婚姻不是兩個人的事
當人選擇離婚的時候，有想過這樣的後果嗎？真的只是個人的選擇嗎？
For first time, unmarried households reign in US
by Maxim Kniazkov
It is by no means dead, but for the first time, a new survey has shown that traditional marriage has ceased to be the preferred living arrangement in the majority of US households.
The shift, reported by the US Census Bureau in its 2005 American Community Survey, could herald a sea change in every facet of American life -- from family law to national politics and its current emphasis on family values.
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 "nonfamily households," a term that experts said referred primarily to gay or heterosexual 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.
Unmarried couples gravitated toward big cities such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, while the farm states in the Great Plains and rural communities of the Midwest and West remained bastions of traditionalism, according to the survey.
The trend represented a dramatic change from just six years ago, when married couples made up 52 percent of 105.5 million American households.
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.
Original Article in Yahoo! News
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