Divorce on decline in U.S., but so is marriage, report shows

Divorce is on the decline in the United States, but a report released Monday suggests that may be due more to an increase in people living together than to more lasting marriages.

Couples who once might have wed and then divorced are not marrying at all now, according to “The State of our Unions 2005,” an annual report.

The U.S. divorce rate is 17.7 per 1,000 married women, down from 22.6 in 1980. But the marriage rate also is on a steady decline: a 50 percent drop since 1970, from 76.5 per 1,000 unmarried women to 39.9, says the report.

“Cohabitation is here to stay,” says David Popenoe, a Rutgers University sociology professor and report co-author. “But as society shifts from marriage to cohabitation, you have an increase in family instability.”

Cohabiting couples have twice the breakup rate of married couples, and in the United States, 40 percent bring kids into those live-in relationships, the authors say.

“It is important now to think beyond the divorce rate to other kinds of couple unions and look at how stable they are,” says Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, a social historian and report co-author.

“It’s a pretty short period of time for that change (cohabitation) to have occurred and to have taken hold in the way it has,” she says.

In the United States, 8.1 percent of coupled households are made up of unmarried, heterosexual partners. Although many European countries have higher cohabitation rates, divorce rates in those countries are lower, and more children grow up with both biological parents, even though the parents may not be married, Popenoe says.

The United States has the lowest percentage among Western nations of children who grow up with both biological parents, at 63 percent, the report says.