Married will soon be a minority

When I was young, everything in society seemed to aim one toward marriage. It was the expectation. It was the inevitability. You would meet someone, get married and start a family.

But even then, the share of people who were married was falling. The year I was born, 1970, the percentage of Americans between ages of 25 and 50 who had never married was 9 percent. By the time I became an adult, that number was approaching 20 percent.

This month, the Pew Research Center published an analysis of census data showing that in 2019 the share of American adults who were neither married nor living with a partner had risen to 38 percent, and while that group “includes some adults who were previously married, all of the growth in the unpartnered population since 1990 has come from a rise in the number who have never been married.”

We are nearing a time when there will be more unmarried adults in the United States than married ones, a development with enormous consequences for how we define family and adulthood, as well as how we structure taxation and benefits.

The unmarried and unpartnered portions of the population vary among demographic groups.

As a society, we have to start asking ourselves whether it is fair and right to continue to reward and encourage marriage through taxation and policy when fewer people are choosing marriage.

Is marriage always the ideal? And should single people pay a loner tax — part of what The Atlantic’s Lisa Arnold and Christina Campbell in 2013 called “institutionalized singlism” — for not pursuing it?

In 2013, when Arnold and Campbell were completing their analysis, they found that “over a lifetime, unmarried people can pay upward of $1 million more than their married counterparts for health care, taxes and more.”

I have been married. I no longer am. I do not see remarriage in my future. And I see nothing wrong with that. But I am also keenly aware of the nudging of those around me, who are married or aspire to be and who falsely assume that an eventual marriage is the only way to be truly happy and whole.

There is clearly a case to be made when children are involved that they benefit from more parenting and more money. This doesn’t necessarily mean marriage, but it often does.

But what of the adults who have no children or whose children are now adults?

Paul Dolan, a behavioral scientist at the London School of Economics, says that while men, in the aggregate, could benefit from marriage because it calms them down and makes them take fewer risks, women, again in the aggregate, don’t receive the same benefits. On the contrary, according to Dolan, the happiest subgroup is women who never marry or have children.

But the point remains: Marriage as the prevailing ideal is losing its grip. And the stigma of being unmarried is also losing its grip. Now government policy that rewards the married while punishing the single must also loosen up.