It looks like there has been a gradual shift from the ‘romantic marriage’ to the ‘companionate marriage,’ meaning that people are increasingly choosing spouses at the outset who are more like best friends than passion-partners.


Doing so may lead to problems with attraction, but it also means those people are choosing partners based on qualities likely to promote long-term stability and satisfaction.

For the past two decades, the number of marriages stayed around 7 to 8 per 1,000 people a year.
But in 2020, the marriage rate was down to 5.1 per 1,000 people, the data shows.

The rate started to climb the next year, and by 2022, the number of marriages had reached 6.2 per capita and over 2 million in a year, according to the report.

In 2022, the divorce rate was 2.4 per 1,000 people. Although that isn’t the lowest it has ever been – in 2021, it was 2.3 – it continues a downward trend, according to the data.

By comparison, the rate of divorces in 2000 was 4 per 1,000, which means the current rate is a big decline from two decades earlier.

Source: CNN Health