In 1972, feminist scholar Jessie Bernard authored a classic book, The Future of Marriage. In 2003, the National Council on Family Relations (NCFR) conference in Vancouver revisited this theme. As conference chair, I picked this theme for three reasons. First, given the importance of marriage, a conference focusing on this topic was long overdue; the last time an NCFR conference theme referred to marriage was in 1958! Second, as the articles by Cherlin (2004), Oropesa and Landale (2004), and Seltzer (2004) demonstrate, marriage in the United States changed significantly during the second half of the 20th century. During this period, the marriage rate declined, nonmarital cohabitation became common, the proportion of births that occur outside of marriage rose, and the divorce rate increased. Similar trends occurred in other western countries, including Canada (Le Bourdais and Lapierre-Adamcyk, 2004) and England (Seltzer). The 2003 conference provided NCFR members with opportunities to discuss the causes of these changes, the implications of these changes for the well-being of adults and children, and how marriage may continue to change in the future.