Cohabitation Has Become a Rural Problem

When we think about rural communities, we tend to conjure up images of faith, large families, friendly neighbors, and conservative values—the exact opposite of the trends that mark our nation’s urban centers these days.

Unfortunately, as Bob Dylan once famously sang, “The times they are a-changin … ” And just as the times changed in urban America several decades ago regarding marriage and family, they have changed in rural communities, as well.

Over the past three decades, marriage rates have actually fallen further among rural women between the ages of 15 and 44 than among urban women of the same age—from 55% in 1998 to 33% in 2018, according to two sociology professors writing for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

While there was also a decline among urban women, as many of us would expect, the marriage drop among rural women was even lower.

So, what has caused the precipitous drop in rural marriages? According to Shelley Clark, a sociology professor at Canada’s McGill University, and Matthew M. Brooks, a sociology professor at Florida State University, the answer is simple: increased cohabitation.

Many rural women are choosing to cohabit rather than marry, with 19% of rural women involved in a cohabitating, non-married relationship compared to 14% of urban women (who often choose to remain single or if they get married, do so at an older age).

Rural women still have more children than urban women, though the number has decreased, overall. Increasing percentages of rural children are born out of wedlock (54% for rural children compared to 34% for urban children).

Clark and Brooks focus on the economic consequences for rural communities, and advocate for government investment in rural transportation. Yet the implications of their research for rural America and our society go beyond dollars and cents, and no amount of government dollars or infrastructure investment can change human behavior. Instead, it often subsidizes the continuation of bad decisions.

In our book, “American Restoration: How Faith, Family, and Personal Sacrifice Can Heal Our Nation,” my co-author Craig Osten and I write about the devastating consequences that have now affected generations of children in rural communities as marriage and families decline.

Family disintegration often leads to social regression such as drug dependance – with much of it occurring in rural communities.

One tragic example is the number of babies born with drug dependencies because their mothers were addicted to drugs. In 2016, The New York Times reported that 15 out of every 100 babies in poorer areas, such as the Appalachians, are born addicted to opioids.

Most tellingly, the two states where the opioid crisis has been the most acute—Kentucky and West Virginia—have seen the sharpest declines in marriage rates decline over the past four decades.

Drug addictions rarely lead to good decisions in life.

The generational poverty of opioid addiction will likely create a caste system, as Robert Rector of The Heritage Foundation predicted in 2010. Children born in cohabitating homes—or even worse, drug-dependent homes—are more likely to engage in substance abuse than those in stable, two-parent, married (mother and father) homes.

When these children grow up, they continue the cycle. They do not marry, as they have little idea of what marriage is, and they bring their drug dependency with them, creating another generation of children trapped in the cycle of family dysfunction—a cycle that Clark and Brooks have documented.

The result, as Craig and I write, is a chasm between those who are born healthy and are nurtured in a two-parent home, and those who emerge from the womb with three strikes against them: drug-addicted, trapped in poverty, and lacking an essential parent. The cycle just gets worse as time goes on.

Thus, while rural America may be more conservative (as voting trends indicate), it is a conservatism not based on faith and family but driven more by despair and desperation because of the decline of marriage and the family and the resulting devastation.

That is the downward spiral that Clark and Brooks have seen but unfortunately do not offer a solution for. While there may be no quick and easy solution to solve a problem that has been decades in the making, a start would be reemphasizing the values traditionally associated with rural America that I mentioned at the beginning.

The start of such a change will come from rewarding good decisions instead of subsidizing bad ones. Only by providing the right incentives can we spare succeeding rural generations from the cycle of cohabitation, poverty, and drug dependency. As marriage rates begin to climb once again in rural America, it is my belief that social pathologies will decrease as a result.