“Elissa B. Terris, 59, of Marietta, Ga., divorced in 2005 after being married for 34 years and raising a daughter, who is now an adult.

“’A gentleman asked me to marry him and I said no,’ she recalled. ‘I told him, ‘I’m just beginning to fly again. I’m just beginning to be me. Don’t take that away.’

“’Marriage kind of aged me because there weren’t options,’ Ms. Terris said. ‘There was only one way to go. Now I have choices. One night I slept on the other side of the bed, and I thought, I like this side.’”
Ah, the indescribable joys of slumbering on either side of an empty big, bed! Such profound pleasures and blissful rewards obviously make up for fleeting inconvenience of growing old alone.

By featuring profile after profile of his joyously unattached females, Sam Roberts doesn’t just report on the purportedly husband-free majority; he celebrates it.

He did the same thing with a similarly misleading and propagandistic article on October 15, 2006, which appeared under the headline: “It’s Official: To Be Married Means to Be Outnumbered.”

This “report” began with the claim: “Married couples, whose numbers have been declining for decades as a proportion of American households, have finally slipped into a minority, according to an analysis of new census figures by the New York Times.”

As with his “disappearing husbands” scoop of three months later, Roberts relied on twisting and squeezing numbers to reach his “marriage is dead” conclusion.

Among the “unmarried” households he featured as part of his “new majority,” more than half involved individuals living alone—many of them widows, by the way. In any event, far more people lived within “married households” than outside of such arrangements – despite his insipid and wretchedly misleading claim that “married couples” have “slipped to a minority.”

The Census Bureau reports (official 2005 numbers) that heavy majorities of individuals (male and female) in every age group over 30 are currently married --- not widowed, divorced, separated, or single. For instance, among those 34 to 39, 64.6% are married, and among those 40-44, 67.7% are married.

What Roberts does to reach his “revolutionary” conclusion is to count “households” rather than “people.” According to this numbering, a little cul de sac (Wisteria Lane?) with two homes--one including two married people with four children, the other with a single widow living alone-- would be evenly split between “married” and “unmarried” – a logical and statistical absurdity. In reality, the married household contains six people, and the other involves only one.

Despite tricky enumerations, the durability and significance of marriage becomes even more apparent when considering the status of children in the United States. The Census Bureau numbers from 2003 (the most recent available so far) show 68.4% of all children under 18 currently live with two parents; almost exactly three times the number (23%) who live with a single or divorced mother. Moreover, among “family households” (defined by the Census Bureau as “a home with at least two persons, the householder and one or more additional family members related to the householder through birth, adoption or marriage”) an overwhelming 75.7% still feature “married couple families.” In other words, for all the attention lavished by Sam Roberts and countless colleagues on “unconventional” living arrangements--- cohabiting couples, gay couples, single parents, and so forth – these alternatives taken together comprise less than 25% of all households, and involve far less than 20% of all individuals. The great bulk of adults are still either living as married couples, or living alone, often as widows.

These statistics may seem confusing (because of the deliberate attempts to obscure and spin the truth by anti-marriage fanatics) but they are incontrovertible and hugely important for the ongoing debate about the future of the family.

The endlessly repeated lies – that married people are now a minority, that most women don’t have husbands, that half of all first marriages end in divorce – exert a real world influence on young people trying to make decisions about their own intimate arrangements. The relentless media portrayal of matrimony as a wounded, collapsing, outmoded, dysfunctional institution discourages prospective husbands and wives from making the lifelong commitments on which societal health and effective childrearing depend.

Despite the journalistic malpractice by Sam Roberts and the New York Times, the real front page news isn’t about marriage’s disappearance; it’s about the institution’s unexpected and encouraging durability.