Marriage rates dropped very low during the Civil War because the country lost 2% of her population amid a very destructive conflict. However, in modern times, the Wall Street Journal reports by way of the Daily Caller that marriage rates are at the lowest they have been since the conflict.
The U.S. marriage rate has dropped to the lowest on record since the federal government began keeping the data in 1867, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
The marriage rate fell 6% in 2018, with 6.5 unions formed for every 1,000 people, according to the National Center for Health Statistics report. The report reflects how economic insecurity and changing norms are eroding marriage, which has plunged since the Great Depression of the 1930s, according to the Wall Street Journal.
“Millennials are in peak marriage years, their 20s and 30s, and it’s still dropping,” Sally Curtin, a statistician at the center, told the Wall Street Journal. “This is historic.”
The marriage rate rebounded sharply after World War II, when marriages hit a high of 16.4 marriages per 1,000 people in 1946. But beginning in 1982, the rate declined until 2009, when it flattened before inching upward in 2014.
Declining religious observation and growing acceptance of cohabitation have also contributed to the marriage decline, according to the Wall Street Journal. (source)
The reason for this decline is simple. Getting married today is a hazardous endeavor for men. With promiscuity as normal behavior, easily available forms of pornography that are for all purposes everywhere, and marriage putting a man into a legal situation that provides some tax benefits but a tremendous personal and social liability that he cannot mitigate no matter what he does, marriage is simply a dangerous thing. There are not many benefits, and a tremendous number of risks that one cannot really mitigate.
The breakdown of marriage has destroyed the family unit, divided all of society, and caused problems that will last for generations, and yet this did not have to be so.
Unfortunately, this pattern is nothing new, and it can be expected to continue for the foreseeable future with the breakdown of the economy and eventually, the political structures as they currently operate amid major changes taking place around the world.