The wedding will have to wait

Ana Perez sips tea as her fiancé Julian Hill plays with her daughter Bryana, 9, and their son Bubba, 4, in their apartment in New York. The couple, who have been together six years and plan to go at least another year without marrying, are part of a generation that has seen a sharp increase in children born out of wedlock

Ana Perez, 35, who moved to New York from the Dominican Republic at age 5, has an open smile, a firm handshake and a vivid, scrappy manner just this side of a fireplug. But as she recalled the night she threw the father of her two older children out of her Harlem apartment, her voice cracked into a dozen pieces and her eyes blurred with tears.

She might have accepted his infidelities if he’d kept them discreet, cheap and away from the neighborhood. “I had this mentality that men will be men,” she said.

But when he began lavishly dating the younger sister of a friend of hers, Perez confronted him in a fury.

“I said, ‘You’ve been spending money on this person when you have children who need diapers and milk?’” she said. “The last straw was, we had this huge fight in the kitchen and I pulled a knife on him. For a second, I saw my children without a mother – because I would be in jail.”

Their relationship ended that night a decade ago, she said, “and I never looked back.”

He still visits with George, 16, and Bryana, 10, “as a friend figure,” Perez said, but he has no say in their upbringing.

For the past six years, Perez has lived with Julian Hill, 39, the father of her third child, Bubba, 4. Hill is tall and African-American, his head shaved, his cream-colored suit impeccably paired with a blue-checked banker’s shirt and yellow tie. He is devoted to all three children and involved in their everyday lives.

“I come home every night,” he said. “They might be asleep when I get home, but I’m here every night. I’m always pushing them hard to do their very best, maybe sometimes a little too hard.”

Until this fall, Perez worked for a financial services firm, and she has been the family’s primary earner. Hill, equally ambitious, has worked as a notary public, mortgage closer and occasional stock investor. He and Perez recently started a small notary-mortgage business.

“I think like Warren Buffett,” Hill said. “My plan is to be a billionaire, but if I fall short and end up a millionaire, that would be fine.”

Yet he admits that for now even that downsized goal remains elusive. “If you’re talking about income,” he said, “we’re lower, lower middle class.”

If you’re talking about their relationship status, he and Perez have been engaged for more than a year, and they plan to go more than another year before getting married.

Of the many changes to the design, packaging and content of family life over the past generation, researchers cite two as especially significant.

One is the sharp increase in out-of-wedlock births among all but the most highly educated women. The second is the repositioning of marriage from cornerstone to capstone, from a foundational act of early adulthood to a crowning event of later adulthood – an event that follows such previous achievements as finishing college, starting a career and owning furniture not made from fruit crates.

The two trends are interrelated, researchers say, but for reasons that are often misunderstood. Unmarried parents are not necessarily the careless and shortsighted hedonists of stereotype. Instead, a growing number of Americans are simply intimidated by the whole idea of marriage: It has assumed ever greater cultural status, becoming the mark of established winners rather than of modestly optimistic beginners (while weddings have become extravagant pageants where doves and butterflies are released but still, nobody gets the bridesmaid dresses right).

Childbearing, on the other hand, happens naturally, and offers what marriage all too often does not: lifelong bonds of love.

“For many cohabiting couples, there’s a high bar for marriage, high expectations of where they should be at economically or emotionally, and if they don’t meet that bar they’ll put off getting married,” said Kelly Musick, an associate professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell University, who has studied cohabitation patterns.

“But if they’re reasonably pleased with the relationship and happen to find themselves pregnant,” she continued, “they may realize they’re not in a great place financially to become parents but they’re still happy to have the child.” They find “a sense of purpose and fulfillment in parenthood” even when the rest of life is withholding the goods.

Kathryn Edin, a professor of public policy and management at Harvard University, has interviewed hundreds of low-income Americans. In her latest book, “Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City,” which she wrote with her colleague Timothy J. Nelson, Edin describes the enormous instability of family life among the working class and the poor.

“In the middle class, the divorce rate has gone down, and family life is in many ways simpler than it used to be,” she said in an interview. “There’s far more complexity and churning of households among the poor, a turnover of partnerships, lots of half-siblings.”

Yet Edin also punctures the myth of the low-income father as a deadbeat who deposits his sperm and runs. Instead, the young men in her study were eager to establish their paternity.