Is America’s affection for marriage dwindling?

Samantha Wursten always figured she’d marry. The Utah woman said she “was and probably still is a hopeless romantic.”

She and her husband Derek married two days after she turned 20, joking that since they were going to grow up together, it would increase their chance of a lasting union. He was 23. And they were right. She’s now 35 and he’s 38. They have three daughters: Ella, 12, Lucy, 10, and Maverick, who’s 6. They live in Layton, about 20 miles north of Salt Lake City.

Ella likes things organized and prefers to be in charge. Lucy loves skateboarding and dinosaurs and shoes. “She just kind of beats to her own drum.” The littlest, who they call Mavi, “is a princess,” Samantha Wursten said.

Family life is pretty much what he envisioned, Derek Wursten told Deseret News. “Growing up, I definitely figured I’d get married and have a family.”

And they still, 15 years in, really love but, even better, like each other, the couple said. They date when they can. They’re a do-things-together family even though life gets crazy busy. Samantha has several part-time jobs, including teaching marriage and family classes, giving voice lessons and helping at a school. She’s also a performer. He works in finance and has a master’s degree in business.

But the best times, they say, are when they just pick something to do and go for it together — hiking or playing games or swimming. Sometimes, they get out the video games and do dance challenges.

Research suggests that Ella, Lucy and Mavi will reap benefits from having two married parents. It gives them more resources — and not just economic ones.

But is the marriage part really necessary? Do Americans still love marriage?

Most Americans think marriage helps children and families financially, but there are partisan differences of opinion on how important the institution of marriage is to a successful family life, according to the 10th edition of the nationally representative American Family Survey, released Thursday in Washington, D.C., at the American Enterprise Institute.

Nearly 8 in 10 Republicans believe marriage is needed to create strong families, while just 4 in 10 Democrats say that. Democrats are more convinced that what matters is personal commitment to one’s partner, not the legal status of marriage.

Still, the survey report by political scientists Christopher F. Karpowitz and Jeremy C. Pope says “precious few Americans are actively hostile to marriage.” Half of Democrats are married, as are 60% of Republicans.

“One interpretation of these findings is that Democrats want to avoid being judgmental about those who choose different relationship paths, whereas Republicans see marriage as being a goal toward which relationships should strive,” per the report.

“There are relatively few Americans — although we’ve seen a small increase over the course of 10 years — who are really outright opposed to marriage,” said Karpowitz.

The survey of more than 3,000 adults was conducted by YouGov for Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute and the university’s Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy, in partnership with Deseret News. Fielded Aug. 22-29, 2024, the margin of error is plus or minus 2 percentage points. Besides teaching at BYU, both Pope and Karpowitz are affiliated with the center and the institute.

Putting a value on saying ‘I do’

Throughout the survey’s existence, it has assessed attitudes about marriage and its societal role. While majorities do believe marriage is needed to create strong families and offers financial benefits, slightly less than half agree that society is better off when people are married. A majority see a personal sense of commitment as more important. That’s true of 62% of Democrats and 41% of Republicans.

Negative statements about marriage don’t get much traction, though. Fewer than 20% believe marriage is more of a burden than benefit or that it’s old-fashioned and out of date. But the number who agree with those statements has risen since the first survey in 2015. While the survey report focuses more on partisan differences, Karpowitz said he believes those attitudes about marriage are more common among young adults.

Galena Rhoades, a research professor at the University of Denver, said while fewer people seem to get married and stay married, “I don’t think we’re actually seeing big shifts in attitudes about whether marriage is something people would like.”

She’s not convinced people hold marriage in less high esteem. Rather, she agrees that some people are reluctant to say it’s needed.

“I think we can confuse those two concepts in national surveys. Sometimes, if we’re asking, should a person who has children be married? I may say, ‘No, I don’t think that’s important,' because I don’t want to be judgy. But in fact, I believe it would be important for me to be married, to have children.”

Karpowitz said marriage helps children. “I’m not talking about anybody’s specific marriage or situations where marriage isn’t possible or has failed. That definitely occurs. But in general, the evidence is very strong that marriage is a good structure for children and it helps children, protects them from economic vulnerability of various kinds.”

What makes you happy

A little more than 40% of Americans think marriage is more important than a career to finding happiness.

That marriage is good for families is a view Brian Jones, professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Villanova University, embraces. Jones has investigated factors contributing to high levels of life satisfaction in America. A major finding from five decades of General Social Survey data and recounted in his just-published book “The Pursuit of Happiness in America” is that marriage is one of the most dependable predictors of happiness.

Jones said married Americans are significantly more likely to be happy than their single peers. He notes that although marriage rates have been declining, the finding holds true across both demographics and time.

Jones said connections to other people matter to happiness and marriage is a big connector. In research, small differences are statistically significant, “but this is not a small difference. Forty percent of people who are married in America say they are ‘very happy’ with their lives. Unmarried Americans of every type — people who never married, who are divorced or widowed — only 20% say that they are very happy. That’s a doubling. Statisticians don’t see differences like that very often.”

Over the course of the General Social Survey, he said, there has been a 5% decline in happiness, though, “which may not sound like a lot, but that means 17 million people went from being very happy to not being very happy. What has declined much faster than that is the percentage who are married.”

Jones said he also commissioned a small qualitative study and marriage ”popped up a lot when people of all different backgrounds were asked what makes them happy about their lives.”

Among benefits, marriage can provide companionship and support across life’s difficulties, along with warmth and more resources, including financial benefits, he said.

It’s hard to sort out cause and effect with marriage, per Jones, who looked to see if marriage causes happiness or happiness leads people to marry. He used General Social Survey panel data from 2006 and 2008. “It turns out that the people who were very happy but unmarried in 2006 were no more likely to get married than people who were unmarried who were unhappy,” he said. “It looks like it’s something about marriage itself.”

One aspect that impacts the decline in marriage numbers, backed by many studies, is the age at which people now marry. Jones, like the Wurstens, married in his early 20s, long the average age. Now the average age for both men and women is around 30, “so the aggregate effect is a lot less marriage.”

There’s a well-documented change in attitude from seeing marriage as a way to launch into and build a life together to one where you have to finish your education, have an established career, maybe buy a house before you’re ready to marry. It has become a capstone, not a cornerstone.

Emma Kratz-Bailey, now 27, and Taylor Bailey, 28, of Midvale, Utah, wed in 2020. She said she actually thought she’d marry older, but walking out of a building at Brigham Young University one day, they held the door for each other. He complimented her jacket. She liked his necklace. And they exchanged phone numbers. Five months later, they were going steady. Six months passed. They got engaged. And another six months in, they married.

They don’t have kids or definite plans for that yet, though they figure they might. They spent a year in England while she got her master’s in architectural engineering. Now they’re back in Utah, staying with her parents while they house hunt.

“My vision of the perfect family is stability and quality relationships. I can definitely see having kids, but we’re not 100% decided,” Taylor Bailey said. “I am right now focusing on building a life with Emma.” So they’re immersing themselves in shared interests, like books and visiting museums. They date, sometimes dressing up formally because it’s fun. They hope their future home will be filled with friends and family — “a warm and welcoming place,” Emma Kratz-Bailey said.

Commitment or a wedding?

Research, including her own, suggests couples tend to do better when both partners are highly committed to their relationship, Rhoades said. Many experts believe that’s more likely within marriage.

“Marriage is a very clear signal that these two are committed to each other. It’s a clear signal to them, but it’s also a clear signal to their community, and even social structures and legal structures. You are publicly declaring your commitment to someone, which means a lot,” she said.

It also pays off, Rhoades said, “because marriage draws support from the community, the legal system, from so many structures that in a way make it harder to break up, but also provide support for the two of you and for your family.”

Pope said studies have led him to believe that “stupid though it may sound, there is something about the little ceremony and the piece of paper and hoops and the relatives, maybe the cake, I don’t know, but a lot of people think that that is true.”

He sees evidence that marriage on the political left is declining. While he thinks that could be “somewhat harming to society, it probably harms people who think of themselves as ideologically liberal more, because if they don’t end up getting married, they miss out on its benefit.” Still, he points out, “most people on the political left will be married at some point in their lives, based on what we see right now. But we might reach a time in the future where that’s not true, if current trends hold up.”

Studies show little difference between married couples and cohabiting couples who already plan to marry, Rhoades said. “It’s people who move in together without a clear, committed plan to get married that tend to be more likely to break up. They report lower relationship quality, and if they get married, they’re more likely to divorce.”

People living together to test the relationship haven’t increased personal commitment to each other, though they likely made it harder to break up, per Rhoades.

Are there more advantages to being single than to being married? Most Americans don’t think so, regardless of party affiliation. Just 22% of Republicans and 30% of Democrats in the survey agree with that statement. “Strong agreement” from either group is in the low single digits.

My marriage vs. theirs

Most Americans say their own marriages are about the same or growing stronger, nearly half saying the latter. Just 11% say that of marriage in general. Never over the survey’s course have more than 8% said their own marriage is weakening.

Having a rosy view of one’s marriage is pretty even across political parties.

Just a quarter of married respondents said their own marriage had been in trouble in the last two years. For those, the most common reasons were communication, money and sex. Those surpassed raising children, in-laws or other family problems, work and other reasons for tumult.

The survey found money worries peak during middle age, which is also when stresses from work and raising children decline significantly. Sex is more of an issue as couples get older, peaking in late middle age. Communication concerns are key for those worried about their marriage at any age.

However, views of marriages in general are far less optimistic. Throughout the survey’s history, respondents have said the institution of marriage is growing weaker; very few think it’s growing stronger.

Fewer than 20% of young married respondents ages 18-29 — the most optimistic group — think marriage in general is growing stronger. More than a third say the opposite. Older Americans, the report says, are “especially pessimistic. Among those who are married and older than 55, just 4% believe marriage is growing stronger. Forty percent say marriage generally is growing weaker.”

Democrats are a tad more optimistic than Republicans in their assessment of the state of marriage overall.

Karpowitz said people often evaluate things they know really well better or differently than they evaluate what’s more general or distant. That’s particularly striking with marriage.

“There may be reasons for that pessimism,” he said. “They may be thinking about the marriages that end in divorce, and some do, and there are marriages that are bad and that are unhappy. But that’s not the average response for most Americans when they think about their marital relationship.”

What makes or breaks a marriage?

Rhoades told Deseret News there are personal finances and education that affect decisions people make about getting married, staying married and having kids.

People with more resources and education tend to be married and experience less divorce compared to people who have less education and fewer financial resources.

Rhoades doesn’t believe there’s less interest in marriage, though. “I think it’s less access to marriage, especially for people who are facing economic hardship.”

She sees interest in marriage and having lifelong commitment, as well as belief that kids tend to do better when they’re raised in married households “among many people today in the U.S., regardless of income, education, race and ethnicity, all demographics. I think what we see is it takes resources to be able to become married and stay married, and I don’t mean just the cost of a wedding, but being able to do what comes along with being married: buy your own home, have a stable job, have the resources to really have a family in the way we tend to want to raise children.”

Nor does it help that government supports for those who struggle financially may penalize being married, she said.

Would supports help marriages thrive?

Pope called the left’s ambivalence about marriage “a little bit distressing,” noting those who get married “are very happy with the institution and everything is going pretty well for them, but I think it’s a dangerous trend.”

On the right, he added, there’s little interest in helping people feel like marriage will be OK because “they’re going to get some support through various institutions or help from the government, or help for their kids. I think that, ironically, there are lots of people on the political right who would say, ‘Everybody should get married. They should do it, but we’re not going to help them with anything. We don’t really want to figure out a way to encourage that sort of thing. They just need to do it.’

“That’s a very tough love approach,” Pope said. “I don’t think that’s the right approach if what you want to do is affect the culture.”

According to the survey, most people would like to see some government supports for families, a finding that suggests to Pope and Karpowitz that a bipartisan political coalition could strengthen marriage in America. The problem is getting the two groups to agree on what policies should look like, they said.

They believe economics is where the two sides might find common ground, because there’s broad agreement that costs associated with family life are a challenge even across income groups.

The report, which consists of various fact sheets, is available online at Deseret.com/Americanfamilysurvey. More survey data will be released in coming weeks.