Divorce And Pop Culture

Americans haven’t given up on marriage as a cherished ideal. Indeed, most Americans continue to prize and value marriage as an important life goal, and the vast majority of us will marry at least once in a lifetime. By the mid-thirties, a majority of Americans have married at least once. Most couples enter marriage with a strong desire and determination for a lifelong, loving partnership. Moreover, this desire may be increasing among the young. Since the 1980s, the percentage of young Americans who say that having a good marriage is extremely important to them as a life goal has increased slightly. But when men and women marry today, they are entering a union that looks very different from the one that their parents or grandparents
Divorce is an ever-present theme in the books, music and movies of the youth culture. And real life experience is hardly reassuring; today’s young adults have grown up in the midst of the divorce revolution, and they’ve witnessed marital failure and breakdown first-hand in their own families and in the families of friends, relatives, and neighbors. For children whose parents divorced, the risk of divorce is two to three times greater than it is for children from married parent families. But the pervasive generational experience of divorce has made almost all young adults more cautious and even wary of marriage. The percent of young people who say they agree or mostly agree with the statement "one sees so few good marriages that one questions it as a way of life" increased between 1976 and 1992, while the percent of those who say it is very likely they will stay married to the same person for life decreased over the same time period for both males and females. [3]
Marriage as a Rite of Passage
For most of this century and certainly before, marriage was one of the most important rites of passage in life. It accomplished several goals associated with growing up: an economic transition from the parental household into an independent household, a psychosexual transition merging two selves and lives into one, and a social and legal transition from status as a single
The likelihood that adults will marry has declined dramatically since 1960. Much of this decline results from the postponement of first marriages until older ages, but it may also reflect a growing trend toward the single life. In 1960, 94 percent of women had been married at least once by age 45. If the present trend continues, fewer than 85 percent of current young adults will marry. Another important trend toward singlehood is apparent in the status of single mothers. In the past, single mothers were likely to be widowed or divorced. For those who bore children out of wedlock, moreover, single motherhood tended to be a temporary status. They went on to marry and to have other children in wedlock. Today, single mothers are increasingly likely to have never married. And they are more likely to stay single, so unwed motherhood has become a permanent status for many women. These convergent forces suggest that although marriage remains an important feature of adulthood, it no longer looms like Mount Everest in the landscape of the adult life course. It is more like a hill that people climb, up and down, once or twice, or bypass