Dr Paul Allen

Marriage and divorce rates in New Zealand (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Marriage and divorce rates expressed as percentages of the Australian population at the time. Based on statistics from the ABS 2008 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Divorce Rates in Sweden 2000- 2010 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) AT 32, one of my clients (I’ll call her Jennifer) had a lavish wine-country wedding. By then, Jennifer and her boyfriend had lived together for more than four years. The event was attended by the couple’s friends, families and two dogs. When Jennifer started therapy with me less than a year later, she was looking for a divorce lawyer. “I spent more time planning my wedding than I spent happily married,” she sobbed. Most disheartening to Jennifer was that she’d tried to do everything right. “My parents got married young so, of course, they got divorced. We lived together! How did this happen? Cohabitation in the United States has increased by more than 1,500 percent in the past half century. In 19

Image via Wikipedia I have some good news and bad news on the marriage front. First, the good news: According to a new study by the Institute for American Values and the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia , the divorce rate for married couples with children has fallen nearly to the rate of the early 1960s, when JFK was president. But this news is not as good as it seems. That’s because the bad news nearly cancels it out. Fewer of us are bothering to tie the knot at all. The rate of cohabitation — “living together”— has exploded. The study finds that cohabitation has increased fourteen-fold since 1970. This means that about 24 percent of children are born to cohabiting couples today. Meanwhile, another 20 percent are part of a cohabiting household at some point during their growing-up years. That means nearly half of all American children have lived in a home where the adults are merely living together rather than married. Image via Wikipedia Today’s advocates

Image via Wikipedia In a stunning reversal of trends , reports now indicate that more educated and more wealthy Americans are now more likely to be married, to stay married, and to have children only within marriage .  In one of the great tragic and unpredicted developments of our times, less educated Americans are now far less committed to marriage than in the recent past, and even less committed to marriage than the educated elites. Researchers explain that the “moderately educated” (high school graduates who may have some college but no baccalaureate degree ) are now increasingly alienated from marriage. Related articles More education means more faith in marriage, new report says (cnn.com) High School Graduates Losing Faith in Marriage (blogs.wsj.com) Shocking New Study: Marriage Is Only for the Rich? (alternet.org) Working Class People Face More Marriage Problems Than Rich (alternet.org) Marital Happiness Plummets Among Many Working and Middle-Class Americans (alter