Children born to single moms tend to be poorer, less well-educated, and more likely to drop out of school, form addictions, and fall into crime than those from intact families.

Second, married people live longer than single people -- ten years longer in the case of men, and four years longer in the case of women. The children of married couples tend to live longer also than the children of mothers and fathers who are now single or remarried.

Third, marriage produces wealth. Men and women approaching retirement are typically far wealthier than those who are single. Fourth, marriage is better for the sex lives of both men and women.

Almost every survey done has young married couples saying that their sex lives are better than when they were single. Some 42 percent of married men report having sex at least twice a week. Only 25 percent of unmarried men can say the same thing.

Why then, does marriage get such a bad rap in the popular mind? Why do 44 percent of Americans, according to a recent Pew Forum study, think that marriage is becoming extinct? Even more contradictorily, why do 95 percent of American young people want to get married anyway?

There are some sobering figures about one alternative to marriage that is much promoted by popular entertainment: cohabitation. The number of Americans cohabiting today is about 7.5 million (compared with few than half a million in 1960). Of these, only 1.4 percent will get married, leaving about six million Americans, in effect, the products of "cohabitation divorces."

About 40 percent of all cohabiting couples break up without marriage. The average cohabiting person later ends up having several cohabiting partners in a lifetime. Yet popular culture has promoted one of the most tragic myths of the current era: that of "trial marriage," a concept that ought more accurately to be called "trial divorce."

In a Pennsylvania State University study, those who live together before marriage -- even if they marry the person they have been living with -- have a 61 percent greater likelihood of divorce than those who refrain from sex and cohabitation before marriage. So even if you end up marrying your high school sweetheart, take this sage advice: avoid living with her before the wedding unless you want to increase the probability of divorce.

Also, avoid doing so if you want a happy marriage: another study showed that by almost every measure of marital satisfaction, those who lived together before marriage were unhappier than those who hadn't.

The Institute for American Values, a non-profit, non-partisan organization whose goal is to strengthen key American values, came up with a revealing study comparing marriages in the U.S. in 1970 with those today.

It called the study "The Marriage Index," and measured factors each year like the marriage rate, the divorce rate, the measurement of married happiness, the percentage of births to married parents, and the percentage of children living with their biological parents.

The results are sobering. While the marriage index in 1970 was at 78.6 percent, in 2008 it was a measly 60.3 percent. In 1970, 89.3 percent of children were born to married parents; in 2008, the figure was 60.3 percent. Think for a moment about the effect on America's future of that statistic: nearly 40 percent of all American children are born today out of wedlock.

There may be few more admirable callings in contemporary America than working to reduce the divorce rate. One couple who has heroically worked in this field for 25 years -- with considerable success, I might add -- is Michael and Harriet McManus, who founded Marriage Savers. The McManuses worked tirelessly for several years in cities across America to establish a Community Marriage Policy.

This was a commitment, by clergy-folk first, not to conduct marriages before couples had undergone both a compatibility test and extensive preparation. Second, it encouraged churches and other faith communities to do everything possible to support married couples in their communities and to discourage divorce. The results of their speaking and training were phenomenal.

In 114 cities they visited, the divorce rate went down, according to an independent report, by 17.5 percent. In their own church of the 1980s and beyond (Fourth Presbyterian in Bethesda, MD), of 288 engaged or marriage-bound couples they trained, 58 didn't marry in the end. Of the 230 couples who married, 214 are still together -- close to a 93-percent success rate in cutting the divorce rate in just one church.

The McManuses have introduced the Community Marriage Policy program to 44 states. Some of the cities they visited reported a reduction in the divorce rate by 50 percent, while others discovered that the cohabitation rate (another bedrock of divorce) had been cut by one-third in comparison with other cities. Why do 95 percent of Americans want to get married if the statistics of failure are so great? Perhaps because, created by God himself, marriage is a good thing.

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