Unmarried Households Reign in US

Traditional marriage has ceased to be the preferred living arrangement in the majority of US households, according to the US Census Bureau's American Community Survey. The findings indicated that marriage did not figure in nearly 55.8 million American family households, or 50.2 percent.

More than 14 million of them were headed by single women, another five million by single men, while 36.7 million belonged to a category described as "non-family households," a term that refers primarily to heterosexual or gay couples cohabiting out of formal wedlock. In addition, there were more than 30 million unmarried men and women living alone, who are not categorized as families, the Census Bureau reported.

By comparison, the number of traditional households with married couples at their core stood at slightly more than 55.2 million, or 49.8 percent of the total.

The trend represented a dramatic change from just six years ago, when married couples made up 52 percent of 105.5 million American households.

It indicated that efforts by President George W. Bush and his allies, who over the past five years have made a concerted effort to shore up traditional marriage and families through tax breaks, special legislation and church-sponsored campaigns are bearing little fruit.

The shift, experts said, also raises the question about the future effectiveness of so-called "family value" politics currently played by both Republicans and Democrats.

Douglas Besharov, a sociologist with the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank, said it is difficult for the traditional family to emerge unscathed after three and a half decades of divorce rates reaching 50 percent and five decades out-of-wedlock births.

"Change is in the air," Besharov said. "The only question is whether it is catastrophic or just evolutionary." He predicted that cohabitation and temporary relationships between people were likely to dominate America's social landscape for years to come.

"Overall, what I see is a situation in which people -- especially children -- will be much more isolated, because not only will their parents both be working, but they'll have fewer siblings, fewer cousins, fewer aunts and uncles," the scholar argued. "So over time, we're moving towards a much more individualistic society."