Marriage by the Numbers

The research that led to the highly touted marriage predictions began at Harvard and Yale in the mid-1980s. Three researchers--Neil Bennett, David Bloom and Patricia Craig--began exploring why so many women weren't marrying in their 20s, as most Americans traditionally had. Would these women still marry someday, or not at all? To find an answer, they used "life table" techniques, applying data from past age cohorts to predict future behavior--the same method typically used to predict mortality rates. "It's the staple [tool] of demography," says Johns Hopkins sociologist Andrew Cherlin. "They were looking at 40-year-olds and making predictions for 20-year-olds." The researchers focused on women, not men, largely because government statisticians had collected better age-of-marriage data for females as part of its studies on fertility patterns and birthrates.

Enter NEWSWEEK. We were hardly the first to make a big deal out of their findings, which began getting heavy media attention after the Associated Press wrote about the study that February. People magazine put the study on its cover in March with the headline the new look in old maids. And NEWSWEEK's story might be little remembered if it weren't for the "killed by a terrorist" line, first hastily written as a funny aside in an internal reporting memo by San Francisco correspondent Pamela Abramson. "It's true--I am responsible for the single most irresponsible line in the history of journalism, all meant in jest," jokes Abramson, now a freelance writer who, all kidding aside, remains contrite about the furor it started. In New York, writer Eloise Salholz inserted the line into the story. Editors thought it was clear the comparison was hyperbole. "It was never intended to be taken literally," says Salholz. Most readers missed the joke.

Despite the flawed statistics, some observers say the story holds up well. "Once you got over the sensational aspects, there was a lot of substance," says E. Kay Trimberger, a sociologist at Sonoma State University and author of "The New Single Woman." Among other trends the original story identified were the rise in cohabitation, the emergence of single mothers by choice, the fact that many single women were very happy with their lives, and an increasingly out-of-the-closet gay population as factors affecting marriage rates.

Some demographers immediately doubted the dire odds. Within months Census researchers did their own study and concluded that a 40-year-old single woman really had a 17 to 23 percent probability of eventually marrying, not 2.6 percent. In retrospect, the demographers faced a huge challenge in getting these predictions right. That's because marital behavior was undergoing a profound shift. Before 1980, a woman who hadn't married by 30 probably never would. But times were changing. "[Women] weren't remaining unmarried because marriage was less appealing, but because it was becoming more appealing to wait," says Steven Martin, a University of Maryland sociologist.

Such unexpected shifts are part of what makes demographic forecasting extremely difficult, not unlike making weather forecasts in the midst of a hurricane. No expert predicted the start of the baby boom in 1946, and today's actuarial tables could become obsolete due to a large-scale war or big medical breakthrough. Even though the original forecasts were wrong, today's researchers remain respectful of Bennett, Bloom and Craig's work. Their marriage-forecast numbers were only a minor part of their study, and the authors remain proud of their papers' larger findings on the diverging marriage rates between blacks and whites and the role that education plays in marriage. Today they look back on the "Marriage Crunch" controversy as a cautionary tale of what can happen when the media simplify complicated academic work. Bennett, now at Baruch College in New York City, says: "We're satisfied that our results have held up quite well."

Today a new generation of sociologists continues to tinker with the delayed-marriage puzzle. The latest research--a 2001 study by Princeton sociologists Joshua Goldstein and Catherine Kenney, and a 2004 paper by Maryland's Martin--concludes that roughly 90 percent of baby boomers will eventually marry. In a shift, however, the newer studies conclude that nowadays, a college degree makes a woman more likely to marry, not less. The Princeton paper suggests that for female college graduates born between 1960 and 1964, 97.4 percent will eventually marry. (Coauthor Kenney, now at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says the study probably overstated the figure, but thinks the college benefit remains substantial.) This new twist has given researchers another worry: that marriage, which confers a host of economic, tax and child-rearing advantages, is becoming disproportionately reserved for better-educated, middle- and upper-class elites. "There appear to be winners and losers in our globalized economy, and the personal lives of the winners appear to be diverging from the personal lives of the losers," says Hopkins's Cherlin.