Are Americans Still in Love with Marriage?

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Overview

Love and marriage. They go together, the 1950s song said, like a horse and carriage. And in the '50s, they actually did. But in 1990, after three decades of profound social change, the venerable institution of marriage no longer seems quite so inevitable. While there's little chance it will end up like the horse-drawn carriage, a relic in a museum, marriage clearly doesn't have the same hold on America that it once did. In fact, some people have even begun to speak of a “postmarital society.”

“[G]etting married, having children and staying married are now matters of choice, rather than things taken for granted,” say sociologists Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler and Steven M. Tipton in their book, Habits of the Heart. “[This] creates a new atmosphere for marriage and a new meaning for family life.”