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

Decline in Marriage Associated with the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States. Brandon G. Wagner, Kate H. Choi, Philip N. Cohen. Socius, December 29, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023120980328

Abstract: In the social upheaval arising from the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, we do not yet know 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, the authors compare counts of recorded marriages in 2020 against those from the same period in 2019. There is a dramatic decrease in year-to-date cumulative marriages in 2020 compared with 2019 in each case. Similar patterns are observed for the Seattle metropolitan area when analyzing the cumulative number of marriage applications, a leading indicator of marriages in the near future. Year-to-date declines in marriage are unlikely to be due solely to closure of government agencies that administer marriage certification or reporting delays. Together, these findings suggest that marriage has declined during the COVID-19 outbreak and may continue to do so, at least in the short term.

Keywords marriage, COVID-19, administrative data

Conclusions

The COVID-19 pandemic and policies to curb the spread of the virus have profoundly affected society. This article contributes to this emerging body of research a description of short-term marriage pattern changes following the onset of COVID-19. We find that fewer people are marrying in 2020 than in 2019. Observing this pattern in a variety of different settings, including a state with a limited governmental intervention (Florida), a geographically isolated state that took strong quarantine measures (Hawaii), and a large metropolitan area (DFW), suggests that this may be a common experience across the United States. Furthermore, we find a persistent deficit in marriage applications in a metropolitan area six months after the first outbreaks were noted. Taken together, our results indicate a steep decline in marriage formation in the United States following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. This decline has thus far shown few signs of stopping, or even slowing, and leading indicators are consistent with continued declines relative to prepandemic levels.

The magnitude of the decline is too big to attribute solely to the temporary shock in the availability of marriage certification (i.e., closed governmental offices). Many local governments, including those included in this sample, continued to process marriage application throughout the pandemic. For example, in one large county in the Dallas MSA, Tarrant County (with a 2019 population of 2.1 million), marriage applications were processed every business day throughout the governor’s emergency declaration. Even in areas with more restrictive government mandates (e.g., shelter-in-place orders), restrictions have been limited in duration, resulting in relatively minor restrictions to access in governmental services like marriage licensing.

This gap is also not solely attributable to unprocessed marriage licenses. Lags between marriages and our data collection are sufficient to minimize this threat. For marriages in the DFW area, the delay between August 2020 marriages and our data collection is consistent with less than 2.5 percent undercounted marriages on the basis of the previous year’s processing timelines (Supplemental Figure 2). The actual undercount is likely even smaller because prior months are even more complete and administrative processing appears to be faster in 2020 than it was in 2019 (Supplemental Table 1), possibly because of reduced caseload. Counts of marriages in Florida are also unlikely to be dramatic undercounts. Comparing June 2020 marriages on the basis of provisional reports collected in September and October, only 21 (0.2 percent) additional marriages were added to the count of the latter, suggesting a stability of the count as we would expect given few unreported marriages. Finally, the decline in marriage applications we observe in Seattle suggests that the difference in marriages we observe between 2020 and 2019 is likely due, at least in part, to fewer couples’ seeking to marry.

Although marriages have declined in the aggregate, this outcome could have arisen from two distinct mechanisms that we are unable to differentiate. Many couples may have simply postponed marriages because of COVID-19-induced barriers to marriages, including inaccessible public services (such as county clerk offices), shuttered facilities (such as churches), travel restrictions, and the like. For others, the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic may result in foregone marriages. Researchers have documented that social shocks can produce declines in births, only some of which are recouped after postponement (Currie and Schwandt 2014), but whether such a process occurs in the context of marriage remains an open question. The extent to which delayed marriages represent a temporary delay or foregone unions will likely depend on the strength of the relationships, the duration of the pandemic, mortality rates among young adults, and other social factors, including the size of the economic fallout from COVID-19. As an institution, marriage has important implications for the well-being and health of couples and their offspring (McLanahan and Jacobsen 2015), individual behaviors (e.g., Wagner 2019), and legal protections for partners. Therefore, understanding the impact of COVID-19 on marriage formation not only showcases how the pandemic has, even if temporarily, upended key dimensions of our social life, it also highlights a wide array of potential effects of COVID-19 on adults and children. We recommend that future research with more long-term data address the extent to which these missing marriages have been delayed rather than foregone and identify the mechanisms contributing to this effect, irrespective of its duration.

Although the tenor of the findings is unmistakable, we should be clear about their implications. First, though we document a decline in the number of marriages following COVID-19, this analysis should not be taken to mean that the pandemic has upended marriage as a social institution. Our research offers the first view of how the year-to-date cumulative number of marriage transitions has changed over a short period of time. The preference for marriage among Americans been historically robust (Cherlin 2009), so future research would be necessary to explore whether the COVID-19 pandemic may have shifted the desirability, content, or meaning of marriages for those who experience them. Second, the counts of marriages we report are indicative of marriage trends but may differ slightly from final counts of marriages in these locations. As discussed above, these data are unlikely to change substantially, but early-access administrative data are inherently provisional and subject to subsequent revisions. Third, although our data cover approximately 10.4 percent of the United States population, we should be cautious in generalizing the observed decrease in marriage, because U.S. jurisdictions have varied widely in terms of pandemic experience (CDC COVID-19 Response Team 2020) and government response (Hale et al. 2020). We are also unable to disentangle the possible causes for the observed decrease in marriage. The COVID-19 pandemic has included covarying experiences: health, policy, economic, and social. In this article, we demonstrate the decrease in marriages following the outbreak of COVID-19, but future work should seek to explain the cause for the observed declines. Finally, this article represents only a first description of the short-term impacts of COVID-19 on marriage in the United States. Future work should seek to extend this description, not only geographically but further in time as the pandemic, and its response, continues to unfold.

Nonetheless, our study offers a first glimpse at the dramatic decline in the number of marriages in a variety of different settings across the United States, with varying experiences and responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. It also contributes insights to our understanding of the impact COVID-19 has had on social life. Although it is unclear whether this decline will represent a temporary delay in marriage timing or an exacerbation of the long-term trend in marriage decline, what is clear is that marriage, like many other dimensions of our social life, has been dramatically influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic.