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Marriage by the Numbers
When Laurie Aronson was 29, she had little patience for people who inquired why she still wasn’t married. "I’m not one of those unmarried women who sit home Friday night and cry," she said. As she passed 35, however, and one relationship after another failed to lead to the altar, she began to worry. "Things were kinking pretty depressive," she says. But then a close friend’s brother a man she’d known for years—divorced. Slowly their friendship blossomed into romance. At 39, Aronson married him, becoming Laurie Aronson Starr and the stepmother to his three kids. Then, after five years of treatment, she became pregnant with a son who’ll be 4 in July. "My parents are thrilled—it’s a relief for everyone," says Starr, now 49. "I wish I could have found the right person earlier and had more children. But I’m very happy now."
As happy endings go, hers has a particularly delicious irony. Twenty years ago this week, Aronson was one of more than a dozen single women featured in the cover story of the magazine of Newsweek. In "The Marriage Crunch," the magazine reported on new research predicting that white, college-educated women who failed to marry in their 20s. According to the research, a woman who remained single at 30 had only a 20 percent chance of ever marrying. By 35, the probability dropped to 5 percent. In the story’s most infamous line, it is reported that a 40-year-old single woman was "more likely to be killed by a terrorist" than to ever marry. That comparison wasn’t in the study, and even in those pre-9/11 days, it struck many people as an offensive analogy (类推). Nonetheless, it quickly became established in pop culture and is still routinely cited in TV shows and news stories.
Across the country, women reacted the research in Newsweek with fury, anxiety—and skepticism. "The popular media have invented a national marital crisis on the basis of a single academic experiment... of doubtful statistical merit," wrote Susan Faludi, then a 27-year-old reporter at the San Jose Mercury News, who saw the controversy as one example against feminism (男女平等主义).
Twenty years later, the situation looks far brighter. Those odds-she’ll-marry statistics turned out to be too pessimistic: today it appears that about 90 percent of baby-boomer men and women either have married or will marry, a ratio that’s well in line with historical averages. And these days, about half of all women get married by their 20s, as they did in 1960. At least 14 percent of women born between 1955 and 1964 married after the age of 30. Today the median age for a first marriage—25 for women, 27 for men—is higher than ever before.
Not everyone wants to marry, of course. And we’re long past those Jane Austen days when being "marriage-minded" was primarily a female quality; today many men openly hope for a wife just as much as women long for a husband. The good news is that older singles who desire a spouse appear to face far kinder odds nowadays. When the Census last passed the numbers in 1996, a single woman at 40 had a 40.8 percent chance of eventually marrying. Today those odds are probably even higher—and may be only slightly worse than the probability of correctly choosing "heads" or "tails" in a coin toss.
To mark the anniversary of the cover story, the newspaper of Newsweek located 11 of the 14 single women in the story. Among them, eight are married and three remain single. Several have children or stepchildren. None divorced. Twenty years ago Andrea Quattrocchi was a career-focused Boston hotel executive and reluctant to settle for a spouse who didn’t share her fondness for sailing and sushi. Six years later she met her husband at a beachfront bars; they married when she was 36. Today she’s a stay-at-home mom with three kids—and yes, the couple regularly enjoys sushi and sailing. "You can have it all today if you wait—that’s what I’d tell my daughter," she says. "Enjoy your life when you’re single, then find someone in your 30s like Mommy did."
The research that led to the marriage predictions began at Harvard and Yale in the mid-1980s. Three researchers- Nell Bennett, David Bloom and Patricia Craig—began exploring why so many women weren’t marrying in their 20s, as most Americans traditionally had. Would these women still marry someday, or not at all To find an answer, they used "life table" techniques, applying data from past age group to predict future behavior—the same method typically used to predict death rates. "It’s the important tool of demography (人口统计学)," says Johns Hopkins sociologist Andrew Cherlin. "They were looking at 40-year-olds and making predictions for 20-year-olds." The researchers focused on women, not men, largely because government statisticians had collected better age-of-marriage data for females as part of its studies on birth patterns and birthrates.
Despite the flawed statistics, some observers say the story holds up well. "Once you got over the sensational aspects, there was a lot of substance," says E. Kay Trimberger, a sociologist at Sonoma State University and author of "The New Single Woman." Among other trends the original story identified were the rise in cohabitation, the emergence of single mothers by choice, the fact that many single women were very happy with their lives, and an increasingly out-of-the-closet gay population as factors affecting marriage rates.
Some demographers immediately doubted the odds. Within months Census researchers did their own study and concluded that a 40-year-old single woman really had a 17 to 23 percent probability of eventually marrying, not 2.6 percent. In retrospect, the demographers faced a huge challenge in getting these predictions right. That’s because marital behavior was undergoing a profound shift. Before 1980, a woman who hadn’t married by 30 probably never would. But times were changing. "Women weren’t remaining unmarried because marriage was less appealing, but because it was becoming more appealing to wait," says Steven Martin, a University of Maryland sociologist.
Such unexpected shifts are part of what makes demographic forecasting extremely difficult, not unlike making weather forecasts in the midst of a hurricane. Even though the original forecasts were wrong, today’s researchers remain respectful of Bennett, Bloom and Craig’s work. Their marriage-forecast numbers were only a minor part of their study, and the authors remain proud of their papers’ larger findings on the diverging marriage rates between blacks and whites and the role that education plays in marriage. Today a new generation of sociologists (社会学家) continues to tinker (修补) with the delayed-marriage puzzle. Susan Faludi disagreed with the prediction of the research in Newsweek.