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Married households are no longer the preferred living arrangement in the United States. The findings, which were released in August by the U.S. Census Bureau, but have escaped public attention until now, indicated that marriage did not figure in nearly 55.8 million American family households, or 50.2 percent.T he number of traditional households with married couples at their core stood at slightly more than 55.2 million, or 49.8 percent of the total.
The shift was first reported by the Bureau in its 2005 American Community Survey. Analysts say the shift could mean long-term changes in U.S. homes.
About 14 million households were headed by single women, another 5 million by single men, while 36.7 million belonged to a category described as "nonfamily households," a term that experts said included gay or heterosexual couples cohabiting out of formal wedlock.
Unmarried men and women living alone, not categorized as families, total about 30 million.
Unmarried couples gravitated toward big cities such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, while the farm states in the Great Plains and rural communities of the Midwest and West remained home to traditional married households.
the 2005 findings stand in stark contrast to six years ago, when married couples made up 52 percent of 105.5 million American households.
It indicated that efforts by President Bush and his supporters, who over the past five years have made a concerted effort to shore up traditional marriage and families through tax breaks, special legislation and church-sponsored campaigns is bearing little fruit.
The shift, experts said, also raises the question about the future effectiveness of so-called "family value" politics played by both Republicans and Democrats.
Douglas Besharov, a sociologist with the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank, said divorce rates reaching 50 percent and five decades out-of-wedlock births have taken their toll on the traditional family.
"Change is in the air," Besharov said in a recent interview with the State Department journal called U.S. Society and Values. "The only question is whether it is catastrophic or just evolutionary."
He predicted that cohabitation and temporary relationships between people were likely to dominated America's social landscape for years to come.
"Overall, what I see is a situation in which people -- especially children -- will be much more isolated, because not only will their parents both be working, but they'll have fewer siblings, fewer cousins, fewer aunts and uncles," Besharov said. "So over time, we're moving toward a much more individualistic society."
Growing life expectancy as well as women's earning potential are impacting the traditional marriage in unexpected ways, according to Stephanie Coontz, who heads the Council on Contemporary Families.
If before World War II the typical American marriage ended with the death of one partner within a few years after the last child had left home, she pointed out in the journal, that today couples can look forward to spending more than two decades together in an empty nest.
"The growing length of time partners spend with only each other for company, in some instances, has made individuals less willing to put up with an unhappy marriage, while women's economic independence makes it less essential for them to do so," Coontz wrote.
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