More surprising, perhaps, than the current difficulties of traditional marriage is the fact that marriage itself is alive and thriving. As Skolnick notes, Americans are a marrying people: Relative to Europeans, more of us marry and we marry at a younger age. Moreover, aster a decline in the early 1970s, the rate of marriage in the United States is now increasing. Even the divorce rate needs to be taken in this pro-marriage context: some 80 percent of divorced individuals remarry. Thus, marriage remains, by far, the preferred way of life for the vast majority of people in our society.
What has changed more than marriage is the nuclear family. Twenty-five years ago, the typical American family consisted of a husband, a wife, and two or three children. Now, there are many marriages in which couples have decided not to have any children. And there are many marriages where at least some of the children are from the wife’s previous marriage, or the husband’s, or both. Sometimes these children spend all of their time with one parent from the former marriage; sometimes they are shared between the two former spouses.
Thus, one can find the very type of family arrangement. There are marriages without children; marriages with children from only the present marriage; marriages with "full-time" children from the present marriage and "part-time" children from former marriages. There are step-fathers, step-mothers, half-brothers, and half-sisters. It is not all that unusual for a child to have four parents and eight grandparents! These are enormous changes from the traditional nuclear family. But even so, even in the midst of all this, there remains one constant: Most Americans spend most of their adult lives married.
Even though great changes have taken place in the structure of American families, （）
A. the functions of marriage remain unchanged
B. most Americans prefer a second marriage
C. the vast majority of Americans still have faith in marriage
D. all of the above
