In Search of Soul Mates

With divorce rates only a bit below their all-time highs, one might suppose young adults don’t take marriage seriously. Oddly enough, the reverse is true. A new report suggests they have such exalted (albeit narrow) views of marriage that they’re less likely to put up with an imperfect one. The National Marriage Project, a research effort housed at Rutgers University, finds Americans in their 20s envision marriage as a highly demanding union of “soul mates”-an intensely private “SuperRelationship” that has lost “much of its broad public and institutionalized character.”