In most households, there is no marriage.

I don't think this means that "To Be Married Means to Be Outnumbered," as the NYT headline puts it.

The American Community Survey, released recently by the Census Bureau, found that 49.7 percent, or 55.2 million, of the nation’s 111.1 million households in 2005 were made up of married couples — with and without children — just shy of a majority and down from more than 52 percent five years earlier.

Are most individual adults married? If singles live alone, they create more households per capita. And the percentage is affected by all the widows who outlive their husbands and all the young people who delay getting married. Individuals in both those groups are still the marrying kind.

But how much should we worry about the trend? Would it be awful if too many people decided that being single is the better way to live? Personally, I like that other people embrace marriage. It gives a nice solidity to society. Is it bad of me not to help with that enterprise?