Why don't we get married anymore?

It is astonishing how complete the transformation of public morality has been with regard to marriage. People may speak of ‘Victorian’ values but the idea that having children out of wedlock was less than ideal was still around in the Seventies and while it’s hard to see extra-marital co-habiting as anything other than natural and desirable today you do not have to go too far back to find a time when it wasn’t.
Marriage is, at best, an excuse for a party and, at worst, something to be avoided at all costs because it curtails our ‘freedom’. Relationships are thus by definition almost wholly temporary with one or both partners keeping their options open even after having children. To flee is easier than fighting and to flee from an informal relationship is even easier. It’s not exactly rocket science. Factor in the statistical evidence of children from broken homes being far more likely to suffer from everything from drug abuse to teenage pregnancy and you have a complete, no-brainer. Why, then, does it still seem so jarring, so old-fashioned, and so controversial to suggest that we need to re-establish marriage as the gold standard of relationships. There will be casualties, of course, but not as many as we have now.