SANTA ANA, Calif. – At a Mass celebrating World Marriage Day today, Bishop Tod D. Brown will honor couples for their long-term commitment to marriage.

The event recognizes the importance the Catholic Church places on its sacrament of marriage. It also underscores church leaders’ concern about the downward trend in the nation’s marriage rate since 1970.

“These alarming statistics highlight the importance of World Marriage Day and the Catholic Church’s role in encouraging people to commit to one another and enter into the sacrament of marriage,” Brown said.

He’s not alone in his alarm.

Controversy arose when a recent New York Times story analyzed Census figures and concluded that in 2005 married couples became a minority of all American households for the first time.

Critics said the article was a misleading attack on marriage based on statistics that included females age 15 to 18 who were living with parents and women whose husbands were away in the military or imprisoned.

Beyond the Times’ story, other research shows a nearly 50 percent drop in the annual number of marriages per 1,000 unmarried females 15 and older from 1970 to 2004.

The reasons vary: more women delay marriage for college and career, an increase in cohabitation, fewer remarriages after divorce and the longer life span of widows.

Some people may have felt threatened by the article’s implication that marriage no longer has the hegemony it once did in society, said Pepper Schwartz, professor of sociology at the University of Washington in Seattle.

“It used to be an institutional given, and people had huge pressure to marry, and if they didn’t, they were open to criticism,” she said. “Women in particular used to have really no other location in the world except marriage. People would have thought it was a flaw. There was no way to be single.”

Still, marriage is not going away.

“People haven’t given up on the idea of marriage,” said Charles Hill, a psychology professor at Whittier College. “Typically people that get divorced remarry on the average within five years. And cohabiting is mostly a stage on the way to marriage.”

The legal and financial benefits are strong incentives to tie the knot. So is the stability it can provide when raising children.

“It’s a way of making public a private commitment. That public commitment confers a lot of pressure on people to stay together,” Hill said. “Once you’re ready for that kind of commitment, then you want your spouse to be committed to you. A public ceremony does that.”



Earl Fordham, who married his wife, Marlene, 46 years ago, said young people marrying today don’t have the commitment he and his wife share. “Married couples don’t want to work through their problems, so the easy way out is divorce,” he said.

Longtime married couples often cite the foundation and structure that marriage gives to their lives and to society.


“Marriage represents the foundation of the human family,” said Angelo Giambrone, 48, who has been married to his wife, Cindy, for 22 years. “It’s the center of society. It’s the center of building culture. It’s a safe and loving environment for future generations. Cindy’s my rib. She completes me.”

The Fountain Valley, Calif., couple help lead marriage encounters for the Diocese of Orange and will participate in World Marriage Day.

They recognize the pressures on couples and families in today’s society. Before their first marriage encounter, the Giambrones didn’t have many friends who had long marriages and were raising their children together, said Cindy Giambrone, 47.

“So many families are broken up,” she said. “I think of my own children and their friends, and how many times they’ll be sitting around the table, and my daughter, Carmen, is the only one who knows her dad. It’s so hard.”

Maria Lujan’s parents divorced when she was young, but that’s not stopping her from getting married in April to her fiance, Jake Lehmkuhl. Lujan, 25, and Lehmkuhl, 26, dated for five years before deciding to marry. They recently moved in together.

“I think I take it more seriously than a lot of people just because I’ve seen what divorce does to families, and it’s not pretty,” Lujan said. “It definitely is something that we didn’t rush into.”

Said Lehmkuhl: “I think the divorce figures are more reflective of the society we live in now than the institution of marriage itself. But it’s still important to me as far as making the commitment.”

For Dee Muir, 82, who was divorced at 29, raised her children as a single mom, and became a successful real estate broker, marriage is something she no longer needs.

She likes the eight-year relationship she has enjoyed with Chuck Neves, 74, just the way it is. They maintain separate households but see each other as often as possible and travel the world together.

“Marriage at my age? Why?” Muir said. “Life is a lot simpler without being tied down.”

A widower, Neves had been married for 42 years. He quit asking Muir to marry him about two years into their relationship when she made it clear to him that if he wanted to be married he should find someone else.

“Personally, well, marriage wouldn’t change anything for us other than the fact I’d be living with her,” he said. “I’d be with her all the time.”

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(Register columnist Jane Glenn Haas and staff photographers Michael Goulding and Leonard Ortiz contributed to this report.)

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(c) 2007, The Orange County Register (Santa Ana, Calif.).

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Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

AP-NY-02-10-07 1902EST