article_snippet: (CNN)The collapse of marriage in our poorest communities -- and its tragic impact -- is a familiar story.
article_snippet: But increasingly, marriage is becoming a marker of class privilege in America, something increasingly reserved for the affluent.
article_snippet: The reality is that the retreat from marriage is pervading the working middle class -- the two-thirds of Americans without a college degree.
article_snippet: Over the past several decades, the norm of marriage has eroded across all economic and educational classes, but much less among the elite," the norm of marriage write.
article_snippet: But for millions of middle- and lower-class Americans, marriage is increasingly beyond reach, creating more fractured and difficult family lives, more economic insecurity for single parents, less social mobility for those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder, more childhood stress, and a fraying of our common culture.
article_snippet: True, overall U.S. marriage rates have fallen from 72% of U.S. adults in 1960 to just 51% in 2012, according to The Economist.
article_snippet: Marriage in America, it seems, is becoming another luxury item for economic elites to enjoy.
article_snippet: Declining marriage rates may not be concerning on Declining marriage rates own, but while Americans are forgoing marriage, Americans are not forgoing childbearing," say Isabel Sawhill and Joanna Venator of the Brookings Institution.
article_snippet: Some see the decline of marriage as stemming from a tectonic cultural shift -- the rise of feminism and the surge of women into work -- that has blurred the old division of familial labor between male breadwinners and female homemakers.
article_snippet: Today, a record number of Americans -- one in five adults 25 and older -- have never been married.
article_snippet: In fact, researchers say aspirations to marriage are as high as ever, but the practical barriers are getting harder to surmount.
article_snippet: Intriguingly, the four authors point to the one cultural shift that's bucking the trend toward diminishing demand for weddings -- the public's dramatic turnaround on same-sex marriage.
highlights_snippet: Retreat from marriage is pervading the working middle class .
  
highlights_snippet: Marriage in America is becoming another luxury item for economic elites, Marriage in America says .