It seems technology not only made out-of-wedlock births normal, it has made marriage less normal, according to Mark Regnerus, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin:
As recently as 2000, married 25- to 34-year-olds outnumbered their never-married peers by a margin of 55% to 34%, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. By 2015, the most recent year for which data are available, those estimates had almost reversed, with never-marrieds outnumbering marrieds by 53% to 40%.
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Young people in the U.S. continue to marry, even if later in life, but the number of those who never marry is poised to increase. In a 2015 article in the journal Demography, Steven Ruggles of the University of Minnesota predicted that a third of Americans now in their 20s will never wed, well above the historical norm of just below 10%.
Regnerus says that because of technology changes, “for American men, sex has become rather cheap” and blames birth control and online pornography as two significant contributors. So much for Jane Austen’s “truth universally acknowledged.”
