The majority of Americans are married (54%) or have never married but would like to someday (21%). That leaves 5% of Americans who have never married and say they don’t want to do so, along with 20% who have been previously married or did not classify their marital status.
These results are based on a June 20-24 Gallup poll. There are no Gallup trend data on this measure of desire to be married, so it is not known whether the percentage who don’t want to marry was lower in previous years or decades. But 5% is a low absolute percentage, regardless of what it was in the past.
Attitudes about marriage are important in the context of a declining marriage rate in the U.S. The Census Bureau reports that the rate of marriage is down, from 9.9 marriages per 1,000 Americans in 1987 to 6.8 in 2011. In addition, researchers at the University of Maryland found that the marriage rate per 1,000 unmarried women fell from 90 in 1950, at the height of the baby boom, to just 31 in 2011.