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Jennifer Bruzina once thought she'd be married by age 20. But as she pursued her education and a career and bought a home, her priorities shifted.
"I'm glad I've waited," says the 36-year-old data specialist from Delhi Township. "It may happen next year. It may not happen until I'm 50. But at this point I'm pretty happy where I'm at, professionally and at home, and I'm doing fine."
Ann Higdon, 27, and Dave Wiesman,39, also expect to marry, but the Pleasant Ridge couple is in no rush. They've lived together for a year.
Singles and unmarried couples like these have helped push the percentage of U.S. households with married couples below 50 percent for the first time ever, according to recent numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky mirror the trend, bringing pause to a region that prides itself on family and traditional values. The impact may be subtle now, but experts say the shifting demographic could have far-reaching implications - changing everything from the character of our housing and where it's built to the shows we watch on TV.
Nobody is writing marriage off. Demographers estimate that more than 80 percent of adults eventually will marry.
But Americans have become less likely to marry in recent decades. The National Marriage Project at Rutgers University notes a decline of nearly 50 percent in the annual number of U.S. marriages per 1,000 unmarried adult women, from 1970 to 2004.
"I don't get depressed about it. I used to," says Sue Fricke, 39, a retail buyer from Newport who's never married. "But the older I get and the more marriages I see break up - I'd rather not be the statistic."
NOT MARRIED - YET
Count Mark Smith, 26, of Southgate among those who say he'll consider marriage "someday - not anytime soon." Age 30 would be about right, he adds.
"I don't think you're ready for (marriage) until you have a grip on who you are and where your life is headed. You need to get your career in line (first)," says Smith, marketing coordinator for a restaurant franchise group.
Bruzina says one advantage of waiting longer to marry is "you have had time for yourself and tend to have more defined ideas about what you want to get out of the remainder of your life."
She's come close to marrying more than once, which she now says "would have been mistakes." She and other singles say they are mindful of high divorce rates.
The National Marriage Project says the median age at first marriage went from 20 for females and 23 for males in 1960 to about 26 and 27, respectively, in 2005, the Marriage Project says.
Other reasons the National Marriage Project cites for declining marriage rates: the growing acceptance of unmarried cohabitation; a small decrease in the tendency of divorced people to remarry; and "some increase" in lifelong singlehood, although the actual amount of the latter won't be known until the lives of young and middle-age adults run their course.
Unmarried cohabitation is particularly popular among people who've come from divorced-parent homes, says David Popenoe, a professor of sociology at Rutgers and co-director of the National Marriage Project.
"They've seen their parents divorce, and that's the last thing they want to go through themselves."
And yet, Popenoe and Ronald Bulanda, an assistant professor of sociology at Miami University, say unmarried couples who live together don't necessarily view marriage as an outmoded institution.
"There is research that suggests many cohabitants do aspire to marriage," Bulanda says.
"A lot of them report ... (cohabitation) is almost serving as a trial marriage. They think it might help them find out how compatible they are."
That makes sense to Smith. "I definitely would live with someone before I got married," he says. "You've got to test the waters before you set sail."
Ramone and Akisha Davenport of Forest Park lived together for two years before marrying on Aug. 5.
Ramone, 31, a business owner, says "marriage is cool," but he would have been just as happy without the legal document.
"We probably could have been one of those couples who are just living together," Akisha, 27, says. "I encouraged (marriage) a lot. I think of marriage as a covenant with God. I look at it more from the spiritual aspect than just a document."
A CHANGING SOCIETY
Living together before marriage, or delaying marriage until age 30 or later, are options that were almost unheard of just a few generations ago.
"Fifty years ago, there was no choice. You graduated from high school, you got married," says Jim Mason, president and CEO of Anderson Township-based Beech Acres Parenting Center, which received state and federal grants for marriage-strengthening programs.
He and Popenoe say that marriage faces more competition today - and that the decline in marriage rates is no surprise when one considers historical trends.
"The dominant trend of the last 300 years, since the Enlightenment, is toward ever-increasing personal freedom and lack of encumbrance by society," Popenoe says.
American society has evolved from agrarian to industrial to today's post-industrial, information age. Along the way, the structure and function of families have changed significantly.
Extended families living together on a farm gave way to nuclear families, with the father as breadwinner, which transitioned to a society where men and women are on equal footing for education and jobs.
"As society gets more and more wealthy, people have even greater freedom, and they don't have to cluster together in established social institutions (such as marriage) to protect themselves," Popenoe says.
What's more, pregnancy outside of wedlock doesn't carry the social stigma it once did. Those who want to prevent it have readily available birth control.
All of these factors have contributed to the rise of single-person households, delayed marriage and cohabitation, experts say.
"Society is changing," says Carrie Gordon Earll, spokeswoman for Focus on the Family, a Colorado Springs-based conservative Christian group. "What we would like to encourage, particularly among young people who are moving in together, is that they look at marriage, and look at the stability that that commitment gives to their relationship."
TAKING THINGS SLOWLY
When Higdon and Wiesman decided to live together a year ago, they took a cautious approach. Higdon moved in with Wiesman but didn't sell her own home until after a four-month trial period.
Her first marriage ended five years ago. He's never been married. Both are information technology consultants.
Today, they say marriage might not be on their minds if not for this: They plan to start a family someday, and they want their children to have the benefit of married parents.
"There are a lot of stresses and issues with raising a family," Higdon says, "and I think marriage is one of those contractual obligations that binds you together to try hard to work things out."
Beyond that, research shows that "kids in intact marriages do better than kids in single-parent families and kids in cohabiting families," Beech Acres' Mason says. Children of married couples are less likely to repeat a grade, commit crimes, abuse drugs and be sexually active, for example.
That doesn't mean single parents can't raise good kids. "It can be done, it's just that much harder," says Craig Jackson, a 37-year-old banker from Forest Park.
He and his wife, Donita, were raised in single-parent homes and didn't want that for their children, who are 3 and 7. So the couple, who have been married 13 years, devoted themselves to learning how to build healthy relationships. They now teach marriage education and enrichment classes at their church, Word of Deliverance Ministries in Forest Park.
Children aren't the only ones who benefit from a good marriage. Research shows that married people tend to be happier, more productive and live longer, Popenoe notes.
"The bottom line is that a heavily married society is a whole lot better off than one that's not," he says.
Which is why Jackson, despite current marriage trends, is optimistic that people are "moving back toward a more traditional view of marriage and family."
Ozzie and Harriet, circa the 1950s? Says Jackson, "We're never going back to that."
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