The Baby Boom

The book has a section entitled, “Marriage is traditional” and in that particular section it mentioned about how “marriage has changed over time.” When examined current day marriage trends show that people are looking for partnership or soul mates, not for the most traditional reasons of the past. The idea that one person is supposed to be with one person for the rest of their life is no longer relevant. It is possible to have many happy years with one person, but that does not mean that these people will die together. People can have a falling out. Situations change—people do grow. If people stayed stagnant their whole lives, where would society be? With the way

Marriage was put into rolls in the 1950s. Men would work and supply the money. Women would stay home, clean the house, and tend to the children. Now, in the twenty-first century, we no longer have rolls in marriage. Both parties work and supply money. Marriage has changed in many ways throughout the years.

In Andrew J. Cherlin’s essay “American Marriage In Transition”, he discusses how marriage in America is evolving from the universal marriage. Cherlin’s definition of the universal marriage in his essay is the man is the breadwinner of the household and the woman is the homemaker. In the 20th century according to Cherlin, the meaning of marriage has been altered such as the changing division of labor, childbearing outside of marriage, cohabitation, gay marriage and the result of long- term cultural and material trends (1154). During the first transition of marriage, Cherlin discusses how in America, Europe, and Canada the only socially accepted way to have sexual relations with a person and to have children is to be married (1154). The second change in marriage occurred in 2000, where the median age of marriage in the United States for men is 27 and women is 25 (1155). Many young adults stayed single during this time and focused on their education and starting their careers. During the second change, the role of law increasingly changed, especially in the role of law in divorce (1155). It is proven in today’s research marriage has a different definition than what it did back in the 1950’s. Today marriage can be defined as getting married to the same gender or getting remarried to someone who already has kids. The roles in a marriage are evolving to be a little more flexible and negotiable. However, women still do a lot of the basic household chores and taking care of the

Next, many women were under the age of nineteen got married in the 1950s and started their families with their husband (PBS). Women that went to college in the 1950s did not have a college degree because they potentially had to look for husband or else was in danger of being an old maid if they were not married. (PBS). It is different today because women can get married in the United States at any age and not be part of a social norm that happened in the 1950s. Partners that marry young in their early 20s today have a higher chance for divorce than partners who marry after the age of 25. (Pearlman pg. 203). According to Amato and Rogers (1997) says reasons that young married couples have problems in their marriage is because of infidelity, jealously, lack of maturity, and financial problems (Pearlman pg. 204). People also marry young because of the wrong reasons in today’s society For example, this wife was married to her husband because both

To begin with, marriage is a celebration of love, instead of an obligation. The world has transformed into a more open-minded. In bygone days,

Marriage has changed dramatically over time in the many years it has been around. What do think Marriage was like 100 years ago? The article, “American Marriage in Transition”, describes how many different types of marriage there are and how people have changed their view on it. Andrew Cherlin (the sociologist of the article) does a great job going in depth explaining American marriage. He arranges the different marriages in three different categories; Institutionalized which was the earliest type of marriage, then Companionship around World War II, and currently we are considered Individualized.

Besides, I also learned that even though marriage is popular, the social norms governing marriage have become weaker. This happens may be because there is a change from institutional to companionate marriage and also there is a larger emphasis on marriage meeting individualistic and self-fulfilling need. People hold many expectations on marriage. People expect marriage can help

More women were leaving the traditional role of homemaker and entering the workforce. The amount of babies that have been born out of marriage has increased greatly. According to Cherlin the first transition was a move from the institutionalized marriage to companionate marriage. This move put a larger emphasis on the emotional satisfaction of the individual in order for that marriage to succeed and both individuals be happy. Cherlin said it focused on the couple being friends and lovers than following roles like the institutionalized marriage did. The age at which people got married had changed from what it used to be in the 60's. People were staying in school and finishing up education as well as starting their careers. As a result of these changes as well as others the definition of marriage changed yet again. It changed to what could be called a more individualized marriage "an intimate partnership entered into for its own sake, which lasts only as long as both partners are satisfied with the rewards (mostly intimacy and love) that they get from it" (Cherlin 49). Today's definition of marriage is very different than those before it. People can try living together to see if they work together. Some

When we are young we play house and we play doctor, we pretend we are husbands and wives to the kids we play with. Marriage is imbedded into our minds at a young age and we value marriage as we get older. We see examples of marriages through personal experience, the TV, and through the media, but how much has marriage changed now compared to the 1950’s? The idea of marriage has been altered and improved since the 1950’s because of feminism, views about individualism, and views of same-sex marriage.

After reading chapter five on the topic of Cohabitation, I was left with a variety of thoughts and questions on the topic and was mostly just trying to sift through my own personal beliefs, the information that we have been presented in this chapter, and the variety of different research studies that have been done on the topic. The question I decided to pursue for my thought paper was relatively broad, but yet something that I couldn’t seem to stop asking my self, which was: “Why is marriage viewed more negatively today?”

From the past decades, marriage was the binding of two people into one, each functioning as their own to contribute to a greater love and companionship, however this has changed today. For example, terms that one associates with marriage today is an individual’s education or career, money, and a

Now that the foundation of love has evolved our image of marriage, how has it affected us? There are a lot of problems that we face nowadays in marriages. According to studies in the marriage industry, about 65.9 percent of the women in the United states were married in the 1960’s with that percentage decreasing to 53.4 percent at

Although marriage has been a central factor and gives meaning to human lives, the change in people’s lifestyles and behaviors through a long period of social development has resulted in alternate choices such as being single or nonmarital living. As a result, cohabitation has become more popular as a trendy life choice for young people. The majority of couples choose cohabitation as a precursor to marriage to gain a better understanding of each other. However, there are exceptions, such as where Thornton, Azinn, and Xie have noted: “In fact, the couple may simply slide or drift from single into the sharing of living quarters with little explicit discussion or decision-making. This sliding into cohabitation without

One of the reasons was the pill; sex outside out of marriage became acceptable due to the appearance of the pill. Couples did not need to worry about having out of wedlock birth. They could use the pill and other birth control methods to decide when they want to have a baby. Hera Cook mentioned in “The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception”, late marriage increased because the couples could satisfy their sexual desire when they delayed until they had capacity to establish and run their own family and raise their own children (115). Also in “Career and Marriage in the Age of the Pill”, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz mentioned that the age of first marriage for women soared from 1972 to 1979, “when fraction marrying before age 22 plummeted from 0.38 for the cohort born in 1950 to 0.21 for the cohort born in 1957. [T]he fraction marrying before age 26 declined from 0.70 for the cohort born in 1950 to 0.51 to that born in 1957”

Marriage and cohabitation play a central role in family life. The way in which society views marriage and cohabitation is changing as individualism becomes an increasingly mainstream ideal. Marriage rates have decreased significantly on average over the past 60 years, but different groups show different rates of change. While each societal group has their views, the general trends are showing decreasing marriage rates in lower income individuals, and increasing marriage rates in higher income educated individuals. These rates are directly connected to racial-ethnic groups, which in turn lead to larger gaps in socioeconomic status.