I like headlines proclaiming that demographically, married couple households no longer rule. I especially love it when they appear in prestigious publications such as the New York Times. So what's my problem this time? The Times and all the rest are about a half-decade late.

Five paragraphs into the story, in a parenthetical remark, the Times sort of admits that this is old news:

"(The proportion of married couples slipped below half over the past decade, but was first reported as a precise count by the 2010 Census.)"

I'm not even sure what this means. Before, they only reported an imprecise count? In any case, here's what Thomas F. Coleman said on p. 184 of Singlism: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Stop It, as he described his anticipation of the release of the new Census data back in 2006:

"Would this be the year of the unmarried majority? I had been watching and reporting on this data for several years, each year noticing how the percentage of unmarried households moved closer to 50 percent.

"There it was. This was the year. The 2006 report of the American Community Survey showed that 50.3 percent of American households were headed by unmarried people. Married couple households were now a minority at 49.7 percent."

Same Old Explanations, Same Old Denial

To account for the rise of households that do not include married couples, reporters trot out the same old explanations. Each is true, and important - but taken together, they provide an incomplete and perhaps misleading account of what is really happening.

For example, in relevant stories, you will read that:

• Adults are getting married later than they used to. (Translation: they will get married, they are just taking their time getting there.)
• Cohabitation is on the rise. (Translation: they are basically married, just not officially.)
• The aging population is growing, and they account for some of the increase in people living solo. (Translation: They already got married, but outlived their spouse. They are not choosing to be single.)

You will not read that some people - perhaps an ever-growing number of them - actually like their single lives. Now that contemporary society has created the conditions in which marriage is no longer necessary for economic survival or - for those who are interested - for parenting, or for having sex without stigma or shame, more people are embracing single life.

 You will read that statistically, most people eventually will marry. You will not read that Americans now spend more years of their adult lives unmarried than married.

The same thing happened last year, when the New York Times reported on the most recent Census Bureau findings documenting the growing number of single people. The story quoted some random person with a congregation who proclaimed that single people are just scared of marriage. No data - just his impression - but good enough for the New York Times.

Remember the Pew and Time magazine national survey showing that about 40 percent of Americans now believe that marriage is obsolete and that in answer to the question, "Do you want to get married," only 46 percent said yes? Time ran a cover story on the results, and ended up opining that marriage is like a luxury cruise ship, and really is the best vessel in a stormy sea: "...marriage is still the best avenue most people have for making their dreams come true."

That Time story, like the recent New York Times story, draws from the same old matrimaniacal sources and so ends up with talking about adult life in the same old narrow and tired ways. If you go to pro-marriage groups for your talking points in a story about the demise of married couple households, and never talk to anyone who has thought deeply about single life (including many of the 28 in this collection), you will never get a single-life perspective. As I noted in my critique of the Time story:

Only by taking a single-life perspective are you likely to see what's missing from the long, detailed article in Time: everyone other than couples and their children. Anything that might make a life purposeful and rewarding other than marriage and children. Nowhere in the story are we encouraged to think about who else might be in that vessel - or to recognize that even a single-person vessel may be well- and warmly-connected to other vessels nearby. There is no hint of the possibility that people may have passions other than marriage or children that motivate their lives, give them meaning, and provide plenty of solace in turbulent times. There is little sense that people are different - that for some, maybe marriage really is the best vessel, whereas others truly are single at heart.

The New York Times story ended its story by pointing out the two kinds of households that showed the greatest increase over the past decade: "women without husbands - up by about 18 percent" and "households whose occupants were not a family - up by about 16 percent." Now wouldn't that last statistic have been worth a bit of discussion? Are people finding roommates at random so they can afford a place to live, or are they valuing people other than a spouse and traditional family members? Are they making more room, in their lives and in their homes, for their friends?

There was, however, no such discussion. We did, though, get the predictable paragraph from the Marriage Mafia telling us that the retreat from marriage means that our kids are going to be doomed.