So last Sunday I worked the Eastern PA Bridal Expo at Lehigh University’s Rauch Field House, as I do every year. It’s a lovely event for those who just got engaged and are in the wedding planning process. Brides walk about aisles and aisles of wedding resources-everything from officiates to travel experts-with their red stickers identifying them as the bride.
Watching the women wander about with glazed-over faces, drifting from booth-to-booth enjoying cake and hors d’oeuvres samples, I wondered how accurate a statistic I recently heard on the “NBC Nightly News” was. It stated that for the first time in U.S. history, the census calculated that the percentage of single households was higher than the percentage of married households. To put that into perspective, in the ’70s the statistic reflected married households outnumbering single households by nearly 20 percentage points. While the difference amounted to just two percentage points in this instance, I was curious as to whether this trend would continue and what would happen if it did.
Is the tide turning? Has marriage fallen out of fashion? After all, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt seem to be making a wonderful go of their relationship with each other and their six kids without the benefit of marriage. It only took Kim K. 72 days to fall out of favor with her marriage and Katy Perry and Russell Brand recently hit the skids, too. (I had high hopes for them.)
Growing up I had all sorts of positive role models for marriage (my parents have been married for 55 years), most of my aunts and uncles were “till-death-do-us-parters,” and on television Mr. & Mrs. Howell seemed happily married even though they were shipwrecked on “Gilligan’s Island”-not to mention “The Brady Bunch” and “The Munsters”-who were clogging up the airwaves with their particular takes on marriage and family.
Back then you heard of few divorced families in the neighborhood and on TV the single heads of household like Mrs. Partridge, were doing very well-with her ragtag band of kids and their multi-colored bus. Even then it was understood that hadn’t Mr. Partridge met an untimely demise, would they be out singing for their supper much less traveling anywhere but to school in a bus.
But things have definitely changed. The word “family” has a much broader definition. Was Mary Tyler Moore to blame? When she came on the TV scene with her brunette insouciance and threw her hat in the air, things started to change, I think. No marriage, no family-that was no problem for Mary. It doesn’t seem to be a problem for many of the kids we see in our travels around here either. Those who are putting off marriage until their 30s or longer, or who have even professed to not care to marry or have children of their own at all. It seems as though the functional aspect of marriage in general has changed and that Angie and Brad are providing a new model for what a happy family looks like. I am not sure I am happy about this.
I am happy to report that our annual bridal supplement Weddings In Style shows no evidence that there is a trend away from marriage as an institution. Every year we receive more entries for our Just Married feature than the last year, so that’s the trend I am hoping will persevere.
What do you think? Are you planning to marry?
Do you think we can reverse this trend? Let us know. And if you are getting married, send us your photos and story of the big day and you might just be on the cover of Weddings In Style for 2013!
