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In 2021, England and Wales became the source of a significant statistic. For the first time since records began in 1845, the percentage of children born to a legal couple—as in, married parents—fell below 50%. In other words, more children in England and Wales were born out of wedlock that year than not.
That might sound surprising, considering words like “love child” or, more offensively, “bastard,” still exist to describe children born to unmarried parents as some kind of anomaly. But while 2021 was the tipping point, the numbers have been steadily shifting in the west for decades. Nearly 4 in 10 US babies were born to an unmarried mother in 2005, and in a 2014 study tracking the first US millennials to become parents, a team from Johns Hopkins University found that 64 percent of mothers gave birth at least once out of wedlock and nearly one-half had all of their children without getting married at all.
“Marriage is simply not as much of a priority any more,” columnit Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett wrote in The Guardian in 2022. “Where once there was the notion that it conferred stability, for women and children, there is now the psychological insight that an unhappy home, even one with a marriage certificate nestled in the filing cabinet, is more damaging to a child than a happy unconventional one.”
This is all to say that having children outside of marriage isn’t, on its face, problematic, nor is someone’s desire to do so automatically a red flag. But still, something about your boyfriend’s request is giving me pause.
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