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National demographic data shows that Americans are delaying marriage or avoiding it altogether. Are we becoming less and less interested in monogamy? One could easily envision a future world where humans have lost the taste for family and long-term coupling altogether. A world in which we are more focused on the self than on a desire to be part of a community. But sociologists say “not so fast.” Research into the changing structure of American families shows that “tradition” when it comes to our relationships throughout human history isn’t as static as we might believe. And science shows the bond of parenthood and togetherness is stronger than the isolation of the Internet might suggest.
As with most trends in life, to understand where we’re going, it’s best to look back at where we’ve been. According to Philip N. Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland and author of two books on the demographics of the family, including his most recent The Family: Diversity, Inequality, and Social Change, throughout history the structure of the family “has gone on kind of a light roller coaster,” he says.
In the 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, the family served a very specific purpose. Large family groups, which included extended members like grandparents and sometimes even aunts and uncles, stayed together in order to provide all of life’s essentials like childcare, education, health care, and food and clothing. But the Industrial Revolution changed all of that. Suddenly, all the things that family had provided were now taken care of by industry. Society began to urbanize and people gained access to schools, hospitals, and factory-produced goods.
“The purpose was going out of families,” Cohen says. And it all came to a head in the 1950s—a time that most Americans think of as the peak of “traditional” family structures. During this time, after World War II, there was an era of prosperity in which it was very easy to purchase a home, move away from larger, extended family living situations and almost everyone at the time turned to nuclear family lifestyles. There wasn’t much left for the family to provide people, Cohen says, “all that was left was love, sex, and human relationships. It put a huge emotional burden on families.”
The thing about this era is that it actually ended up being extremely short-lived. “Scholars refer to that era as an aberration historically,” says Kim Parker, Director of Social Trends Research at PEW Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank that tracks American social trends and demographics. “We look at the era as if it was the norm, but if you go back to the 1800s and other eras where commerce was different and roles were different [they didn’t have] the nuclear family.”
Within one generation, Cohen says, Americans rejected the nuclear family of the 50s and 60s. One of the main reasons was because women had little to do all day. In fact, in 1945, the U.S. government released a report that announced the housewife was going to become obsolete because technology was taking her place. “It quickly fell apart as higher education expanded and women went to college. They wanted careers and they postponed having children and postponed marriage,” he says.
Today, the family and monogamous relationships look nothing like they have in the past. This is because families are voluntary and exist largely for emotional reasons and not reasons of survival. “Families started elevating satisfaction, love, kindness, companionship, and sex—and all that stuff started mattering more because divorce was an option. Now, we have single parents, cohabitation, and gay marriage. The family was replaced with a million different things. The beauty of that is people get to choose,” says Cohen.
According to Parker, people are still seeking monogamous relationships and long-term coupling but they’re not necessarily translating those desires into formal marriage. A PEW study on the state of marriage and cohabitation in the U.S. released last year, found the rate of marriage since the 1950s has steadily declined while the rate of cohabitation has increased. Between 2013 and 2017, only 50 percent of adults ages 18 to 44 had ever been married but 59 percent had cohabitated with a partner. This is a big change from just ten years earlier when those numbers were essentially switched (in 2002, 54 percent had ever cohabitated and 60 percent had ever been married).
Parker says it’s hard to say why exactly this has happened, but she notes that some academics believe: “marriage has become a capstone instead of a foundation. People are waiting longer want to finish education, become more financially independent, and women have more opportunities to make progress in their careers. Some of it is just options and priorities shifting. And some are cultural norms changing. The idea of living together has become more acceptable by society so it’s a more attractive option.”
So what does this mean for the future? Will these trends in delaying marriage or never marrying continue? Are people likely to eventually reject monogamous relationships altogether? Parker notes that the number of marriages was falling for a long time but recently has stabilized at around 50 percent. Cohen says he believes marriage will continue to be a part of American life, just perhaps not one that is such a core aspect. The parental bond is still very strong, he says, and family life is unlikely to ever lose that particular purpose. As for everything else it provides: “In the future I think there will be smaller families for sure; more voluntary coming and going from family, fewer lifelong commitments. People will be freer and less bonded,” he says. Marriage might just be another life experience people collect and then move on from. Our life expectancy is already so long and likely to get even longer, why not try to fill our days with as many different lives as we can?
This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Peacock's Brave New World.
