A Pew Research Center report released Wednesday shows 51 percent of all adults in the United States are now married — a record low. In 2010, a survey also conducted by Pew found that four in ten Americans thought marriage had become obsolete, but found that most people who had never married (61 percent) would like to do so someday.

Throughout the course of American history, a lot has been said about marriage in the African-American community. From scientific racism to the Moynihan Report to Tyler Perry, the way we discuss marriage in black America can be difficult and often controversial. The marriage rate has declined for all Americans over the past forty years, but it’s declined much faster in the black community. Why is this?

This weekend, gay couples in the state of New York will begin legally tying the knot. While most gay rights supporters have been vocally celebrating this milestone, there are others who don’t see legal same-sex marriage as a triumph. 

Last month, New York State passed the Marriage Equality Act and became the sixth and largest state to legalize same-sex marriage. And starting this Sunday, July 24, gay partners can marry, with an estimated 66,524 couples expected to wed in New York over the next three years. This historic event will have impact beyond the issue of civil rights: Gay couples will see a variety of financial changes, too. If trickle-down economics is about the impact of economic policy on the individual, then this is the trickle-up economics of gay marriage–how a decision two people make willchange insurance, taxes, businesses, state revenues, and economic policy.

In the upcoming edition of The New York Times Sunday Magazine advice columnist Dan Savage has some words of wisdom for married couples, gay or straight. Savage, the sex-advice columnist best known for his "It Gets Better" project to help gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender teens deal with the cruelties of fellow high school students, says that married couples should not put so much stock in fidelity and monogamy, and should focus instead on honesty.

President Barack Obama declared the Defense Of Marriage Act unconstitutional yesterday, and ordered the Justice Department to no longer defend it. The act, which was signed into law in by President Bill Clinton back in 1996, barred any federal recognition of same-sex marriages. Reactions were split between Democrats and Republicans. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), said, "while Americans want Washington to focus on creating jobs and cutting spending the president will have to explain why he thinks now is the appropriate time to stir up a controversial issue that sharply divides the nation."

When the statistics for success are still grim (50 percent of marriages fail), we're asking: is marriage really worth the effort?

Whether you're married, divorced or considering either, do you have a story that made you think twice about tying the knot?

Ephron tells us that the stories of relationships ending are often as rich as the beginnings. She writes about her experiences over at The Huffington Post:

Divorce seems as if it will last forever, and then suddenly, one day, your children grow up, move out, and make lives for themselves, and except for an occasional flare, you have no contact at all with your ex-husband. The divorce has lasted way longer than the marriage, but finally it's over.

The marriage of same-sex couples is on hold again in California while the Ninth Circuit Court prepares to hear an appeal by the backers of Prop 8. Those who supported the ballot initiative, which led to the banning of same-sex unions in the state, are challenging a judge's recent decision that found the ban unconstitutional. 

The United States is not the first country to discuss these issues, and other countries have experience we might be able to learn from when considering same-sex unions. Back in 2001, The Netherlands became the first country to legalize gay marriage. We speak with an author who traveled there to document how marriage affected Dutch gay couples and wider Dutch society.

I had no idea there was this much angst over changing names after marriage. Perhaps I'm less concerned about it because the name change doesn't carry emotional weight. My grandmother got married in 1939 and kept her birth name and she was a pioneer. And yet, my grandparents were married for almost four decades, happy, loving, and very much a cohesive unit. So I grew up accepting the idea that changing my name was my choice, that it had nothing to do with my commitment to the marriage. I never thought that marriage was about submission or ownership. Thanks to pioneers like my grandmother and the feminists of the 20th century, I've never felt shackled by traditional views of marriage or reproduction or family.

This week, when Portia de Rossi filed a petition to change her name to Portia DeGeneres, it got all of us talking about name changes around marriages. Who changes their name when they get married, anyway? A lot of us do, it turns out – 77 to 95 percent of women, at least. But a recent study found that women who change their names are perceived to be worth lower salaries than women who don’t.

If you're married, did you keep your name, take your partner's or take a new name altogether?

California's same-sex marriage ban was struck down as unconstitutional yesterday. Chief U.S. Judge Vaughn Walker overturned the voter-approved ban, Proposition 8. The ruling is currently limited to California, but will go to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and could eventually end up in the United States Supreme Court.

Brian Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage speaks out against the judge's ruling.

Closing arguments are scheduled for today in a federal trial that will address the constitutionality of Proposition 8 - the controversial amendment to California's constitution that reinstated a ban on gay marriage in the state in 2008, after it had been legal for some months.

According to the latest census numbers, the number of interracial marriages is up 20 percent since the year 2000, to about 4.5 million. That means that eight percent of all marriages in the U.S. are now between people of different races. 

We join with The Week Magazine to take a look back at the best and the worst of  the past week. It was a bad week for cyclist, Floyd Landis, who admitted to using performance enhancing drugs. But our "bad week" nod goes to Todd Davis, the CEO of LifeLock, an identity theft protection service. Todd Davis revealed his social security number on TV to prove that his company could protect anything, but the plan backfired when his identity was stolen multiple times. But there's good news for couples, who can now buy a new blanket that absorbs odors in bed, putting an end to that "silent, but deadly" problem.

This weekend, movie-goers saw Jennifer Lopez pursue single parenthood with donor sperm only to meet the man of her dreams immediately after being inseminated. But what happens when the premise of "The Back-up Plan" happens in real life?

Takeaway co-host Celeste Headlee will be getting married this summer and, in the process, she'll be taking on the role of stepmother, as her husband-to-be brings a new son into the household. At the same time, her son will get a new stepfather. She's not alone: 65 percent of remarriages involve children from a previous marriage, so we look at the challenges of blended families.

We speak with best-selling author Elizabeth Gilbert about her latest book, "Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage." To write the book, she had to wrestle with the fact that her first, wildly successful memoir, "Eat, Pray, Love," had been based on the premise of getting over a bad marriage and swearing off the institution forever, while her second memoir details her reluctant acceptance of marriage after all.

Click through for an excerpt of Gilbert's new memoir.

Recent studies have shown that parents with young kids can put a solid marriage on the rocks.  So what happens when you add a national economic crisis to the mix?  Yale psychology professor Susan Nolen-Hoeksema and Lamar Tyler, blogger at the parenting website BlackandMarriedwithKids.com, say that it's particularly hard for loving married couples to connect when times are tough.

A quarter of all marriage proposals happen in the six weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year's, and most of those involve a diamond ring. Diamond sales finance civil wars around the world, and in some regions diamond mining involves horrific abuse, mutilations and murder. How hard is it to find (or define) a truly 'conflict-free' diamond? Our contributors, Beth Kobliner and Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, join us. Beth has some advice for Ibrahim, who is in the market for the right ring for his fiancée.

We continue our week-long series on faith in America with Laurel Snyder, editor of "Half/Life: Jew-ish Tales from Interfaith Homes," who talks about growing up in a Jewish/Catholic home, and marrying into one once she became an adult. Also, Kristi Nellor-Hampole and Ravi Hampole, a Baptist from Kansas and a Hindu from Canada, discuss their recent mixed-faith nuptials, and how they plan to raise their future children.

(click through for all the conversations in our "Faith in America" series)