The Black Divorce Rate Hides a More Devastating Number: The Never-Married Rate

When America discusses the state of Black marriage, it reaches, almost reflexively, for the divorce rate. The divorce rate is a comfortable subject — it is high for everyone, it can be discussed without racial specificity, and it implies that the institution is at least being attempted. Divorce presupposes a wedding. It presupposes a commitment that was made and then broken, a promise that was offered and then withdrawn. There is tragedy in that, certainly, but there is also a record — evidence that two people stood before witnesses and declared their intention to build a life together, however that intention was eventually betrayed. But the number that should arrest our attention, the number that transforms the conversation from one about marital failure to one about structural catastrophe, is not the divorce rate. It is the never-married rate. And for Black Americans, that number is 36% — meaning that more than one in three Black adults has never married at all. Among white Americans, the figure is approximately 16%. Among Asian Americans, roughly 17%. No other demographic group in the United States approaches the never-married rate of Black Americans, and the consequences of this disparity are written across every measure of economic well-being, child development, and community stability in the country.

This is not a story about choice, though choice is a component of it. It is not a story about freedom from an outdated institution, though some will frame it that way. It is a story about a set of conditions — economic, structural, historical, and cultural — that have combined to make marriage functionally inaccessible for a large proportion of Black adults, and about the consequences that flow from that inaccessibility into the lives of children who had no say in the matter. The never-married rate is the door through which the most devastating outcomes for Black children enter, and the fact that America would rather discuss divorce — a less uncomfortable topic, a more racially universal one — is itself a symptom of the evasion that has characterized this conversation for sixty years.

The Arithmetic of Never

The distinction between divorce and never-marrying matters because the consequences are different in kind, not merely in degree. A person who marries and divorces has, at some point, participated in the economic and social institution of marriage: the pooling of income, the sharing of household expenses, the accumulation of joint assets, the tax advantages, the access to spousal benefits. Even after divorce, some of these advantages persist. A person who never marries has never had access to any of them.

The Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances makes the economic dimension visible. The median net worth of a married couple in the United States is approximately $284,000. The median net worth of a never-married individual is approximately $8,000. For Black never-married individuals, the median is lower still — often measured in the hundreds of dollars, an amount so small that the word “wealth” becomes a cruel misnomer. The never-married person is not merely poorer than the married person. The never-married person occupies a different economic universe, one in which the concept of generational wealth transfer — the mechanism by which middle-class families sustain themselves across generations — does not exist because there is nothing to transfer.

Over a lifetime, the wealth gap between married and never-married individuals compounds with the relentlessness of interest accruing on a debt. Thomas Shapiro, at Brandeis University, calculated that the median wealth of married white families is approximately thirty-one times the median wealth of single Black women. That ratio is driven not only by racial discrimination in income and asset-building but by the simple, structural fact that married households accumulate wealth through mechanisms unavailable to single individuals: dual income, shared housing costs, employer-sponsored insurance through a spouse, and the tax code’s systematic preference for married filers.

“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”
— James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name, 1961

The Children of Non-Marriage

Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, in their landmark study at Princeton, tracked the outcomes of children raised in various family configurations and concluded that children who never experience a two-parent household have the worst outcomes on virtually every measure — worse than children of divorce, worse than children of widowhood, worse even than children raised in high-conflict two-parent homes. The reason, as McLanahan documented, is that the never-married household typically lacks not merely the father’s income but the entire institutional apparatus that marriage creates: the joint investment in the child’s future, the two-adult supervisory capacity, the economic stability that permits planning beyond the next paycheck, and the relational model that teaches the child what sustained partnership looks like.

For Black children, the never-married rate translates directly into the child poverty rate. Among Black children living with never-married mothers, the poverty rate exceeds 50%. Among Black children living with married parents, it is approximately 11%. The gap is not explained by income alone — married households are more stable, more predictable, and more capable of weathering the economic shocks that push vulnerable families into poverty. A job loss in a married household is a crisis. A job loss in a single-parent household is a catastrophe. And the difference between crisis and catastrophe, for a child, is the difference between disruption and deprivation, between a difficult year and a damaged life.

Andrew Cherlin, the sociologist at Johns Hopkins whose work on marriage and family structure has defined the field for three decades, documented in The Marriage-Go-Round that American children experience more family transitions — parents entering and exiting the household, new partners arriving and departing — than children in any other Western country. For children of never-married mothers, these transitions are more frequent and more disruptive, because the relationships that produce them are, by definition, less institutionally anchored. A marriage creates legal obligations, financial entanglements, and social expectations that slow down the process of dissolution. A non-marital relationship can end with a slammed door, leaving the child to adapt, again, to the absence of an adult who was present yesterday and gone today.

The Intergenerational Transmission of Non-Marriage

Perhaps the most alarming dimension of the never-married crisis is its self-perpetuating nature. Children who grow up in never-married households are themselves significantly less likely to marry as adults. This is not genetic. It is observational. A child who has never witnessed marriage — who has never seen two adults commit to each other through difficulty, navigate conflict within a structure of permanence, and model for their children what sustained partnership requires — does not develop the internal template that makes marriage imaginable as a personal possibility. The institution becomes abstract, theoretical, something that happens to other people in other communities.

This intergenerational transmission operates through multiple channels simultaneously. The first is economic: children raised by never-married parents are more likely to experience poverty, less likely to attend college, and less likely to achieve the economic stability that makes them attractive marriage partners. The second is relational: without models of healthy marriage, they are less equipped to form and maintain the kind of relationships that lead to marriage. The third is cultural: in communities where the never-married rate is high, the social expectation of marriage erodes, and what was once the norm becomes the exception, and what was the exception becomes inconceivable.

The result is a self-reinforcing cycle that deepens with each generation. In 1960, the never-married rate among Black adults was approximately 10%. By 1980, it was 21%. By 2000, it was 32%. By 2022, it was 36%. The trajectory has moved in only one direction for six decades, and at no point during that period has any significant public policy initiative, any cultural campaign, any institutional effort attempted to reverse it. The silence is not neutral. It is an active choice to accept a trajectory that produces, with demographic certainty, increasing child poverty, decreasing wealth accumulation, and deepening community instability.

The Difference Between Single by Choice and Single by Circumstance

It is important, at this point, to distinguish between the person who chooses not to marry and the person for whom marriage is functionally unavailable. The former is exercising a legitimate personal preference that requires no justification and deserves no criticism. The latter is constrained by a set of conditions — the incarceration of potential partners, the economic collapse of marriageable male employment, the educational attainment gap, the cultural devaluation of commitment — that are not individual choices but systemic realities.

The conflation of these two categories has been one of the most damaging features of the contemporary conversation about marriage. When the never-married rate is discussed as if it reflects the free choices of autonomous individuals, the structural forces that produce it become invisible, and the policy interventions that might address those forces become politically impossible. Nobody proposes solutions for a problem that has been redefined as a choice. Nobody allocates resources to address conditions that have been reframed as preferences. The language of autonomy, intended to protect individual dignity, becomes a mechanism for institutional neglect.

Surveys consistently show that the vast majority of never-married Black adults want to marry. Pew Research data indicates that among unmarried adults who have never married, Black respondents are as likely as white respondents to say that they would like to marry someday. The gap is not in desire. It is in opportunity, in the availability of suitable partners, in the economic conditions that make marriage viable, and in the cultural infrastructure that supports the formation and maintenance of committed relationships.

What Must Be Done

Reversing a sixty-year trend requires interventions at every level — structural, economic, cultural, and institutional — and it requires a candor that the current public conversation has not demonstrated.

Economic interventions that increase the employability and earning power of Black men directly address the marriageable-male pool that William Julius Wilson identified as the primary structural driver of declining marriage rates. Investments in vocational training, apprenticeship programs, and community college access specifically designed for young Black men have been shown to increase both employment rates and earnings. Programs like Year Up, which provides intensive skills training and corporate internships to young adults from low-income backgrounds, have produced earnings increases of approximately 30% for participants — enough, in many cases, to cross the economic threshold that makes marriage a realistic possibility.

Criminal justice reform that reduces incarceration for nonviolent offenses and facilitates reentry is not merely a matter of individual justice. It is a marriage policy. Every man who is incarcerated is removed from the marriage market. Every man who returns from prison with a felony record faces employment discrimination that reduces his economic viability as a partner. The 2018 First Step Act and state-level reforms that have reduced sentences for nonviolent drug offenses are, whether their architects intended it or not, the most significant pro-marriage policy interventions of the past two decades.

Marriage readiness programs that operate within the community — through churches, community colleges, and community-based organizations — are helping young adults develop the relational skills that their families of origin may not have modeled. Programs like PREPARE/ENRICH, which has been adapted for diverse populations, provide structured assessments of relationship strengths and growth areas, communication skills training, and financial planning tools that equip couples for the practical demands of marriage. The evidence base for these programs shows consistent improvements in relationship quality and stability.

Cultural interventions that celebrate and normalize Black marriage are perhaps the most difficult to design and the most important to implement. The narrative that marriage is obsolete, or optional, or culturally foreign to Black life must be countered with the historical truth: that Black Americans married at higher rates during Jim Crow than they do today, that the never-married rate is a recent phenomenon not a cultural constant, and that the institution of marriage was something that enslaved people fought and died to access. Organizations like the Black Marriage Initiative and media projects like OWN’s Black Love documentary series have begun this cultural work, but it must be scaled, sustained, and freed from the sanitized, aesthetic version of marriage that social media produces and replaced with the honest, difficult, rewarding reality that actual marriage requires.

The never-married rate is the number that the divorce conversation was designed to hide, consciously or not. It is the number that reveals the true depth of the crisis, because it measures not the failure of marriage but its absence — the void where an institution should be, the silence where a commitment should have been spoken. It is the number that explains why Black wealth lags, why Black children suffer, why Black communities cannot stabilize. And it is the number that will change only when the nation decides that the discomfort of discussing it honestly is a smaller price than the cost of another generation lost to the consequences of its refusal to speak. The children born into that thirty-six percent did not choose it. They cannot reverse it. They are waiting — as children always wait — for the adults to do what adults are supposed to do: face the truth, and build something better from it.

“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”
— James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 1955