Emerging from the shadow of divorce: Today’s youth slower to marry than previous generations

In a 1979 article in the Globe and Mail called “Did the family unit become the casualty of the seventies?” a bleak picture of what divorce had done to society was painted.

“There were runaway wives and mothers; children were kidnapped by divorced parents who didn’t have custody; middle-aged men going through what psychologists termed the male menopause walked out on their wives of 20 or more years and took up with much younger women,” said the Globe and Mail.

The article described children of divorced parents as “latch-key kids” because they lived in high-rise apartment buildings without parents waiting for them after school.

Barbara Mitchell, a sociology professor at UBC said she feels that the image of divorced families in the past wasn’t fair.

“A lot of these children were regarded as different. I think there was this stereotype that divorce would lead to all kinds of problems with children and family dysfunction, and kids would grow up to be delinquent criminals and have a lot of these psychological problems,” said Mitchell, who has studied family relations for 20 years.

Thirty years after the Globe and Mail article was written, being a kid of divorce is, for many, just being a part of the club.

Erica Bauer was 15 years old when her parents split up and she joined most of her friends who had already been through a family break-up.

“When I was in elementary school, most of my friends’ parents were getting divorced then and I was one of the only people who had parents together,” said Bauer, now 23 and living with her boyfriend. “When they ended up getting divorced, I was just like everybody else.”

According to StatsCan, divorce hit its peak in 1987, around the time many generation Xers were kids and Ys were being born. In that year, according to StatsCan, there were 96,200 divorces. The laws for divorce were softened in 1985, when the Divorce Act was revised and anyone was allowed a divorce as long as they could prove they had lived apart for one year.

Divorce became an everyday occurrence, and with that the opportunity arose for generation X and Y to do what other generations couldn’t: break with tradition.

Instead of going from dating to marriage, many people started taking a middle-step by living together in a common-law relationship before marrying or choosing not to marry at all.

In 1991, according to StatsCan, there were 719,000 common-law couples in Canada, and in 2006 the number nearly doubled to 1,377,000.

“I don’t think that the institution of marriage is going away and the ideal of wanting to marry somebody for a lifetime, you know till death do us part … I think most young people still ideally want that,” said Mitchell, who sees co-habitating before marriage and common-law relationships as the way of the future.

The average age of marriage has gone from 24 for women and 27 for men in 1968, to 32 for women and 34 for men in 2005, reports StatsCan.

Colin Macdougall, 25, can’t envision himself getting married, but doesn’t write it off. Macdougall was 17 years-old when his parents divorced, something he says affects the way he thinks about marriage and relationships.

“I think it is probably right for some people, but I think it’s a little different in this day and age to get married,” said Macdougall. “People have different values and I think people are beginning to understand that they don’t need to be in marriages as much anymore.”

In 2005 there were were 71,000 divorces according to StatsCan. A 26 percent decrease that Mitchell feels can be attributed to generation
X and Y’s cautious attitude towards marriage, a trait which distinguishes them from their parents.

However, Mitchell said that even with all the precautions, marital instability is a common trait among those from divorced parents.

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