The Tribune

By DIANE PHILLIPS

When we were kids, most of the people we knew were part of a family. It may not have looked like the nuclear family of the last century with mom, dad, two kids and a dog, but somewhere there had been a marriage or arrangement that produced this friend we hung with after school. Mating was, for adults, as predictable as crawling was for toddlers. And mating that resulted in marriage was not just commonplace, it was a goal to be achieved. In every young girl’s dream, putting a ring on it was the height of unblemished romance, sheer joy, excitement and anticipation of a future guaranteed. In every young boy’s heart, there stirred a hope that the girl he had a mad crush on now would someday share his life and bed.

Over the last several decades, something happened to those hopes and dreams. They crumbled while we looked the other way. While young girls still dream of romance and most young boys are still interested in the part about bedding the girl they can’t stop thinking about, fewer are going the route of marriage to make what they dream about come true.

For the first time in history, the rate of marriage has fallen and it has fallen precipitously, so much so that some believe the state of unmarried may become the new norm. According to a recent report published by the Pew Research Center, the marriage rate has dropped by 60 percent in the last 50 years. Psychology Today recently quoted a study that found one in four Americans will reach the age of 50 without ever marrying.

Our own parents may have looked with pity or sympathy on those poor unwanted souls who had not made at least one trip down the aisle. Were they not pretty enough or smart enough or desirable enough to be marriage material? Would they go through the rest of their lives with no one to talk to at the end of the day? Would they have no one to sit next to on the front porch when they were retired or no one to care for them when they grew old and were ill?

Pity no more

If marriage were the antidote to loneliness, surely it was deserving of pity. And those who remained in that state got plenty of it, though behind their backs, from neighbours and friends. They whispered about them, referring to them as spinsters as if it were wrong somehow for a woman to be unwed. And men who had never made a commitment were either thought to be secretly gay or probably too immature to grow up and take responsibility. Either way, it wasn’t very flattering. It wasn’t as if the unmarried person actually CHOSE to be single because they liked it or because their standards were so high that they had not met anyone yet who lived up to them.

But then, slowly, something happened as I said. It felt like the number of people we knew who were divorced outnumbered the number who remained married to their first spouse. By the early 2000’s, it did not just feel that way. It actually was.

In the US, more than 50 percent of first marriages ended in divorce. As the numbers increased, we stopped feeling sorry for the divorcee and treating her as if she were an abandoned outcast who would struggle socially and economically for her foreseeable future because of her newly-minted and surely unwanted status as the wife whose husband left her. We started seeing her as a woman with a new hair style that suited her renewed sense of self. She didn’t just look different, she was different.

She exuded energy and self-confidence. As for the now single men, we suspected they wouldn’t stay that way long. Our suspicions were based on the younger women we saw them with. Our conclusion, we confess, was an educated guess resulting from good eyesight and astute observation. What was not a matter of conjecture was a gradual change in the emotive response to the word divorce. No longer a subject on which to dwell, no longer a cause for pity, simply a way of life for a majority of those who once walked down an aisle and promised “in sickness and in health till death do us part”.

And if more than half the marriages end in divorce, there’s an unspoken impact on the desire to marry. Maybe marriage isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Maybe when romance fades and turns into arguments about whose turn it is to empty the trash, the single life looks simpler, more enticing.

47 million never married

The facts show a steady trend that has been unfolding in front of our eyes without really catching our attention for years. More people than ever are choosing NOT to marry. In the US more than 47 million males and more than 41 million females have never married. Today, most of the unmarried have never been married, not divorced or widowed, according to the Institute of Family Studies.

This state of unmarried-by-choice is nothing new to Bahamians. Without statistics to confirm, I would venture to say that we lead or come close to leading the Americas in remaining single-by-choice trends, even if we did not plan it that way. At one point, 80 percent of the births at PMH were recorded as being those of unwed mothers.

What does single-by-choice portend for the future of the family, especially when we have good reason to fear rising crime rates and other consequences of increasing dissociation from community and a culture of belonging to something larger than oneself? Is the nuclear family, mother, father, two kids and a dog, a thing of the past?

Will single-by-choice along with marrying later and the continual rising cost of living lead to fewer children being born or, in a country where fathering a child nets income for mom, will it lead to more out-of-wedlock births? Is there one family model that works better than others or are we still trying to find our way through this maze of marital roller coaster machinations?

Psychologists and psychiatrists have long said that children fare better in a loving single parent home than in a troubled two-parent environment, especially in cases where there is domestic violence or emotional and verbal abuse. In all cases, they point out, support from others improves chances of success and in that regard, Bahamians who have loving grammies available are ahead of the game.

There is one thing for certain – whether marriage is in the cards or not, the dynamics of family are shifting. Singlehood is looking more attractive to a larger segment of society and no longer invites a knee jerk reaction of loser, but one of respect for those who know what they want and do not want to settle for less. What emerges in its place will be what we need to follow to ensure that the keys to health, happiness and security are met through strong friendships, social engagement, physical activity – all the ingredients that blended together create a new kind of sense of community. Of course, a little romance never hurt anyone. It just no longer automatically translates into step one of a journey down the aisle.