With This Ring

Executive Summary

A national telephone survey of 1,503 Americans age 18 and older conducted late in 2003 and early in 2004 that asked questions about attitudes toward marriage, aspirations for marriage, and past experiences with marriage yielded the following findings:

1. Although only 60 percent of the respondents were married at the time of the survey (virtually the same percentage as shown by recent Census surveys), Americans clearly are not rejecting marriage. Most of the older respondents were married or had been married (96 percent of those age 60 and older), and most of the unmarried younger respondents said they wanted to marry. Only two percent of the respondents had never married and said they did not want to marry. In spite of much talk about a “retreat from marriage” among African Americans, only three percent of the black respondents had never been married and said they did not want to marry.

2. One of the most surprising and important findings of the survey casts doubt on the widespread belief that persons can increase their chances of having good marriages by postponing marriage until their late twenties or their thirties. Although respondents who married after their midtwenties were only about as likely to have divorced as those who married in their mid-twenties, they were much more likely to be in intact first marriages of poor or mediocre quality.

3. A very large majority of the respondents to the survey expressed pro-marriage attitudes and a very small minority expressed attitudes that could reasonably be considered “anti-marriage.” For instance, most of the respondents to the survey said that marriage should be a lifelong commitment (88 percent) and that fathers are just as important as mothers for the proper development of children (97 percent). A substantial majority (71 percent) disagreed with the statement that “Either spouse should be allowed to terminate a marriage at any time for any reason,” thus expressing their disapproval of unilateral no fault divorce (though that term was not used in the question).

4. Although the respondents were not asked specifically about healthy marriage initiatives and similar governmental and private efforts to strengthen marriages, most of them expressed agreement with the goals of such efforts and confidence in some of the methods being used. For instance, 94 percent agreed that divorce is a serious national problem, and 86 percent agreed that all couples considering marriage should get premarital counseling. Furthermore, almost half (47 percent) thought that premarital counseling should be

5. Although very few of the respondents agreed with such anti-marriage statements as “Marriage is an old-fashioned, outmoded institution,” such sentiments were expressed more frequently by younger respondents than by older ones (possibly indicating a trend), by poorly educated than by better educated respondents, and by secular than by religious ones.

6. Sentiments that some observers consider a threat to marriage, though they are not clearly anti-marriage, were expressed more frequently by younger than by older respondents. These include approval of cohabitation as a means of testing compatibility for marriage, believing that divorced parents can parent just as effectively as married ones, and rejection of the notion that, in the absence of violence and extreme conflict, parents should stay together until their children are grown. These age differences almost certainly reflect a trend toward less traditional attitudes toward marriage.