"How We Mate" by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, in City Journal (Summer 1999), Manhattan Inst., 52 Vanderbilt Ave., New York, N.Y. 10017.

Laments about the decline of marriage and the traditional family have almost become a tradition themselves in recent years, but Whitehead, author of the influential 1993 Atlantic Monthly article, "Dan Quayle Was Right," holds out little hope that the decline will be reversed. "A fundamental and probably permanent change in the way we mate" has taken place, she contends.

"Though the majority of Americans will marry at least once," Whitehead reports, "the marriage rate among unmarried adults has nevertheless declined by a third between 1960 and 1995." Cohabitation is now the rule rather than the exception. Two-thirds of the young adults born between 1963 and 1974, according to Whitehead, "began their partnered lives through cohabitation rather than marriage," compared with only 16 percent of men and seven percent of women born between the mid-1930s and early 1940s. Seemingly vanished are many of the rituals of romantic courtship. "By the time they leave their teens," says Whitehead, "many single young women have experienced at least one round of [sexual] hookup-breakup, and they carry its emotional baggage" into their twenties, as each new relationship "starts out at a lower level of trust and commitment than the one before."

While "living together" was pioneered by privileged college students during the 1960s and ’70s, today it is more common among 25- to 39-year-olds who lack a college degree. By the 1980s, 45 percent of female high school graduates were opting for cohabitation as a first union, compared with 24 percent of female college grads.

Among African Americans, cohabitating unions often begin earlier and are much less likely to lead to marriage than such unions among whites. Those black couples who do marry—as portrayed in such popular movies as Waiting to Exhale (1995)—have very high rates of divorce, and, says Whitehead, "those who stick it out have strikingly high rates of marital dissatisfaction."

In the evolving new mating ritual, in Whitehead’s view, "men and women can pursue their reproductive destinies with only minimal involvement with each other." At first, both sides seem to benefit: "men get sex without the ball and chain of commitment and marriage; women get a baby without the fuss and muss of a man around the house." Women’s economic independence and the pill have encouraged women to accept this new deal. Today, 53 percent of teenage girls think it is "a worthwhile life-style" to have a baby without getting married. Among teenage boys, when asked their views on dealing with an unwed girl’s pregnancy, 59 percent said that rather than marriage, adoption, or abortion, the best option was for her to have the baby and the father to help with support.

Such loose arrangements give men the freedom to walk away at any time, leaving women to raise the children. Even women who opt for single motherhood, according to survey responses, often rethink their choice by the time their children reach the age of six, particularly those with sons. It is far easier for men to find the situation that suits them, and many opt for a pattern of serial monogamy, sometimes involving marriage or remarriage, but more often not. Except for a lucky few in the upper-middle class, women are more often left embittered and alone, struggling to work and raise children on their own. In the end, the new mating pattern, says Whitehead, "which began with the promise of enlarged happiness for all, generates a superabundance of discontent, pain, and misery, something that should be a matter of concern to a society as solicitous of adult psychological well-being as ours."