Marriage is dead? Not in America.

Surprisingly good news in our nation’s family life

If your only sense of the state of our unions is drawn from the pop culture and the prestige press, you probably think marriage in America is on the ropes. The critically-acclaimed new movie, “Marriage Story,” described by its costar Adam Driver as a “love story about divorce,” provides viewers with an intimate and raw glimpse into the demise of a marriage in New York City and Hollywood. The bestselling new novel from Taffy Brodesser-Akner, “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” tells a similarly bleak marriage story about another bitter divorce unfolding in New York between a doctor and a talent agent.

Pop cultural offerings like these give the impression that many marriages are messy and miserable, and the descent into divorce is rampant.

Or take the messages about marriage we get from the media. The New York Times recently ran an op-ed, “Beyond Marriage,” from an eminent family scholar suggesting that marriage is “disappearing.” Elsewhere, Brookings Institution fellow Isabel Sawhill warns, “marriage is in trouble and, however desirable, will be difficult to restore.”

But the story of the death of marriage, told in popular and elite venues, has been greatly exaggerated, to paraphrase Mark Twain. While movies like “Marriage Story” and op-eds do their part to perpetuate the cultural myths of widespread divorce and the collapse of the institution of marriage, the reality is that there is good news to report about the state of our unions and state of the American family. If we look at three key trends over the last decade in the United States, there are bright spots on the family horizon.

1. Divorce is on the rocks

First, divorce is down. In fact, the divorce rate has been falling since it peaked around 1980, at the height of the divorce revolution. According to our analysis, the divorce rate has fallen by nearly 25% over the last decade to the point where there are about 15 divorces per 1,000 married people today — about the same rate as in 1970. And scholars predict that the divorce rate will continue to fall.

Surveys tell us that Americans are less tolerant of divorce today. That’s in large part because, as family scholar Richard Reeves put it, “Modern marriage is not principally about money, sex, or status. It’s about children.” Today’s married couples seem to invest more in staying together, unlike the Boomers who were obsessed with their own fulfillment in the ’70s, offering their children a better shot a more stable family life and future.

2. Children following marriage

Second, nonmarital childbearing is down. As Lyman Stone explained at the

Institute for Family Studies, though the reasons for the decline are complex, “we are actually approaching a decade of falling births to unmarried women.”

The rate of nonmarital childbearing has fallen from 41% in 2009 to 39.6% in 2018. We think what has happened, in part, is that young adults in America have become more cautious in the wake of the Great Recession about forming families and, hence, are less likely to leap into parenthood without a ring on their finger.

3. Two-parent households

And, finally, the share of children being raised in intact, married families is ticking upwards. Although family instability and single parenthood are still too high, less divorce and fewer babies born out of wedlock mean more stable, married families in America. Since bottoming out in 2014, we’ve seen a small increase in the share of children being raised by their own married parents. Specifically, the share of children being raised in intact, married families bottomed out at 61.8% in 2014 and has risen to 62.6% in 2019, according to our analysis of Census data. We expect this number to keep heading upward in the coming years.

What does all this mean for American children? Children raised by their married parents enjoy a host of lifelong benefits compared to children born into other family forms, including more financial stability, greater physical safety, more involved fathers, and greater educational, social and psychological outcomes.

And, as we have seen, those who are privileged to be born into married-parent families today are less likely than children in the past few decades to witness their parents’ divorce, sparing children the grief that often follows the death of their parents’ marriage.

All of this is good news for our children, good news that has been obscured in recent pop cultural and media depictions of marriage in America. It should encourage us to do a better job of promoting the facts about the benefits of marriage to the rising generation, even as we try to help them form stronger marital bonds.

Although the state of our unions isn’t as strong as it could be, for our kids at least, marriage is getting stronger — and this is news that should be widely heralded as we head into the new decade, especially given that the science tells us that intact marriage is the gold standard when it comes to the welfare of our kids.

W. Bradford Wilcox is director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and a senior fellow of the Institute for Family Studies. Alysse ElHage is editor of the Institute for Family Studies blog.