Time To Stop Saying ‘Retreat From Marriage’ (Metabolism Update)

My paper on marriage metabolism is now published in Population Research and Policy Review. Thank you to the corresponding editor, Kara Joyner, and reviewers.

I like marriage lifetables. Also, I hope people within the sound of my (repetitive) voice will reconsider their use of the term “retreat from marriage.” It was a metaphor that caught on early with marriage promoters because, I think, it suggested a cultural problem. Let’s not feed that beast anymore. If there is less marriage than there used to be (and there is, along with less divorce and less widowhood), that might or might not imply a “retreat.”

My conclusion: “Thus, one partial explanation for falling marriage, divorce, and widowhood rates may be greater selectivity into marriage, with fewer people achieving a more desirable status—and as a result exiting that status less often. A higher status marriage system is a smaller, slower, and more stable marriage system.”

The paper is on SocArXiv in preprint form (no substantive differences from the journal version). Springer has given me a link to a “read only” version here, and the regular journal version is here (it sometimes lets me read it in HTML or download it in PDF for free there)

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Previously Published on familyinequality with Creative Commons License

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