ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Thursday, November 18 2010

Among the poor, cohabitation rarely produces fairy-tale endings
By Colleen Carroll Campbell

Their nuptials may live up to "the wedding of the century" hype, but the engagement of Prince William and longtime girlfriend Kate Middleton had the air of an anticlimax when it was announced Tuesday. British tabloids trumpeted the news as a happy, if predictable, ending for the 28-year-old woman they nicknamed "Waity Katie," who met her prince nearly a decade before he popped the question. After living together off and on for years, the couple's decision to finally wed led even Prince Charles to crack that it's about time, since "they have been practicing long enough."

In many ways, their protracted courtship, casual cohabitation and plans for a splashy wedding to formalize a union already forged make Will and Kate the quintessential postmodern couple. Many college-educated, upper-middle-class men and women today follow a similar path to the altar, finding and moving in with Mr. or Mrs. Right long before they wed.

For these men and women, marriage comes at the end of a long list of "to-dos" that trump it: seeing the world, securing advanced degrees, climbing the career ladder, buying a home. Earlier generations regarded such goals as things you achieve while married, with the help and companionship of your spouse. Today, marriage increasingly is seen as the reward that comes at the end of all that striving. It is the big, white bow you tie atop all the professional accomplishments, financial stability and sexual intimacy you and your future spouse already have experienced.

Interesting, though, there is one item not typically on the pre-marital to-do list of today's educated, upwardly mobile young adults: parenthood. Cohabitation may have lost its stigma among educated elites, but most still consider marriage a prerequisite to parenthood. As a 2007 Pew Research Center study noted, college graduates and wealthier Americans are more likely to marry, less likely to divorce and less likely to bear children out of wedlock than those with less education and income.

The Pew study found a curious disconnect between elite behavior and attitudes, however. Despite being more likely to put love and marriage before the baby carriage in practice, wealthier and more educated Americans are less likely to recognize marriage's importance in principle.

"Adults with higher incomes and more education tend to be slightly less inclined than others to say that premarital sex and non-marital births are always morally wrong," the study found. "The college educated also are slightly less inclined than the less educated to say it is very important for couples to legally marry if they plan to spend their lives together." As for views on the social impact of unmarried childbearing and cohabitation, researchers found that "there are no more than minimal differences by education or income."

This habit of "walking right and talking left," as University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox has dubbed it, shields many cultural elites from the harshest effects of the laissez-faire sexual climate they champion. They can use their political and media influence to convince Americans that family structure makes no difference in child welfare — a flawed, feel-good message eagerly imbibed by less educated and poorer Americans who tend to be consumers rather than producers in our media ecosystem. Then they can return to their traditional families, never having to face in their own homes the fatherless children and single mothers whose struggles give lie to their facile claims.

Contrary to those claims, couples who live together before marriage experience higher rates of divorce and, unlike Will and Kate, many never walk down the aisle at all. As for children born to unmarried cohabiting couples, they are more likely to be poor, see their parents split up and experience unmarried parenthood and divorce themselves.

Given that four in 10 American children today are born to unwed mothers — a number that jumps to one in two for Hispanic children and three in four for African-American children — the messages that cultural elites send about marriage matter more than ever. It's time that the more privileged among us start preaching what they practice: the truth that families fare best when built on a marriage between mom and dad.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is a St. Louis-based author, former presidential speechwriter and television and radio host of "Faith & Culture" on EWTN. Her website is www.colleen-campbell.com.