Stephanie Kuntz

Let's put it this way.

Fewer than 10% of people say they don't want to get married, but what you have increasingly

is quite a number of people who say they've no idea if they actually will get married.

Certainly, marriage is not dead.

Yes, back in the 1950s, more people married.

94% of them married before they reached their 35th birthday.

Only 5% of them never married at all.

The average age of marriage was under 21 for a woman and under 23 for a boy.

So when you look at what's happening to now, you still get 80, 85% of Americans half-wed at some point.

but that's not until they reach their 50s and 60s.

So, of course, it looks like marriage is collapsing if you just say how many, you know, what's the rate of marriage per single people in the population.

So I don't think marriage is collapsing.

It's obviously more voluntary than it used to be.

Divorce rates have been falling since 1980, since they hit their high point in 1980, but they're not going to disappear forever.

What's interesting to me, though, is that for all the talk about marriage being obsolete, most people still believe it is the most rigorous, highest commitment that they can enter into.

Parents whose kids marry respect them more than if the kids are living together, and that goes for the parents of same-sex couples and heterosexual couples.

Most people still say they want to marry.

Only 8 to 10 percent say they definitely do not want to marry.

But what we have seen that's interesting is a big increase in the number of people who say, well, I don't know if I actually will get married even though I might like to.

And that increase has been the greatest among young women.