I have nothing against marriage (we just celebrated 30 years together) and I don't think the author does either. The problem isn't the institution itself but the outdated way that it is largely carried out. As the researcher I quoted said, ""I think that marriage as an institution has been a little bit slow to catch up with expectations for gender equality." The solution to that is not to do away with marriage, it's for men to get with the program that this is not the 1950s or even the 1980s and they need to participate in marriage as partners, not as kings of the hill. And because only a few men seem to be doing this, fewer and fewer women want to get married and the numbers plunge even further for women who have been married before. Having done that once and seeing how it's not really the "now you have arrived" milestone that our culture has long promised, they'd rather have independence and autonomy.
