MarriageTweets

Married couples with children now make up fewer than one in four U.S. households. That’s half the rate of 1960. Married households of any type have been in the minority since 2005. **People are navigating the middle ground between uncommitted hook-ups, and the “institution” of marriage. **Americans are pairing off and staying together just as much as ever, but now it’s without the rings, gowns and expensive photographers. They are America’s committed cohabiters, and theirs is the fastest-growing kind of U.S. household. According to the Census, there are 5.2 million such cohabiting couples, and they are raising 2.2 million children. **And with the financial crisis hitting the downscale the hardest, it may lead to even more cohabitation without marriage, accelerating this microtrend into something bigger.