I agree, we can’t force a couple to marry, but the fact remains that cohabitation-relationships have a statistically higher rate of breaking up and are more fragile/unstable than marriages.

Cohabitations have a higher rate of breaking up because most are trial runs. So people don’t marry someone, live with them, and then find out they can’t stand them and get a divorce. They’re more unstable because, again, they’re usually trial runs before an engagement or marriage.

Rings != magic bonding mechanism.

Fewer relationships, fewer marriages, fewer children, more stability, more happiness.

Sounds good to me.

just observing that cohabitations tend to break up at a higher rate than marriages and this is harmful especially to children.

Again, you are drawing conclusions from trends of data and trying to apply it to individual families. A child of cohabiting parents will not have their home situation improved by them getting married (well, bar some legal faff if they are not both the biological parents but we’ll ignore that for the moment). The relationship will not become more committed or stable if they get married.
Similarly imagine a couple who are planning to have children – should they cohabit, or get married? Answer: either – their relationship will be the same either way, and their likelihood of breaking up the same.
Marriage as a status is acting a a filtration system on the data. If you are in that set you are more likely to, but not guarenteed to, have a more stable relationship.

At least you will admit that cohabitation has more minus than plus points associated with it than marriage – people are free to choose either, which ever works for them – but the statictics are against them.

No, no, no. This is not what I am saying at all. I am saying that relationships with more plus points are more likely to choose marriage. Whether you cohabit or marry will have no effect on any particular couple.

It’s an indicator of more stable relationships.

It’s an indicator of fewer more stable relationships.

divorce was at an all-time high in the 70s.

Again you ignore what you can’t/won’t address.

The divorce rate is falling but the marriage rate is falling faster

Poor Article: Perfect. Which is why lower marriage rate is an indicator of less stable relationships.

VK: Only if every stable relationship must get marriage, and if everyone gets married at the same level of stability.

Because there is less pressure on couples to get married today, I’d think of it more as the stability threshold for marriage is rising.

It’s an indicator of more stable relationships. There are fewer marriages and relationships because of a higher stability threshold resulting from all the alarmist reports divorce is at an all-time high due to feminism, of course, when new research shows divorce was at an all-time high in the 70s.

therefore it is community and economics that need to be changed,

…if the economics of this society were changed so that thirty hours of work would provide all their needs, a significant chunk of her child’s disadvantages would go away.

Wow, that’s very socialist of you !

But inspite of this, the relative number of children being born to married couples is reducing as compared to those born to unmarried, which is the case for concern.

Read again.
1950: 5/2 = 2.5
1990: 2/2 = 1

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PS : I have nothing against single-parents, infact they are the ones who have to work the hardest and as pointed out above, without a support network, life is very difficult for them and their children, though some even raise children better than the married, but the overall statistics prove otherwise. My point still remains that more unstable relationships and less marriages are not good for society.

PPS : My nickname looks really stupid.

But inspite of this, the relative number of children being born to married couples is reducing as compared to those born to unmarried, which is the case for concern.

As djw pointed out, the difference is not that unmarried people are having more children than before, but that married people are having fewer children than before.

Here’s an example: let’s say you have two women in the 1950s. The unmarried one has two children and the married one has five children.

Then look at two similar women in the 1990s. The unmarried one still only has two children, but now the married one also only has two children. That skews the statistics, because although the rate of unmarried people having children hasn’t risen, the number of children born to married people has dropped, so it gives the appearance of an “explosion” of children born out of wedlock, even though the rate hasn’t budged by an inch.

Also, I can’t figure out what this means:

Marriage > Cohabitation > Single Parent

There are cohabiting people who have children, but they get counted as “single parents” because they’re not legally married. So what percentage of “single parents” are actually cohabiting parents, and what percentage are “true” single parents where one parent has primary physical custody? Also, how many of those single parent households are that way because of a marriage that ended in divorce or death rather than cohabiting or other non-marital relationships that break up? If the children were born into a marriage that later broke up, that’s not exactly supporting your point that marriage is clearly superior to other arrangements.

You seem to think that your questions are significant, but you keep leaving out huge swaths of data in order to reach the answers that you want.

Marriage > Cohabitation > Single Parent

How so? What studies, and how and why, and what definitions of “better?” Repetition of your premise is not an argument for it.

And once again, what causes these various problems about which you keep making assertions? Some indelible aspect of cohabitation or single parenting, or society’s treatment of them, or economics in this civilization? A person who, due to lack of a decent living wage, has to work seventy hours a week to keep herself and her children provided for, is quite naturally going to lack the energy to be the best of parents as well—if the economics of this society were changed so that thirty hours of work would provide all their needs, a significant chunk of her child’s disadvantages would go away.

A lot of the problems with single-parent homes are economics and societal issues—we’ve got this isolationist, you-raise-yours-by-yourself-and-I’ll-do-the-same-with-mine thing going on, and the support network from family, friends and community has all but disappeared, and it results in the whole burden of raising any one child solely on that child’s parent or parents; there’s almost no diffusation among other people, and that’s in part why single parents often have it so bad in this society, that and poverty.

One of my relatives is raising two kids post-divorce; he is decently off financially with a normal full-time job, and he has family and friends who engage with the kids enough to take the pressure off somewhat, scouts and church activities and other community issues so that the kids have other adult role models and mentors whom they trust and care for—and I think that is a very successful parenthood model—a little stressful at times but much less so for him and the kids than a bad marriage. It is where finances are a nightmare and community fails to help, that single parenthood risks disadvantaging the kids—therefore it is community and economics that need to be changed, rather than just pointing fingers at single parents and whining that everything would be fixed if they weren’t so determined to be single.