Decline in Marriage Associated with the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States

Abstract

Despite the abundance of changes arising from the COVID-19 pandemic, little is known about how union formation, particularly marriage, has been affected. Using administration records - marriage certificates and applications - gathered from settings representing a variety of COVID-19 experiences in the United States, we compare counts of marriages in 2020 against those from before the pandemic in 2019. We find a dramatic decrease in year-to-date cumulative marriages in 2020 compared to 2019 in each case. We also find that marriage applications, a leading indicator of marriages, are substantially lower in the Seattle metropolitan area, a region affected early by the pandemic in the US, than they were in 2019. Together, these findings suggest marriage has likely declined in the United States following the outbreak of COVID-19 and that this decline may reflect more than a delay, such as might be caused by the temporary unavailability of government marriage certification.

Marriage and Divorce Decline during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Case Study of Five States

“…The overall pattern from March through June (data available for all five states) indicates shortfalls in marriages and divorces amounting to about 21,000 fewer marriages and 16,000 fewer divorces in these five states than would have been expected on the basis of state-level counts in March through June the prior two years. Our findings regarding decline in marriage are consistent with those of Wagner et al (2020), but Arizona stands out as a state that entered a nearly full marriage and divorce recovery. Although variation across states in marriage and divorce patterns is evident, the explanations are less clear.…”

“…The U.S. marriage and divorce rates have been on a declining trajectory (Reynolds 2020a, 2020b), but there is limited empirical evidence about levels during the pandemic. One study revealed marriage declines from March through July using administrative data in two states and two metropolitan areas (Wagner, Choi, and Cohen 2020). We expand on their work and present monthly numbers of marriages and divorces in 2018, 2019, and 2020 on the basis of provisional marriage and divorce data from the five states (Arizona, Florida, Missouri, New Hampshire, and Oregon) that published 2020 monthly vital statistics data.…”

Disaster, demographics, and vulnerability: Interrogating the long‐term effects of an extreme weather event

“…Studies such as the one carried out on the demographic consequences of Hurricane Katrina (Hamilton et al, 2009), Red River floods in North Dakota (Tong et al, 2011), temperature and precipitation shocks from 1993 to 2015 in Indonesia (Sellers & Gray, 2019), droughts of the mid‐seventeenth century in the Ebro Valley in Spain (Cuadrat et al, 2016), and the events that affected Japan and Italy during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Lin, 2010) point to a decrease in the number of births following the events. A decline in marriages was also observed in studies on the aftermath of major floods in Pakistan (Ahmed, 2018) or associated with the Covid‐19 pandemic in the United States (Wagner et al, 2020).…”

The Family Consequences of Terrorism: The Effects of the Tokyo Subway Sarin Attack on Marital Formation and Dissolution

“…They may positively or negatively affect these life-course transitions by inducing stress (Goldmann and Galea 2014), increasing solidarity (Bowlby 1969; Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski 1991), depressing economic conditions (Abadie and Gardeazabal 2003), or increasing perceived uncertainty (Aassve, Le Moglie, and Mencarini 2021; Mills and Blossfeld 2013). Consequently, the available evidence about their effects is mixed at best (e.g., Ahmed 2017; Cicatiello et al 2019; Cohan and Cole 2002; Cohan, Cole, and Schoen 2009; Deryugina, Kawano, and Levitt 2018; Nakonezny, Reddick, and Rodgers 2004; Stevenson and Wolfers 2007; Wagner, Choi, and Cohen 2020).…”