Marriage Rates

Marriage rates

Diogo Silva, ISCSP, University of Lisbon, diogosilva5005@gmail.com

Abstract

Marriage rates have shown short-term and long-term fluctuations along times. Particularly in the last thirty years, it seems to be emerging a decreasing pattern of marriage rates in most developed Western societies. Nevertheless, marriage still occupies an important trait on people´s life, particularly in less developed societies. This entry reviews some of the factors behind this decrease. Factors like women's educational levels and work opportunities, cultural factors, cohabitation, or imbalanced sex ratios are suggested to have had a major role on the decline of marriage rates.

Main text

Marriage is the legally accepted union between two persons who decided to prove their relationship in a kind of contract. Historically marriage was almost the only way for two young individuals to enter in an intimate relationship and constitute a family. Marriage was conceived as a one-time event in a person’s life, marking the union for life of husband and wife. This traditional view of marriage was promoted over and over including in the media passing the idea of the “lived happily ever after”. While it is still portrayed as such for example in some movies, this has been changing, even in more conservative and religious countries.

Traditions, especially in western countries, have no longer the same weight as they used to and marriage has lost much of its power and significance for the last decades. The decline of traditional marriage is measurable: between 1980 and 2000 marriage rates among people between the ages of 15 and 64 years old fell 36 percent in Canada, 33 percent in U.K., 30 percent in Ireland, 23 percent in France and between 15 to 19 percent in Netherlands, Italy, Spain and United states (Gary and Kats, 2003). Going back as much as the 1960’s, marriage rates were largely cut in half by 2000.

A great number of theories have been advanced to explain why...