victims that is an injustice, the grave is vandalized perhaps a fitting epitaph for a man that so many say did so much harm. part a prince, haiti. don't forget al jazerra's brand of real news available whenever you want it at aljazerra.com. >> fewer people are saying i do, and more adults than ever can say i never did. never married adults have moved from the fringe to the center of a conversation on the future of marriage. it's inside story. >> hello, i'm ray suarez. we don't make decisions about

getting paired in a vacuum. we have families, home towns, ethnic and religious backgrounds, weekly wages and levels of education that all push a little like hands on an ouija board towards making a conclusion for ourselves. striking numbers of children are born to single women. couples are building long-term relationships, sharing property, retirement savings, while never planning to marry. the number of adults who have never married is steadily rising as are the divorce rates for people over 50. during the rise of no-fault divorce commentators lamented the number of failing marriages. will we now turn our attention to those who have decided to do without marriage all together? it may strike you as surprising, but moments like these captured in photographs of a happy young couple starting out on a new life together as husband and wife are becoming less common. nowadays the face of marriage,

who does it, at what age they choose to do it, with whom and why is a much more complex puzzle than it was even a few years ago. the pew research centers soldier and demographics trends groups crack only census tate da and their own survey to put marriage in a 21st century context. few found the share of americans who never have been married reached an all-time high in 2012. one in five adults aged 25 and older have never been married. about 42 million people according to pew. that's 23% of men, 17% of women. in 1960 only 9% of adults in that age range had never been married. shifting with the changing times are americans attitudes towards marriage. the pew survey asked in your view is society off if people make marriage and children a

priority or is society just as well off if people have priorities other than marriage and children. 46% said better off. 50% said just as well off. young people aged 18 to 29 are driving that change with 67% agreeing society is just as well off. that reflects the life choices they're making these days. young americans are getting married later, putting it off until they earn a college diploma or advance degree and a well paying job, and would-be husbands and would-be wives are taking longer to find that special someone because increasingly the unmarried are seeking a made who is steadily employed. the recession has reduced the marriaging age of adults with jobs it concludes that this year is not the year to take your

vows. >> marriage, not when but if this time on the program. we've just emerged from years in which the contours of marriage in america were hotly debated because a tiny minority of americans, gay people, wanted access to the state of matrimony. while we've been engaged in that family fight millions more people who have always been able to marry have deciding not to. joining us for a look at 21st century matrimony. in salt lake city brad wilcox, director of the in fact marria national marriage. from seattle, stephanie kunz, she's director of research and education for the council on contemporary families and stephanie kunz, let me start with you.

is this a new norm or really . >> the age of marriage has been rising. i don't think that marriage is on its way out. most people will marry eventually. but one of the big differences is that people are taking longer to get married, and marriage no longer organizes every life change, every transition, every decision we make. and the result is that we have to be much more open than we used to be to the idea that you just can't expect that all married people will have obligations, and unmarried people will not. >> brad wilcox, if you look at what's happened over the past

couple of decades have we, without really realizing it, flipped the script? when i got married during the carter administration, it's shocking to say, the idea was well, of course, people don't have much when they get married. and they make this alliance voluntarily, and then start acquiring the things of life together. now when i hear young people talking about getting married, they want to get that stuff done and see marriage as the end of that process rather than the beginning of it. we moved from a cornerstone model of married life to a capstone model where you're singling by getting married that you've arrived. financially you've arrived. emotionally you've arrived. and so it's a very different understanding of what marriage is all about today than was the case when you got married back in the 70's . >> so when we look at the numbers, this is a very large

cohort of of young people right now. if they're not getting married, that's millions of couples who are not being formed, millions of households not formed in a way they might have been at another time. >> exactly. our projection shows today's young adults when they reach mid 40s and they're going to stay married. but the chance of them getting married for the first time after 45. after average 55 it will be much smaller. >> i'm no stat situation, but i assume if the cool of never never-married people is much larger, inside that pool there is a much larger number of people who will go unmarried throughout their adult life . brad, what are the consequences

of that. >> i think it's fine for adults not to marry if kids are not in the picture. but when we're bringing lots of kids in the world without benefit of married kids. those kids experience more family instability, a lot more single parenthood, more poverty and other deprivation that puts their future at risk. that's the bottom line concern that i have with this decline for marriage that we've seen in the last really four or five decades now. >> stephanie conntz, do we have to be careful when we talk about children born to women they're not always single women. >> no, they're often cohabiting with men. it's important to recognize in this is to a large extent a class problem. there are plenty of people who make a commitment to each other, even single older single mothers

who can raise children very successfully, a woman's education and jiggsal aspirations for her kids account for more than her own marital status, but what we've seen is a huge class divide emerging. when brad talks about this is a cause of poverty, it's a result of more poverty and economic inequality. it used to be when you talk about the kind of wedding that you had in the 50's and 60's, people got married because two things were going on. first was a bad thing that women had no option. they couldn't get jobs. they couldn't support themselves outside of marriage. but the good thing was that even a man who had dropped out of high school, certainly a man with a high school degree could support a family. his yearly earnings were rising by 4% a year between the ages

an25 and 35 the average man saw increases in his wages. as a result people had a sense that they could get married. a woman looked around for a guy and said, you know, he's going to be able to support me. he'll probably age out of any immaturity he has because having a job and being able to look forward to it is something that matures people. today forever high school-educated people those things are not in the card. a woman has to weigh the possibility and increasing probability that this man will not have a job. his real wages will be falling. if he misuses his resource she'll be worse off after a divorce than if she had focused on her own earning power. there is a high pay off of institutional relationship if good but a riskier institution than it used to be. >> brad wilcox i want your response to the idea that family poverty is not caused by lack of

marriage, but a resulting factor--excuse me. i'm flipping--i'm saying it backwards. people who don't get married don't not get married, and then as a result are poor. but in fact, don't get married because they are poor. >> that's partially true. as stephanie noted what we're seeing today, working class and working americans are much less likely to get played and stay married. the fact that that is the new norm for working class and poor americans only diminishes their odds of making it into middle class and more importantly it diminishes the odds of their kids making it into middle class. we saw a study from myth m.i.t. the study of families breaking down and the impact on boys and impacting their ability to flourish in school and then to flourish in the labor force. it's a vicious cycle where we

see economic trends that make it hard for couples to get married and stay married. but the fact that they're not getting married in the second place put their kids and especially boys disadvantaged in schools and later on in the labor force. i think you have to recognize that the family basically influences the economy, and the economy influences the family. that's the balanced way to look at this issue. >> wendy wang in the research what did young women tell researchers about their reasons for not getting married? were they saying, when i look around i just don't see men to marry? >> especially young adults we find that the financial reasons are top reasons why they say they're not currently married. then even though across the board we don't find the differences among people's desire for getting married. less educated adults as well as

educated adults, they don't want to get married. >> there are mismatches who are around to get married? >> we also looked at what they were looking for in a potential spouse. young women were much more likely to say finding someone with a steady job is important to them. but in reality we see the declining rate of the employment rate among young men. young men with a job is actually less and less. that's why we see potential mismatch. >> we'll be back with more inside story after this short break. when we return i want to look at our look of socio-economic profiles of people who are continue to go choose marriage if later in life, and then the neighborhoods where marriage seems fragile, almost counterintuitive. stay with us. >> alaska, a state that depends on it's natural beauty >> we need to make sure that we have clean air >> some are living off natures bounty >> we're rich cause of all the resources we have...

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since 1960 men with a high school diploma or less have moved from the men most likely to be married to the least likely to be married. in those years wages for those lightly-educated men first stagnated, and then dropped like a rock. meanwhile women with high school diplomats or less are less likely to be married than we were in 1960, but the likelihood a woman with an advance degree was never married has tumbled. as we continue our look at marriage we continue to talk about education and income, and brad wilcox, if it's tougher to make a go of it, if you are low income person, how come individual men and women have not come to the conclusion that throwing in their lot with each other makes financial sense if not else? if we're going to give an incentive to young people to marry each other rather than simply live together, it seems

not to be working. >> yes, i think part of the problem facing us as a country is that we do have i think higher expectations of what marriage can deliver today. i think many poor and working class couples feel they should be able to achieve that middle class status and have that $20,000 wedding before they get married. we should look at marriage as a way of a vehicle for establishing a life together, including a financial life together that is going to be better for them over the long-term, especially their kids as well. but that requires a shift in thinking about what marriage is and what marriage could be to make it more accessible as a model not just for those who are privileged and powerful, but those who are holding down working-class jobs in america today. >> wendy when those young men and women get married are their marriages more fragile and more likely to break up? >> it seems that the less educated

people have higher divorce rate than those with higher degrees. >> has that always been the case? >> not necessarily. in the 60's and 70's we don't see this pattern but this is emerging and we're seeing the gap between the folks with college degree and people who don't have college degree, yes. >> over those same years, stephanie coontz, women with ph.ds move to being from the unmarried. and you watched it happened. what happened? >> well, i think that this is part of the complex thing that we're seeing. a large part of this is good news. yes, we have much higher expectations of marriage. that's a good thing. domestic violence has gone down.

child abuse has gone down. people are saying i don't have to settle for a man who doesn't treat me well, and so i will not settle. but the other side of it is that men are becoming more accepting of women who have higher education, and in fact, they're becoming very grateful for someone who will share bread winning. the only group of women whose marriage rates have risen are women who earn higher than the average wage. it used to be less likely to marry, and women with ph.d's. in general what we're seeing is general. it was a high risk for women to have more education than her husband. now it's not a higher risk. you're seeing incredible increase and equality that is easier to play out in the middle class where you have two earners working together and communicating together. the leo income people that wendy is talking about you have

pressure to move together very soon to save money in this period of declining real wages so you have a better chance of not having a good a 34,567. low income men are much more likely to abuse their wife than any other segment of the population. when a man loses his job that doubles the chance of divorce. yes, a good marriage, a good marriage, if it lasts, is a wonderful help. but it's also risky because you may end up abused or divorced. this is why people are having such a tough time. >> brad wilcox, the divorce rate has moderated some in recent decades. even as we're seeing more unmarried adults i'm wondering if the reason we're seeing fewer marriages breaking up is because a lot of bad unions that would have happened once upon a time simply aren't now, and those people are remaining unmarried. >> well, yes, certainly compared

to the 70's at the height of the divorce revolution i think marriage is a more stable institution, but it's partly because we've become more realistic about marriage and more sensible about marriage. the example i give is newt gingrich and barack obama. it's not a political point but a generational point. newt gingrich was caught up in the approach of the 70's when it came to married life, and barack obama has been an exemplary model of marriage and more committed husband, and i'm confident his marriage will go the distance. but we've seen this decline in divorce among college-educated americans. it's not only be more selective but more realistic about what image can deliver. the challenge is can we take that basic mindset and some of those basic skills and orientations, and extend them to working class and poor couples

to increase their odds of lasting marriage as well. if we don't do that we're going to see more economic inequality, and more low income kids, particularly boys, falling behind in school and later in life and this dystopian future for americans, and that's not something that any american would like to see our country to move towards. >> the news business has a problem with stories involving a lot of statistics. we like to slide in that phrase "if current trends continue," yes again they may not. that's what makes them current trends. is this a low, a lift, regrouping or reconstruction moment for a social custom thousands of years old, or something more permanent. stay with us >> hundreds of days in detention. >> al jazeera rejects all the charges and demands immediate release. >> thousands calling for their

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>> we're back with inside story on al jazeera america. i'm ray suarez. we're looking at friends

marriage in america this time on the program, and in particular findings from a recent study from pew research suggesting a large and growing share of american adults have never been married, and may never marry. still with us from salt lake city brad wilcox director of the university of virginia national marriage project. he's a visiting scholar. wendy wang, senior researcher at pew research center, and in seattle, stephanie coontz, professor of family studies, director of research for the council of contemporary families. wendy, your life does not end when your marriage ends, but do people who have been married and aren't look at marriage differently from people who have never been married. >> yes, interestingly people who have been married before but currently unmarried are less unlikely to say they want to get married again, then there is a gender difference.

women are much less likely than men to say they want to be married again. >> to say that, but do we know whether they do? are women more likely to seek to remarry? >> well, it's hard to say because we need to see the overall rates of the remarriage, but this is currentl among currently divorce people. we don't know how many times they've been married before. maybe they've been married three or four times and they're tired of it. >> as you look at the stats coming in, whether that's having temporary impact or whether it's helping restructure marriage in the way we get married in this country? >> well, i think it had a temporary impact. it actually delayed many divorces, but the divorce rate

has picked up since. i think it delayed some marriages. in 2012 we saw a slight up tick in the marriage rate. the longer run issue are these changes in gender, egalterinism. a lot of my feminist friends don't like to admit this, but women's push for equality did destabilize ask marriage. men were threatened by it. but extending egalitarianism, it's where women have the right to work outside of the home and family supports having a slight up tick in the fertility rate, i think it's very important that we recognize that we need to move forward rather than looking backwards to the extent that we

hope to stabilize family life. one our thing that's very important. america right now not only has the highest poverty rates among single-parent families compared to two-parent families and highest educational gaps, we have to do something about our social safety net well. >> brad, does that all add up to a pitch to get married and stayed married or be more mindful about your choices and really be ready when you finally say "i do"? >> well, be careful when it comes to marriage. we see couples who have premarital preparation are more like will be to be happier in marriage and less likely to be divorced. being careful is a great idea, and careful about parenthood is a good idea. there are too many people in their 20s who are having kids outside of marriage, and they're

not prepared to take on the challenges of being parents for kids in the long term. in terms of--i don't think general of gender equality , many men are under educated, they're more likely to be unfaithful, we have to figure out how to make them more marriageable. unless we do that we're not going to see marriage taking a turn for the better here in america. >> brad wilcox, stephanie coon coontz, wendy wang, thank you forgoing me today. that brings us to the end of "inside story." the program may be over, but the conversation continues. we want to know what you think about the issues raised on this or any day's programs. sent you go yours thoughts on facebook or twitter. the and it @

aj inside story am. or ra @ray suarez news. in washington, i'm ray suarez. >> next on al jazeera america presents... >> the catholic church of the 21st century is a global financial power. the pope might just be one of the biggest landloards in the world. the church is now spending heavily on political lobbyists. >> 21% of the dioceses told us that they never audit their parishes. we found that 85% of the dioceses had experienced an embezzlement in recent years,