There were 37 million one-person households in the United States in 2021, the U.S. Census Bureau reported this week, representing 28 percent of all households across the country and 15 percent of the overall population.

In 1960, just 13 percent of households were occupied by just one person. In the past decade, the number of Americans living alone jumped by 4 million.

Just half of American adults, 50 percent, are living with a spouse, down from 52 percent a decade ago. At the same time, the share of Americans living with an unmarried partner is rising — today, 8 percent of Americans over the age of 18 live with a partner to whom they are not wedded, almost double the 4.1 percent rate the Census Bureau measured in 2001…

But even before the pandemic, birth rates were falling off a cliff: Birth rates were lower in every month of 2020 — including January and February, before the pandemic enforced lockdowns, and in subsequent months, when pregnancies begun long before the coronavirus dominated news headlines — compared to 2019.