The Five Leading Indicators of Marriage

A team of family scholars recently launched a U.S. Marriage Index , the first attempt to track the health of marriage in America. The report begins by asking: “What helps us the most to thrive, as individuals and as a society? Money or marriage? Assets or relationships? Here’s what we know: A large body of research suggests that the status of our marriages influences our well-being at least as much as the status of our finances.”

The Marriage Index is the product of a bipartisan group of scholars and leaders who selected five indicators as fundamental:

(1) A marriage rate measure—the proportion of adults under age 54 who are married. (The focus on younger Americans is in order to avoid conflating longer life and more widows with the decline of marriage.)

(2) A divorce measure—the proportion of first marriages that are still intact.

(3) A marital happiness measure—the proportion of married people who say their marriage is “very happy” (because quality matters, too).

(4) The proportion of babies who are born to married people.

(5) The proportion of all children who live with their own two married parents.

As Maggie Gallagher points out , “These last two are to many of us the most important. ‘Why devote two-fifths of a Marriage Index to children?’ the authors ask. ‘These last two indicators concern more than just children: Fundamentally, they reflect the link between adults and children that marriage is designed to create and secure. At its essence, marriage is a social institution that, when it’s working, meets social needs—and perhaps the greatest of these needs is supporting the helpless offspring that result from the sexual union of two people.’”

The report reveals that since 1970 the combined Five Leading Marriage Indicators dropped from 76.2 percent to 60.3 percent.

Fortunately, as Gallagher notes, the news is not all bad: “Since 2000, three of the five leading marriage indicators have actually stabilized or begun to improve: The proportion of first marriages that are intact plunged from 77 percent to under 60 percent between 1970 and 2000; it actually climbed three-tenths of a percent since 2000. The proportion of children living with their own married parents similarly ticked up half a percentage point. And the proportion of marriages that are “very happy” has been stable.”