Wedding bells predicted after long sag in marriages

The number of marriages in the USA fell 5% during the recession to a new low, but an analysis out today says pent-up demand and the large population of young adults ages 1834 means more are probably headed to the altar over the next two years.

Cultural changes about whether and when to marry, the fact that twothirds of first marriages are preceded by cohabitation and the recession’s financial fallout — including unemployment and underemployment — fueled the wedding decline.

Projections from the private company Demographic Intelligence of Charlottesville, Va., say the signs are right for a temporary boost in weddings, largely among the better-educated and affluent and women ages 25-34.

The company projects a 4% increase in the number of weddings since 2009, reaching 2.168 million this year and 2.189 million in 2014. Depending on the economic recovery, the report projects a continuing increase to 2.208 million in 2015.

“Declines in weddings are likely to set in towards the end of the decade, even though the number of young adults is increasing, because of the nation’s ongoing retreat from marriage,” says the report, released ex- clusively to USA TODAY.

Experts say this projection makes sense.

“If you’re going to get married in time to have kids, you can’t wait forever, so they may be saying that the postponement of marriages is running its course, and a backlog of young adults is about to schedule their weddings,” says sociologist Andrew Cherlin, director of the Hopkins Population Center at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

From 2007 to 2009, the number of marriages each year fell from 2.197 million to 2.080 million. The report estimates that more than 175,000 weddings have been postponed or forgone since the recession began.

Wendy Manning, co-director of the National Center for Family & Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, says the projected wedding increases “might be overly optimistic” because onethird of marriages are remarriages and they are not the young people who are the report’s focus.

The company — launched in 2010 — is also analyzing same-sex marriage, but the data analysis isn’t complete, President Sam Sturgeon says.