[humanser] Marital Happiness Plummets Among Many Working and Middle-Class Americans

[Mary Ann Robinson]

Marital Happiness Plummets Among Many Working and Middle-Class
Americans
  Amy Lee, Huffington Post December 6, 2010
  Affluent, well-educated Americans are enjoying increasingly
stable, strong marriages, even as marital happiness is plummeting
and the chances of divorce are rising among middle Americans.
These are among the startling findings of "When Marriage
Disappears: The Retreat from Marriage in Middle America," a new
study released by the National Marriage Project at the University
of Virginia and New York's Center for Marriage and Families at
the Institute for American Values.
  The study, edited by W.  Bradford Wilcox, brings together the
latest findings from "The State Of Our Unions," an annual report
produced jointly by the two organizations which monitors the
health of "marriage and family life" in the U.S., with a focus on
determining the ways "children, race, class, immigration,
ethnicity, religion and poverty" shape marriage today.  The
results--culled from three nationally-representative surveys
conducted between 1972 to 2008--paint a bleak picture for most
American families.  Perhaps the most alarming finding is the
tangible shift in key markers of marriage stability among middle
Americans, whom the study defines as the 58 percent of the adult
population with high school, but not college degrees.
  The study found that these adults are more likely to divorce
now than they once were.  Indeed, middle Americans have a 37
percent chance of divorce or separation within 10 years of first
marriage, compared to 36 percent in the 1970's.  By contrast,
highly educated Americans (those holding a bachelor's degree or
higher) are less likely to divorce than before: they have a mere
11 percent chance that their marriages will dissolve--a drop from
15 percent in the '70's.  The least educated segment of the
population, defined by the study as anyone who doesn't have a
high school degree, were also less likely to split from their
partners than they were previously, though at 36 percent, the
chances of their marriages ending are almost identical to that of
Middle Americans.
  When it comes to marital satisfaction, the statistics were also
alarming: 57 percent of middle Americans reported they were 'very
happy' in their marriages, down from 68 percent in the 1970's.
Again, the numbers are closer to the lowest socio-economic
segment of the population than the highest--52 percent believe
themselves to be in happy unions.  The highly-educated remained
just as satisfied with their marriages as they had been
previously--69 percent consider themselves to be happily married.
The study also looked at the segments of the population who
believe "Marriage Has Not Worked Out For Most People They Know,"
and found that 43 percent of moderately-educated and 53 percent
of the least-educated people believed this to be true, while only
17 percent of highly-educated people think so.
  The study argues that, while moderately-educated people
traditionally mimicked the behavior of the upper class, they are
now in the midst of a "historic reversal" insofar as they are
mirroring the attitudes and actions of the lower class.  So
what's to blame? According to the study, these new statistics
reflect a shift in values, both marriage-related and otherwise.
The study measured those values by a diverse set of beliefs, from
religious attendance to birth control usage to the number of sex
partners they'd had in their lifetime.
  The data sparked the conclusion that "the United States is
devolving into a separate-and-unequal family regime, where the
highly educated and the affluent enjoy strong and stable
households and everyone else is consigned to increasingly
unstable, unhappy, and unworkable ones."
  "The State of Our Unions" attributes the change to an
overriding shift in values.  Once the most socially conservative
part of the country, middle America now appears to be becoming
more socially permissive and less marriage-minded.  For example,
whereas 76 percent of adolescents in highly educated households
would be embarrassed to get someone pregnant, only 61 percent of
moderately educated people felt the same way, and only 48 percent
of the least educated believe that is so.  Furthermore, while 81
percent of 14-year-old girls in highly educated households lived
with their mother and their father (a number that has jumped by a
percentage point since the 1970's), 58 percent did so in middle
America--a whopping 16 percent drop from the 74 percent who
reported they lived with both parents in the 1970's.
  While the most affluent sector of society has held onto
marriage as a defining social unit, the study found that the rest
of the country is suffering, at least in part because they are
having trouble doing so.  Marriage--"an institution to which all
could once aspire," has become "a private playground of those
blessed with abundance." So why sound the alarm bells over these
findings? Because when marriage is at risk, so, too, the study
argues, is the very foundation of our society: "Marriage is a
core social institution, one that helps to ensure the economic,
social and emotional welfare of countless children, women, and
men in this nation."
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