Walking the Talk

Ignorance of actual trends in marriage has produced many misconceptions. Marriage promoters began with the assumption that low-income people were not marrying because they did not value marriage. But the relationship between people's attitudes toward marriage and their actual behavior turned out to be much more complicated. In this, as in many other aspects of family life, the connection between what people believe in the abstract and what they do in real life is often tenuous at best.

In the United States, for example, highly educated people are much more likely than any other group to think that remaining single or having a child out of wedlock is an acceptable choice. Yet they are also more likely to marry than their less educated counterparts and are much less likely to have children out of wedlock.

By contrast, men and women with lower incomes and less education, whatever their racial background, are much more likely to view marriage as the preferred state, but they are also less likely to get married. African Americans are more disapproving of cohabitation than white Americans but are nonetheless more likely to cohabit. Born-again Christians are as likely to divorce as Christians who are not born again, and the divorce rate of both is only 2 percentage points below the divorce rate of atheists and agnostics. Similarly, in America's Bible Belt, the low-income areas of the South, out-of-wedlock births and divorce rates are higher than anywhere else in the country, even though polss indicate that the region has the highest disapproval of "nontraditional" family behaviors.

Source: Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, a History. Viking, 2005.