Dating As a Single Parent

That doesn't mean that later marriage is a disaster: for the educated minority who are still living by the old rules, on time delay, the new marriage norms are mostly working out great. 

College graduates who wait until they are 30 to get married report an average annual income of about $50,000--$20,000 a year more than those who married before the age of 21. They also report arguing less frequently, and intensely, with their spouses.

 "In some ways the middle class has really cashed in on a form of marriage that we didn't see much of historically," says Kathryn Edin of Harvard's Kennedy School. She calls theirs "superrelationships," with high levels of rapport and satisfaction--not to mention income. 

The divorce rate for these relationships has plunged to levels not seen since the 1960s, and it may decline further. But there's a big potential fly in the ointment: not all of these people are getting established quickly enough to have all of the children they want. 

A 2011 survey showed that almost half of female scientists--and a quarter of the men--reported that their career had kept them from having as many children as they wished.

Meanwhile, less educated women who will never have the money for five rounds of IVF aren't running that risk; instead, they're choosing an even bigger risk: having a child before they're in a stable relationship. 

Fifty-eight percent of first births to those women now take place outside of marriage. And while the father is usually around at the birth, within five years, a substantial fraction of those relationships will have broken up. 

Since 1990, the age at first marriage has soared well above the age at first childbirth: the median age at which a woman has her first child is now a full year earlier than the median age at which she first marries, a phenomenon that a recent report from the National Marriage Project dubbed "The Great Crossover."

"When I look at their statistics, it's as if the college grads are living in a different society," says Andrew Cherlin of Johns Hopkins, an expert on family structure. And the college grads, unfortunately, are not the majority. 

The majority are the people without a four-year degree, for whom late marriage has combined with early parenthood to produce a crisis in family structure. The fragile, often fatherless family that used to be associated with the deepest urban poverty is increasingly becoming the norm for everyone except the educated: urban and rural, black and white, Northern and Southern.