Marriage Rates Are Falling, And For Some Faster Than Others

*There are interesting statistics about Latinos and marriage laced throughout this article. But I love the end. I won’t spoil the read for you. But that Rockwellesque notion of the traditional American family now has a definite Latino twist. VL

By Gene Demby, NPR

The biggest takeaways from a new study on marriage by the Pew Research Center are these: Fewer Americans who are older than 25 are married than ever before, and by the time they’re middle-aged, a record 25 percent will have never tied the knot.

That might not be too much of a surprise, since marriage rates have been sliding for decades.

But what’s just as interesting is how those numbers break down. More than a third of black people older than 25 have never jumped the broom — a number that’s four times higher than it was in 1960. This trend has been generally true for whites and Latinos too, albeit less dramatically: The nonmarried rate for whites and Latinos has doubled since 1960. Sixteen percent of whites and more than a quarter of Latinos over 25 have not married. The number of nonmarried Asian-Americans over 25 was around 13 percent in 1980; today, it’s roughly a fifth of all Asian folks. (It’s important to note that 1960 was the high-water mark for American marriages.)

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