"[T]he US Census Bureau in its 2005 American Community Survey...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.

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

(Source:  Maxim Kniazkov, "For first time, unmarried households reign in US," Yahoo News, AFP, October 15, 2006; http://news.yahoo.com

"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 in a recent interview with the State Department journal called US Society and Values. 'The only question is whether it is catastrophic or just evolutionary.'

He predicted that cohabitation and temporary relationships between people were likely to dominated 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.'

Fewer and fewer American adults are hearing the melody of wedding bells. And even among those American men and women who do find their way to the wedding chapel, the music of conjugal carols have often given way in recent decades to the cacophony of divorce-court wrangling.

Just how completely America has been transformed by the silence of wedding bells and the rancor of the divorce court is all too evident in an analysis recently released by the Population Reference Bureau (PRB). Scrutinizing data from the federal government's Current Population Survey and the American Community Survey, the PRB analysts highlight "the increase in the proportion of adults who are not married" as "one of the biggest demographic stories of the past several decades." "Between 1960 and 2003," the PRB team reports, "the share of Americans age 15 or older who have never been married increased from 22 percent to 29 percent, and the share of Americans who are divorced increased from 2 percent to 10 percent."

Over time, the plummeting marriage rate and the simmering divorce rate have transformed the character of American society. The PRB analysts thus identify "rising age at first marriage [and] high divorce rates" as key reasons for "dramatic decline in the share of married-couple families, and the corresponding increase in the share of single-parent families." The data indeed indicate that between 1960 and 1983, "the proportion of families with children that were headed by a single parent increased from 9 percent to 28 percent." The PRB team further notes that "in some large cities...the share of female-headed families approaches 50 percent (for example, Cleveland, Detroit, and Newark, N.J.)."

Though the PRB analysts are statisticians, they recognize the human distress behind the numbers they parse. In particular, they view with "concern" the increase in the number of female-headed households "because people living in female-headed families typically have access to fewer economic or human resources than people in married-couple families." Data collected for 2003 in fact show that "about 37 percent of families maintained by women with children were poor, nearly six times the rate for married couples with children." Poverty rates run especially high among households with children headed by black and Latina women: 42 percent of such black households and 46 percent of such Hispanic households are mired in poverty.

Before even more American children find themselves trapped in poverty, perhaps it is time that America put its wedding bells back in melodious motion and its divorce courts into silent quiescence.