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The institution of marriage suffer at the moment the most serious crisis in its whole history. In some countries, like USA and France, the number of divorces surpasses the number of marriages per 1 year. The classical nuclear model of family (2 parents + 2 or 1 children) seems to degenerate. The unpopularity of marriage was also a result of the feminist movement propaganda. 
The families of extraordinary, like 1 + 1 (lonely mother with a child, or, rather rarely spotted, lonely father + 1 child) has now become as common, as the full family used to be. the marriages seems to be now of very little duration and basically a very unstable institution. The whole modern society, as it was described by sociologists (especially Ulrich Beck in his famous book, "Society of Risk"), suffer from the growing anomy (that is, the loosening, or even progressing rupture of social bounds) and the proceeding promotion of the individualism, which is a part of contemporary, self-centred consumerist culture, promoting and exploring the self-realization of the individual and the choice of oneself. That also "by chance" raises the sell-curves among the single people, who are the main target and a great market for big companies. That situation, shortly and shallowly  described above, seems to me a vicious circle. The contemporary culture promotes the individuality, what makes the marriage and the institution of family less and less popular, as an obstacle towards the "self-realization". We may call it an "egoist" approach, but the individualism is at the same time one of the primary values of Western thought and culture. But it was devaluated by the politics of capitalist mercantilism and consumerism.
To make the marriage - central social cell, from which the whole society takes its beginning - an attractive institution, that preserves from the toughness of living once again, the whole anomic and single society would have to change. But like it was described by Michel Houllebecq in his novels, Elementary Particles or "Platform", the Western society is too deeply self-centered and victimized by the results of "sexual revolution" of the 60s, to undergo such a great metamorphosis. Even though marriage seems to be so unpopular now, some people still get married and streets are full of newly born babies on the walk with their parents. So even if people one day stop to get married, it will only mean that marriage has transformed into something else, different kind of relationship, and will never fully disappear  from the face of the earth. 


