Black women are the most unpartnered group of people in the United States, a dubious distinction reflected in their low rate of marriage

More than 2 out of every 3 black women are unmarried, and most unmarried black women do not have a committed partner. It's not only economically disadvantaged black women who find themselves alone. College educated black women are twice as likely as their white counterparts to be unmarried. This low marriage rate translates into a high rate of single-parent black families. Roughly 7 in 10 black children are born to unmarried parents. Although many of these unmarried parents are in a relationship, or even living together, at the time of their child's birth, most of these relationships dissolve within a year or two. Typically, the mother ends up raising the child. Although many fathers may hope and attempt to remain involved in their child's life, all too often fathers who don't live with their children eventually become distant, leaving the mothers to make it on their own. Raising a child can be a challenge with two parents; with one, it can be overwhelming. The marriage decline not only burdens black women who have children. When confronted with an unplanned pregnancy, single women are more likely than married women to abort. Because black women are so much more likely to be single, they are also more likely to have abortions. Black women can also become dispirited because they confront a relationship market with too few black men who are stable and employed. Unprecedented numbers of black men spend some portion of their young adulthood incarcerated. More than 1 in 10 black men in their 20s or early 30s are behind bars; a black man's lifetime likelihood of losing his freedom is 1 in 4. And most black women, like women of all races, don't want an ex-convict as a husband. The paucity of desirable black men is most glaring on college campuses. Nearly twice as many black women as black men earn college degrees. Even those black men who might seem to be the most appealing marriage candidates - affluent college graduates - are less likely to marry than are their white counterparts. And when they do marry, they often marry women who are not black. As a result, highly educated black women who marry wind up more likely than any other group of women to marry a man who is less educated than they are - or who earns less money than they do. These relationships are often conflicted. A man may be insecure about being economically subordinate to his wife, and a wife may not be too happy about the situation either. Research has found that when the husband is unemployed, a couple's likelihood of divorce increases substantially. And if all this weren't enough to leave black women on the wrong side of happy, unmarried black women have to contend with black men who, according to social science data, are more likely than any other group of men to maintain relationships with multiple women.