine that one day your parents sit you down and tell you they have found your husband or wife. Believe it or not this is still reality for many people in the world. Indeed, it happened to my grandparents by their parents. However, marriage behavior and family life are changing. Young people are waiting later to marry, and couples are having fewer children in modern society. The many differences between modern marriage and old fashioned marriage are notable.…
The traditional family structure in the United States is used to be considered as a family support system involving two married people providing care for their family. However, the traditional family structure has become less common as we head into the 21th century. The changes among families in America has shifted to very powerful changes, including divorce and single-parent families, teenage pregnancy, and same-sex marriage, and increased rate of adoption. Social movements such as advanced technology, longer life spans, the freedom of increasing the use of birth control, women’s increasing engagement into the workforce, and a dramatic increase in divorce rates have restructured the American family’s life nowadays.…
The average number of marriages has declined since the 1950’s for various reasons that scholars have tried to explain through their research (Vanorman & Scommegna, 2016). Even with the legalization of same sex marriage, there has been a decline in the number of married adults in the United States. In 1960, about three-quarters of all American adults were married, compared to 2014 where the number had decreased to about half of all American adults being married (Vanorman & Scommegna, 2016). The United States’s marriage trend has been influenced by factors such as cohabitation, delayed marriage, an increase in divorce with a decrease in remarriage, and the increase of having children out of wedlock (Vanorman & Scommegna, 2016).…
After reading the article Never Married Americans, I will now be providing three key summary points that I found in the article, provide information on each point, and answer the question is marriage necessary in today’s world. To start I will be looking at the three points that summarize this article.…
People marry for various motives, including: legal, social, emotional, financial, spiritual, and religious. In some parts of the world, marriages are arranged. Marriages can be done in a ceremony or in a religious setting. Marriage usually creates legal and other obligations between the individuals involved. Some cultures allow the termination of marriage through divorce or annulment. Polygamous marriages could also occur in spite of nationwide laws. Traditionally, in most cultures, married women had very few rights of their own, being considered, along with the family's children, the property of the husband; they could not own or inherit property, or represent themselves legally. From the late 19th century throughout the 20th century, marriage has endured gradual legal changes in the US, expecting to improve the rights of women. Some of these changes involved giving wives a legal identity of their own, giving wives property rights, ending the husband’s right to physically punish their wives, requiring a wife's consent when sexual relations occur, and liberalizing divorce laws. Many of these changes are still only restricted to this country. During the past few eras, major social changes in developed countries have led to changes in the demographics of marriage, with the age of first marriage increasing, less people marrying, and many couples choosing to shack up rather than to marry. This has become quite the trend nowadays because there isn’t as much of a stigma that comes with living with your significant other without being married first.…
Marriage has changed dramatically over time in the many years it has been around. What do think Marriage was like 100 years ago? The article, “American Marriage in Transition”, describes how many different types of marriage there are and how people have changed their view on it. Andrew Cherlin (the sociologist of the article) does a great job going in depth explaining American marriage. He arranges the different marriages in three different categories; Institutionalized which was the earliest type of marriage, then Companionship around World War II, and currently we are considered Individualized.…
Americans do just about everything a bit more spectacularly than most other people. That includes marriage and divorce. The United States has the world's highest divorce rate and it also leads in the rate of remarriage after divorce, an occurrence that frequently boosts the statistics by leading to yet another breakup. Americans, in short, appear to be marrying more and enjoying it less. This situation distresses clergymen, sociologists and anthropologists, who rightly regard stable marriage as the foundation of society. But it is only half the tragedy of divorce in America. The real scandal is not that so many Americans resort to divorce. It is that so many of the laws of the land are sadly out of step with the growing…