(upbeat music) - Hello, and welcome to "The Journal".

I'm Steve Kendall.

Who's getting married?

When are they getting married?

And where are they getting married?

Well, to answer these questions, and some other things, we're joined by representatives, researchers from the National Center for Family & Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University, Dr. Wendy Manning, and Dr. Krista Payne.

Thank you both for being here.

Dr. Manning, for people who don't know, talk about what the Center for Family & Marriage Research is.

- So, the National Center for Family & Marriage Research was established at Bowling Green in 2008, so we're celebrating our 15th anniversary here, so that's wonderful.

And our goal is really to promote and share research on families and marriage, largely in the United States.

And something we do that we're very proud of is we produce what are called family profiles, which are two page, easily consumable facts about marriage and family that are really up to date using the latest census data, or population-based samples.

And so, it's really great because it's a way to share information we have with lots of different audiences.

So, we were just at our national meeting in New Orleans, and people were telling us they use these in their classrooms, lots of reporters are interested in them, and then researchers will cite them in their work as well.

And it's a great opportunity to train students here at Bowling Green, and so we really enjoy doing it.

And we put out about 30 of those a year.

And so, if anyone's interested, we have a series of different topics, from grandparenthood to child wellbeing, and so if anybody's interested, they should check that out.

- And we're gonna talk about some of those as we go through the show today.

Dr. Payne, one of the things I noticed when I was going through some of these family profiles is it gives you a snapshot, but in a lot of cases too, it shows trend lines, if there are any, or maybe it doesn't show that things have changed that much.

When you do that research, you go in expecting, well, the data is what the data turns out to be.

And I know that there's census data here, you mentioned, heavily involved in that.

When you look at these different topics, are you ever surprised by what you see?

And we'll get into detail in a couple of these in a moment, but is there anything that ever jumps out and you go, wow, didn't see that one coming or not?

Or is it leveler than we think it would be?

Because we see things in the news, and sometimes it's like, oh wow, shocking news.

But is it really like that?

Do you really see something that just jumps right out?

- I'd have to say for me, because I was trained at Bowling Green as a family demographer, I was trained so well that a lot of it doesn't necessarily surprise me.

They do such a great job here.

But I would say the general public would be surprised.

One of the things that really comes to mind is the idea of a seven-year itch.

There's this idea that a lot of the divorces happen at that seven-year mark, and we've found that that's really not the case, that the median time about half of marriages when they end, they end at about the 11-year mark.

So, that's one of those little things that not everybody knows.

- And it just doesn't sound as good to say 11 year, it's seven year, and plus the movies.

Now, one of the family profiles that I was looking at, and you have, as you said, a long list of them, and we can't cover all of them today.

One of the ones that I wanted to touch on, and we'll get into same-sex and different-sex marriage and that sort of thing, is the geographic variation in LGBT+, because across the country it does vary from state to state, sometimes significantly, it seems as if there are certain parts of the country where it's more likely than others.

Could you talk a little bit about that?

- Sure.

That was an exciting project because there's not a lot of data that includes measures of sexual identity, or gender identity, in our national surveys, and so we had an opportunity with the Household Pulse survey that was conducted during the pandemic, we had over a million respondents, so we had a really large sample, and they included these questions.

And we found, overall, that about 7% to 10% of the population identifies as LGBTQ+.

And it's really important to be able to count populations so that they know that they matter, and then we can more accurately assess health and wellbeing, if we know how many there are.

So, what was exciting with the Household Pulse survey is they had state-level indicators, and so we were able to look at differences across states.

And so, for example, we found that in Ohio, about 10% of the population identifies as LGBTQ+.

And what we were able to do with these data that I thought was really cool that we partnered with the Human Rights Campaign is we projected the population forward.

And we found that by 2040, about 20% of the population over 18 in the United States will identify as LGBTQ+.

And this was done research in collaboration with Christopher Julian, a student in our program.

So, it was a great partnership with the Human Rights Campaign, using our demographic skills to project the population forward and think about that.

But yeah, I think we don't realize how much variation there is in the distribution of the population across states.

And some of that might have to do with just different social and political climates.

- Right.

Because I know when we look at the map, and you have this in the profile, it talks about the West and the Southwest.

That's where we see a heavy concentration, or a heavier concentration.

You get to the upper Rocky Mountain areas like Idaho, Montana, the Dakotas, a lot less, middle of the country, kind of a mixture of things.

Northeast, the same way.

The South, a little leaning, a little less declaring in that kind of situation.

When you get that research, I think you touched on it, we don't really know why that is, but you can speculate on whether it's political or just the make of the population demographically, that kind of thing.

- Right.

So, a lot of it has to do, younger people, so our Gen Z population, about 15% of those folks identify as LGBTQ.

Where you look at boomers, it's close to 5%.

So, where you have younger populations, you're probably gonna have greater concentrations.

Also there's a lot of variation in terms of state policies that are supportive of LGBTQ+ populations, and so, for example, we've had some major assaults recently with over 400 bills that are targeting those populations, so I'm imagining those states might see exoduses of individuals, people might not want to stay in states that aren't supportive, and so we can see some concentration of population based on that as well.

- Yeah.

So, you'd see movement away from those states, and maybe to other states because of the environment is more welcoming, is more accepting, whatever, yeah.

When you look at that, and obviously too, the timeline on that, I know it says this report was 2021, a lot of the data, that kind of thing.

Can you go back before that?

Or is data just so limited that it's difficult to even make any kind of projection like that?

Or just say... [Dr. Payne] I think you should be a demographer.

I understand.

[Dr. Manning] Great question.

- He knows all the questions.

We always wanna have trend data.

And as you mentioned at the beginning, we always like to see what are the patterns over time.

Because sometimes if you just look at what's happening now, you act like, oh, that's a big surprise.

But maybe it's, for example, our marriage rates have been declining, but they're sort of stably low, but we don't have good data going back in time.

And so, that's one of the major flaws with our data infrastructure, I would say, in the United States, and they're trying to look at changes, come up with changes in that.

But there is the Gallup Poll has a very large sample, and so they're the folks who have been measuring this over time, but we're trying to move beyond those kinds of data and get some federal agencies to buy in and include these kinds of measures.

- Yeah.

Because it's simply, oh, I'm sorry, go ahead.

- But regarding trends, we do know over the last 25 years, Americans accepting LGBTQ relationships has increased dramatically from 27% all the way up to 71% now.

So, we do know that trend.

So, Gallup's done that work, that's been really beneficial.

- And, I guess, because this information for whatever reason, wasn't tracked 10, 20, 30 years ago, it just wasn't as something even showed up in census data, it wasn't part of the mix, so it's more difficult to find good data from those areas.

Okay.

Well, we'll be back in a second.

We've got a couple of other areas to cover.

And it's always interesting when I was looking through all of the information, how similar we are, and yet sometimes how different we are with regards to some of these things.

So, back in just a moment, from two researchers from the National Center for Family & Marriage Research, Dr. Wendy Manning, and Dr. Krista Payne.

Back in just a moment.

Thanks for staying with us here on "The Journal".

Our guests are Dr. Wendy Manning, and Dr. Krista Payne from Bowling Green State University's National Center for Family & Marriage Research.

Dr. Payne, the topic we're gonna carry over in this section a little bit is, there's also a family profile on marriages to same-sex and different-sex couples, and what we're seeing there.

So, talk about that, and kind of the background of that, and things that have changed or haven't changed, or things that might surprise us, or maybe nothing's changed at all.

(Dr. Payne laughing) - Well, there's not really been a lot of time for change, because until June of 2015, federally, same-gender couples weren't allowed to get married.

But because we already had the Marriage Center established, we were able to jump in quite quickly and start measuring these trends.

And what we've found is, just like different-gender couples, they want to get married.

Marriage provides a lot of protections, over 1,000 different benefits to being married in the United States.

Which you might not always think about, one of those surprising things.

- Yeah.

Now, what would some of those be that we might not be aware of, or might not think are important.

- A lot of them have to do with taxes, but too, as you age, and we do have an aging population, there are certain rights and privileges that is only bestowed upon spouses.

So, when you have chronically-ill individuals, and HIPAA laws, and medical information, this is something that not all same-gendered couples have had the ability to actually... - The actual legal background, the legal authority, or the legal permission to do the things that a married spouse would have.

- Or Social Security benefits, or inheritance benefits, or veterans benefits, or immigration.

[Dr. Payne] There's many.

[Steve] There's thousands.

- Yeah, you said 1,000.

- Over 1,000.

- That's a whole topic in and of itself.

- [Dr. Payne] It is.

It really is, yes.

- And when you look at that, I think a lot of times we have presumptions about what's going on with marriage.

So, talk about what you found in here.

- Well, with marriage, in the United States, about two million marriages happen every year.

Of those two million, the most recent data, tell us about 60,000 of them, were two couples of the same gender.

They're not an insignificant share of those getting married.

And then, when we break it down and we look at it, it's about 4 in every 100 marriages are among same-gender couples.

It's a little bit more likely among female couples.

[Steve] Than male couples, okay.

- Yep, yep.

But about a third of female same-gender couples are married versus about a half of different gender.

So, while there are a lot of similarities, there's some differences.

- Now, when we look at age with regard to this, I know there's gotta be a huge amount of information there.

Do you see younger people more likely to be in same-sex relationships versus older people?

Or is there any connection at all with regard to age?

- Well, regarding marriage, same-gender couples tend to be a little bit older.

And the age gap too between the couples is a little bit wider.

So, among women who marry different-gendered partners, they're about 28 years old when they get married, whereas women who marry another woman are about 31 years old.

And then for men it's 35 versus 30.

And the gap is anywhere from four years to six years.

So, there are differences there.

- We're sort of at a historical high point in terms of the age at marriage for everyone in the United States for different-gender and same-gender couples.

So, that 28 and 30, when you asked at the beginning what surprises us, what surprises me is that every year that just keeps ticking up.

And I keep thinking maybe someday it'll level off.

- [Steve] It'll stop, yeah.

It'll plateau.

- It'll level off.

People used to get married in their early part of their twenties, and now they're getting married at the later part of their twenties.

- And that, as you said, that number is going, well, eventually you'll wake up one day and it'll be, oh, now it's the early thirties, or the mid thirties, with people, yeah.

- Well, in Europe it is.

And so, we're thinking it might move into the thirties, and so, as women, it just keeps shifting up, and so we see that among same-gender couples, so it's sort of interesting.

- And I know it's probably a simple question with a really complex answer.

Do we know why that is?

Even around the periphery of it in any way or not?

- We do know some things.

We know that there's this economic bar for marriage.

So, it used to be when individuals married, they married really before all those dense things happened, in young adulthood, they would marry before they got education, or they would marry before their jobs were really necessarily set.

And now, while most people say they do wanna get married, they're putting it off because they wanna finish their education, they want to be able to afford a nice wedding, they want to be able to buy their home, or have more secure housing, they want their career to be well established.

So, that's one thing that we have seen over time.

- Now, and one thing that I know we didn't really talk about this in preparation for this, with regard to when, and this is a whole different area, with regard to couples, whether same-sex, different-gender couples with regard to having children, because that's another number that seems to continue to go up, and I know that's not a topic we dwelled on a little bit, but is that something that you guys see too?

Or is that part of this whole patch that people are waiting later, or just deciding not to have children?

- Well, I mean, for all couples that we see a lot of delay not only in age at first marriage, but we see a delay in entry into parenthood.

And often, though, people will have children before they get married.

And so, I would say 25 years ago, the expectation was you get married and then you'd have children.

And there's been a reversal of that.

And so, about 40% of children are born in the United States outside of marriage.

And there's been growth in attitudes of people where they think it's okay to have children before you get married.

And a lot of that has to do with children that are born in cohabiting relationships, so couples that aren't yet married, but they are living together.

And before they might have decided to, upon pregnancy, decide to get married, where now they're not as in such a rush to get married.

- There's not the, I guess probably, the societal demand for that to happen, or impression that you must do that, which was prevalent probably more in the '50s, even into the '60s and '70s.

And I know when we look at some of this information, there were some similarities to same-gender marriages and what we're tracking with those and different-gender marriages.

So, again, to some degree it felt more alike than maybe different.

Am I overgeneralizing that?

- No, I would think that's a really good conclusion.

I mean, about half of them own homes, regardless of the gender composition, and a lot of them do have children.

We know about a third of same-gendered female families have children present, about a half, I mean, there is a difference, but there are a large number who do have children and are raising families, and socio-demographically, there's a lot of similarities as well.

So, yeah, I would have to agree.

- Yeah.

Well, it's one of those things too, I think, and a lot of topics that we talk about on the show that we sense because I think what we see in the media that there are lots of differences among all of these different populations, and, as you just said, you find out that, well, yeah, there are some, but not to the extent that we have been accustomed to believing or been been told.

When we come back, and we touched on a little bit too, about the difference between the number of people cohabitating, and that sort of thing as well, because there's been some change in the way that's taken place too, and I think that's an interesting topic because obviously you have parents who have expectations for their children over certain age, and maybe the children are saying, well, no, I'm not interested in getting married this soon, as we talked about a moment ago, so we can talk a little about that too, because that's obviously something that cuts across all of the generations and all of the age groups as well.

Back in just a moment with Dr. Wendy Manning, and Dr. Krista Payne from Bowling Green's National Center for Family & Marriage Research here on "The Journal".

You're with us here on "The Journal".

Our guests are Dr. Wendy Manning, and Dr. Krista Payne from Bowling Green State University's National Center for Family & Marriage Research.

One of the areas that probably weaves its way through a lot of these things is the pandemic.

So, when you started to do this research, what did you find the effects, or maybe a lack of effect, from that particular situation?

- Well, with the pandemic, one thing across many disciplines is data, we needed data to know what was going on.

And the Marriage Center has been archiving administrative counts of marriages and data at the county level since actually we started with data in the 1800s.

And we've been archiving those numbers.

And so, when the pandemic hit, we were able to pivot very quickly and turn to those data that we had been working so hard to archive, and to see if the pandemic had impacted marriages and divorces.

And there were a lot of assumptions.

You had talked about that before about different things.

And there's this idea that, well, everything shut down.

And our data did show that, that marriages did decline significantly, and so did divorces, because offices were closed, individuals couldn't even file.

- [Steve] You couldn't do the paperwork.

[Dr. Payne] Correct.

Correct.

[Steve] Even if you wanted to.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- Interesting.

[Dr. Payne] And then, as time went on, as the pandemic continued, as humans we started to adapt, and make changes.

And so, one of our research questions was, were these changes going to catch up with demand?

Was there still going to be demand?

Was there gonna be an influx of people running to get married once certain things were allowed?

[Steve] Because they, yeah.

- Right, right, right.

And so, what we were able to do is determine if there had been some type of correction, and we actually hadn't really found that, among all marriages.

So, those early-pandemic declines have remained, we're still tracking, so the project's ongoing, and so we're going to continue to look at that.

And then, with Chris Julian, our student we've mentioned before, we are actually collecting the number of marriages among same-gender couples as well.

And we don't have as much, again, but in 13 states, we were able to collect that information, and we found that they did decline, but not quite as much as those couples who marry that were of different gender.

[Steve] Oh, that's interesting.

- So, it's just interesting to see that there were slightly differential effects.

- Yeah.

And I guess it's curious because we hear the hope is that we'll go back to pre-pandemic whatevers.

[Dr. Manning] Right, right, right.

- And the thought would be, oh, people have waited to get married because venues weren't open, that sort of thing, but you're basically saying that we're not seeing this big wave come back of people who held off for two or three years.

Huh, interesting.

- Yeah, they haven't compensated for the loss.

So, there's been increases, but they still haven't recovered from the losses of marriages.

- Correct, correct.

- And the idea too, of the shutdown, and possible discord between couples when they're being forced to be in close proximity with one another.

(Steve laughing) And you could see, you could see [Steve] I shouldn't laugh, but familiarity breeds contempt, that old cliche.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- [Steve] But okay, got you.

- And too in economics.

So, economics are tied very heavily, we've already talked about that, to marriage and divorce decisions that individuals make.

And it's expensive to get divorced.

And so, when we see economic crises, we tend to see dips [Steve] Go back and... - for a little while.

And then, after the recovery begins, we might start to see upticks again.

And so, we're collecting that data to see if similar patterns pan out.

- Yeah.

So, a year from now, you might know something that right now looks like we haven't seen that wave come back through, but maybe it will, maybe it's just delayed, maybe a thought.

When you look at this scene, I know the profile talks about a decade of change in single, cohabitation, and married individuals, are we seeing changes in that because of the pandemic?

I mean, we talked about the fact that maybe people aren't getting married as much as we thought, to some degree, because of that.

But what do we see with regard to cohabitation?

Because, it used to be a really dirty word, and as we've talked about today, it's become a lot more prevalent in a lot of different ways.

So, what's our situation there?

- I think what we know about cohabitation is that about three quarters of folks have lived together before they get married.

So, it's not something that people are, people are less often just going straight into marriage, we call that direct marriage, so we see more often there's an indirect pathway into marriage.

We also see people are entering and leaving cohabitation a few times, so they call that serial cohabitation.

It's sort of unfortunate term.

(Dr. Payne laughing) But it's that people have started and ended a number of relationships in young adulthood, and that's probably appropriate developmentally in some ways to learn how to start and end relationships.

And so we see a lot of that, but a group that we haven't studied as much are people in middle age.

So, we focus a lot on young people, because we're interested in their entry into marriage, and entry into cohabitation.

- [Dr. Payne] And these adult roles.

- Yeah, how they're doing that, and then we're focused on a lot about older folks, and how they're faring.

And we're seeing our colleague Susan Brown and Ethan Lynn have done a fair amount of research about family change amongst people who are over age 50 and 60, so in the second half of life, what are the family changes?

But what's missing is sort of that meaty middle, so what are we doing in middle age?

And so, we're trying to do more work on that.

And what we're seeing is a growth in singlehood, and that's a group that's often ignored in a lot of research we have, our research is really marriage-centered.

- [Steve] Sure, it's couple-centered.

- Yes, we're very about what's happening, and I think an important area for new research is thinking about the variation in singlehood.

So, some people are living alone, some people are living with others, a lot of folks have children from relationships, some don't have any children, and they've never been married, some have been divorced.

So, there's a lot of different pathways into singlehood in middle-age, but it can have consequences as you move into your older years.

- Yeah.

Because one of the things I know when you look at being single, and again, it's an economic way of looking at it, is that, as you get older, because typically you would have family members around, as people got older, your grandparents, your parents, that sort of thing, there were sons, daughters, grandchildren, etc.

around.

That is an issue that has to be faced because if you have a lot of single people who are now in that older age group, the support system has to be totally different, and that raised a whole question of how are we prepared for that, if we've even thought about preparing for it.

- There is... - Yeah, go ahead, go ahead.

- There's some research on that, that Susan Brown has done on kindlessness, is the term she uses, and it's really about folks in their older years who don't have children, and they don't have siblings or spouses to help care for them, and so how will those folks navigate their older years when the demands for caregiving increase.

- Everything's gonna increase.

We've got just a moment or so.

If people wanna see more about this information, it's probably pretty simple to go find it, right?

So, tell us how easy it is.

- Well, you go to the website, Bowling Green State University, and you can actually just Google NCFMR, and it's really great because our profiles pop up, we get a lot of hits, so they're usually at the very top of the page for Google.

Or you can just go to our page, and right at the top, we have a new, freshly-designed web page.

- [Steve] I noticed that.

- Yeah, yeah.

They did such a great job.

But there's a button that says Family Profiles, you can click on that, and that gives you that long list.

[Steve] The full list.

- Or you can hit Resources By Topic.

So, like Wendy had mentioned before, we have a number of topics, and they range, pretty much anything having to do with family and marriage, if it's not on there.

(Dr. Payne laughing) - Let us know.

- Please.

Yes.

- [Steve] You'll be happy to research it.

- Yes, yes.

- Because we've touched on three or four things.

There's at least 20 on there, I think it may be more.

And that's just what we're seeing there.

And it is interesting, it gives us insight into what we think we know about this, and then we find out what we don't know about this.

And I think it's really important that we find out what we're not aware of.

So, appreciate, yeah.

- We all have, we all have families, right?

And so, we're an expert on our own families, but we don't necessarily know what's going on.

Yeah, yeah.

- Yeah.

Well, good.

Well, yeah, Dr. Wendy Manning, Dr. Krista Payne, thank you so much for being here.

You can check us out at wbgu.org.

You can watch us every Thursday night at 8:00 PM on WBGU-PBS.

We will see you again next time.

Good night, and good luck.

(upbeat music)