Chloe Leboeuf

This blog entry is going off of our class study about marriage rates. I was reading an article by the Pew Research Center that talked about how only half of the United States' adult population is married. Just 50 years ago, 72% of the adult population was married. Now, people are marrying later, raising a family outside of marriage, and getting divorced later in life. The statistic I found most interesting was how 47% of people who make less than $30,000 a year are married, while only 21% of people who make more than $75,000 a year are married. According to Statista, over 40% of the adult population make $75,000 or more. Coming from a broken family myself, I looked into the divorce rate in the United States. Sure enough, it has spiked over the past few decades. Divorce has become so normalized in our society, and I would love to delve into why that is. I think some of it has to do with the fall in religion in our country. 50 years ago, it was a sin to get divorced, and if you weren't married, you were probably in a convent or a seminary. Women needed to marry men because they couldn't make it on their own. With the little rights they had, the chances of them being financially comfortable on their own were slim. I think another reason the divorce rate has gone up is because of technology and how our world is becoming smaller and smaller. If a man wants to leave his wife and kids and start over, he can pack up and move to a place where nobody knows him. Our society has made it easy for people to give up on their responsibilities. Through the media, government welfare, and high incomes, most people feel like they have a safety net underneath them, and I think that's why the top 40% of our population don't consider marital commitments to be important.