pite experiencing marital problems no less severe than those encountered by former cohabitants [1, p. 104]. Addition, the very act of living together may lead to attitudes that make happy marriages more difficult. The findings of one recent study, for example, suggest «there may be less motivation for cohabiting partners to develop their conflict resolution and support skills.» (One important exception: cohabiting couples who are already planning to marry each other in the near future have just as good a chance at staying together as couples who don t live together before marriage) .2001 study of 1,000 US adults indicated that people who cohabited experienced a divorce rate 50% higher after marriage than those who did not, though this may be correlation and not cause-and-effect. A subsequent study performed by the National Center for Health Statistics with a sample size of over 12,000 individuals found that there was no significant difference in divorce rate between cohabitating and non-cohabitating individuals [16, p. 24]. Most parts of the United States, there is no legal registration or definition of cohabitation, so demographers have developed various methods of identifying cohabitation and measuring its prevalence. The most important of these is the Census Bureau, which currently describes an «unmarried partner» as a «person age 15 years and over, who is not related to the householder, who shares living quarters, and who has a close personal relationship with the householder.2001, in the United States 8.2% of couples were calculated to be cohabiting, the majority of them in the West Coast and New England / Northeastern United States areas [18, p. 143] .2005, the US Census Bureau reported 4.85 million cohabiting couples, up more than ten times from 1960, when there were 439,000 such couples. The 2002 National Survey of Family Growth found that more than half of all women aged 15 to 44 have lived with an unmarried partner, and that 65% of American couples who did cohabitate got married within 5 years [4, pp. 99-100].
The cohabiting population is inclusive of all ages, but the average cohabiting age group is between 25-34.we can see from the given information, the marriage pattern in the USA is rather diverse: some social groups prefer to stay single or cohabitate, others make families later or earlier. The topic of investigating American marriage pattern remains open and more detailed analysis can give a definite picture of marriages in the USA.
2. Marriage contract and divorce
The family is not a static institution. In recent years, marriage rates have fallen, divorce rates have risen, and the defining characteristics of marriage have changed. The economic approach to the family seeks to explain these trends by reference to models that can also explain how and why families form. Gary Becker s 1981 Treatise on the Family proposed a theory based on «production complementarities», in which husband and wife specialize in the market and domestic spheres, respectively, and hence are more productive together than apart. Production complementarities also arise in the production and rearing of one s own children. However, production complementarities at least as initially described are decreasingly central to modern family life. Increased longevity and declining fertility mean that most of one s...
