Is Marriage No Longer a Sustainable Institution?

Nearly four in ten Americans — 39% — told Pew in 2010 that marriage is becoming obsolete, up from 28% when Time magazine asked the same question in 1978. The US marriage rate has fallen from 16.4 per 1,000 people at its 1946 peak to 5.1 at its 2020 trough, the lowest ever recorded. Case closed?

Not quite. Because the divorce rate has been falling for forty years too — and the marriages that do form are lasting longer than their parents’ did.

The belief

“Marriage is no longer a sustainable institution.” People marry less, divorce freely, raise children outside wedlock, and the whole arrangement is on its way out. To make that testable, this analysis reads “sustainable” three ways: marriage formation should be collapsing without a floor; the marriages that form should be failing at rising rates; and the institution’s social footprint should be shrinking toward irrelevance. If all three hold, the belief is supported.

Thesis: the decline is real

Start with what the believers get right — the formation numbers are genuinely historic.

The 2020 figure of 5.1 marriages per 1,000 people isn’t just low — it’s lower than the Great Depression’s worst year (7.9 in 1932), when weddings were postponed for lack of money. And this is not an American quirk.

Every dot below the dashed line is a country that marries less than it did in 1990. That’s 36 of 38. Alongside formation, the institution’s monopoly on family life has broken:

Antithesis: the survivor institution

Here’s what the obsolete-marriage story leaves out, and it’s not small.

The divorce rate has been falling for four decades. Look back at the first chart: divorces per 1,000 people peaked at 5.0 in 1985 and have fallen to 2.5 — half the peak, and roughly the level of the late 1960s, before no-fault divorce existed. If marriage were becoming less workable, the marriages that exist should be failing more. The opposite is happening.

The marriages that form are lasting longer. The best long-run public cohort data — England & Wales, tracking each year’s weddings by anniversary — shows it directly:

People marry later, not never — and later marriages hold. The average US woman now first marries at 28.6, up from 25.1 in 2001. Demographers consistently find later first marriage is one of the strongest predictors of a marriage surviving.

Marriage isn’t dying. It’s consolidating — fewer entries, later entries, and the ones that happen hold together better than their parents’ generation ever managed.

The complication neither side owns

There’s a third reading the data forces, and it belongs to neither the declinists nor the optimists: marriage is becoming a class institution.

The falling divorce rate and the rising stability are concentrated among the same people still marrying: older, more educated, more financially settled couples. Marriage is thriving as the capstone of already-stable lives, and receding as the foundation of unstable ones. That’s neither “obsolete” nor “sustainable as ever” — it’s the institution narrowing its membership.

Synthesis

Score the belief against its three testable parts:

• “Formation is collapsing without a floor” — half true. The decline is real, historic, and global (36 of 38 countries). But the US rate rebounded from the 2020 trough of 5.1 to 6.2 by 2022, and roughly two-thirds of American adults still marry in their lifetime. A floor keeps showing up.
• “The marriages that form increasingly fail” — false, and it’s not close. Divorce has halved since 1985; every recent cohort outlasts the one before it at each anniversary.
• “The institution’s footprint is collapsing to nothing” — false as stated, but transformed. Marriage lost its monopoly on childbearing (40.5% of births outside it) and its universality across class lines. It survives — selectively.

Verdict: mixed. Marriage as the default life script — universal, early, and mandatory — really is gone, and the believers are right about that. Marriage as an institution is not collapsing: it is contracting into a smaller, later, more durable, and more class-bound form. An institution that keeps a floor under formation, halves its failure rate, and retains two-thirds lifetime participation isn’t unsustainable. It’s exclusive — which is a different problem, and arguably a worse one.