by Stacy Falk

With Valentine’s Day next week, love may be in the air, but fewer Americans are choosing to express it by taking the proverbial trip down the aisle. In fact, with U.S. marriage rates at an all-time low, modern iconoclasts are rewriting the rules on that once revered institution.

While some point to economics and others blame changing social norms, there are actually numerous economic and social factors at play, said Keri Brandt, sociology professor at Fort Lewis College.

 “People are more suspicious of marriage than ever before,” Brandt said. “It’s more acceptable to put off getting married until later in life or not at all.”
Hence the U.S Census Bureau reporting a steep decline in marriages in the last 10 years which was directly proportional to the rapid increase of cohabiting couples, primarily between the ages of 24-34.

For many of today’s brides to be, like  Brooke Herb, of Durango, getting married is more of an afterthought than the means to an end sought by their mothers and grandmothers.

While following her pink map titled “how to plan your wedding” through a maze of wedding-related everything, Herb, 27, said she never imagined she’d find herself among the other 200 registered shoppers at the recent Durango Wedding Expo.

“I had no idea he was going to propose,” she said. “It knocked my socks off.”

Herb said she had been living with her now fiancé for the last four years, and their biggest commitment talk involved buying a house together; the topic of marriage never came up.

Local wedding planner Celeste Greene, 25, said in her three years business has remained steady, but she wouldn’t be surprised if things changed. She said she is starting to clue into the national marriage trends but feels Durango is somewhere in between.

Coming from the South, Greene said it’s considered odd if you’re not married by the time you’re 21. Yet after spending six months in California, she picked up on a completely opposite vibe. “The fact that women put their careers before marriage and children was very noticeable,” she said.

According to the Population Reference Bureau, marital statistics are subject to regional trends and most often run counter to unemployment rates. Many states in the Northeast and Southwest have experienced a bigger decline in marriage compared to the Midwest and Mountain West because of unstable economic conditions and other social demographics such as the rise of women’s income relative to men’s.

While national statistics show an increase in younger couples cohabiting instead of getting hitched, in Durango, it’s a mixed bag.

A 2010 Colorado demographics study shows the number of never-married males and females in Durango significantly higher in the rest of the state and the country, with 26 percent of males in Durango in the never-married category compared to 15 percent nationwide. At the same time, the study also showed Durango to have slightly higher divorce rates on a national average.

Furthering the marriage gap, processed marriage certificates in La Plata County took a big fall in the early ’90s, from 776 in 1990 to 578 in 1995. The numbers have since remained relatively stable, with a slight decline each year, yielding 529 marriages in 2011. These numbers, however, do not take into account whether or not the couples live in La Plata County, keeping in mind that Durango is a popular destination wedding town. Also keeping in mind that the population has been on the rise.

One local couple bucking the trend is Aaron Schenk, 30, and Liz Miller, 28, who sealed the deal last summer. However, like many of today’s couples, they married only after cohabiting for four years. Miller said living together for at least two years before even considering marriage was crucial. “It was the next step of committing to the relationship for me,” Schenk said. “There was no financial motivation, and I am not religious, it just felt right.”
Miller said she never placed any pressure on her husband about wanting to get married and that the proposal, on a Grand Canyon river trip, came as a shock. “I’ve never been ‘that girl’ that’s dreamed about getting married forever, and I was really laid back about the whole thing.”
Schenk said he thinks most of his unmarried friends who are now living together will eventually get married. “It seems like once a couple in a group of friends gets married, they all start getting married.”

Also taking the cohabitation route are Durango residents Braeanne Wyrostek, 28, and Larry Craig, 32, who have been in a relationship for the last nine years and lived together for the past six. However, they both agree there is no desire to officially tie the knot.

“We really haven’t cared to get married because we feel so happy where we are,” Wyrostek said. “We just see so many people get married and then get divorced.”

They agree that there are challenges to living together, but they are always able to work it out. “Girlfriends make the best roommates,” Craig said.
And it’s not just the lack of desire that plays a role in deciding to get married, there’s the financial commitment, too. Craig said paying for a wedding would put financial strain on the relationship. The couple keeps finances separate and splits everything down the middle, although, Craig joked, he could get his teeth cleaned on his “wife’s” time if he were to get her health benefits. “I really haven’t wanted to find out what marriage will do to our relationship,” Wyrostek said.

Chessa Gill, a nondenominational reverend, has been marrying people in Durango since 1995. She said the number of weddings she conducts hasn’t shown much of a change, remaining around 30-40 per year. But at the same time, Gill is aware of the growing trend of cohabiting.

“There is a fear around getting married,” she said. “The level of commitment goes really deep when making that decision.”

As a minister, Gill said she is old-fashioned in that she believes marriage is a step that should be honored. But she also respects that everyone has a different philosophy on what symbolizes a committed relationship.

And when committed relationships crumble, the married ones are perhaps the hardest to put back together.

“It’s really easy to get married but it can be very hard to stay married,” said Wanda Ellingson, a social worker for the past 30 years. “Working out marital problems takes a lot of time and investment that many people don’t have the patience for.”

Ellingson, who is also a clinical associate professor at the University of Denver’s Durango-based social work graduate program, said the latest trend makes it an interesting and complicated time to be in the field.

“Our notion of family has changed so much that people are having a hard time wrapping their minds around the fact that the heterosexual nuclear family, that is the mom, dad, kids and dog, are now the minority,” she said.

And with all the socially accepted examples of once-taboo topics such as dysfunctional families and failed marriages, it’s no surprise that people don’t want to tie the knot with rings and white dresses. “Till death do us part” has been replaced with “As long as we’re happy.”

It’s one thing to decide not to get married, but its another to not get divorced.

“People are staying in marriages and living emotionally divorced lives,” Ellingson said. “Couples are opting to coexist because it’s a lot of work to make it work.”

Although divorce rates in Colorado saw a slight decline three to four years ago, in the wake of the recession, they are once again on the rise, according to district court records. In La Plata County, 249 people filed for divorce in 2011, a nearly 10 percent increase from 229 in 2010.
Ellingson, who’s been married for 37 years, says that within her peer group she is one of the few who is still married and finds that her friends are more surprised when couples are still married rather than divorced.

“We’re living in a really interesting time in the evolution of partnerships,” Ellingson said. “What’s happening to relationships and more so what’s happening to love?”