Breaking down the question
The command word is examine, and the crucial word is relationship. The examiner is not asking for two separate lists — one of marriage trends and another of family forms — but for an argued account of how the two are connected. Changes in the way people marry both reflect and drive changes in the shape of the family, and your task is to trace that mutual influence.
Marriage is the socially sanctioned union that founds a family; the family is the group of kin that marriage typically brings into being. When the timing, form, permanence and even the necessity of marriage alter, the composition and character of the family alter with them. Contemporary trends — later and fewer marriages, rising divorce, cohabitation, same-sex unions, individual choice over arrangement — are therefore intimately bound up with the shift from the large joint household towards nuclear, single-parent, reconstituted and other diverse family forms.
How to approach it
Structure the answer around the causal link rather than around two independent descriptions. Begin by defining marriage and family and asserting their interdependence. Then take each major marriage trend in turn and show precisely which change in family form it produces or accompanies. This keeps the relationship at the centre and prevents the answer from splitting into two halves.
Draw on theory to lift the discussion above mere reportage. Parsons on the isolated nuclear family, Giddens on the pure relationship and confluent love, and Beck on individualisation supply the analytical vocabulary to explain why marriage and family are changing together. The typology of family forms is set out in our notes on types and forms of family. Ground the discussion with Indian illustration — the decline of the joint family, the rise of the urban nuclear household and the slow appearance of live-in arrangements.
Model answer
Marriage and family are the twin pillars of kinship: marriage is the socially approved union that establishes rights and obligations between spouses, while the family is the group of persons united by marriage, descent or adoption who typically share residence and cooperation. Because marriage founds the family, any significant change in the pattern of marriage necessarily reshapes the form the family takes. The contemporary period offers a clear demonstration of this interdependence, for the trends now visible in marriage correspond closely to the diversification of family forms.
The first trend is the movement from arranged towards choice-based marriage. As individuals increasingly select their own partners on the basis of romantic attraction and personal compatibility, the marriage bond is loosened from the wider kin group that once negotiated it. Anthony Giddens captures this shift in his idea of the pure relationship and confluent love — a union sustained only so long as it satisfies both partners rather than by external obligation. The family that results is smaller, more private and centred on the conjugal couple rather than embedded in an extended network, which helps explain the ascendancy of the nuclear household.
The second trend is delayed and declining marriage. Rising education, female employment and career aspiration push the age at marriage upward and reduce the proportion who marry at all. Ulrich Beck's thesis of individualisation illuminates this: as biographies become self-directed projects, marriage is postponed until personal goals are secured, and the family it eventually forms is late-forming, small and often planned around dual careers. Fewer children and greater spacing follow, reinforcing the compact nuclear or dual-earner family.
The third trend is the rise of cohabitation and the pure relationship as alternatives to formal marriage. Where couples live together without marrying, the family unit exists in fact but outside the traditional marital frame, producing cohabiting-couple families and, where children are involved, unmarried-parent households. The link here is direct: a change in the form of union creates a new form of family that classical definitions built on legal marriage struggle to accommodate.
The fourth trend is rising divorce and remarriage. As marriage becomes contingent on personal satisfaction, its dissolution becomes more frequent and less stigmatised. Divorce produces single-parent families, and remarriage produces reconstituted or blended families combining children from previous unions. Judith Stacey's account of the postmodern family describes exactly this fluidity — families formed, dissolved and recombined over the life course rather than fixed once and for all. The permanence once assumed by marriage gives way to a sequence of household arrangements.
The fifth trend is the recognition, in many societies, of same-sex partnerships. Where such unions gain legal or social sanction, they create same-sex families, extending the very definition of the family beyond the heterosexual couple that earlier theory took for granted. Once again a transformation in who may marry transforms what a family can be.
Underlying all these trends is a common sociological process. Talcott Parsons argued that industrialisation favoured the isolated nuclear family, geographically mobile and specialised in the functions of primary socialisation and the stabilisation of adult personalities. The contemporary trends carry this logic further: as the economy rewards mobility and individual achievement, marriage becomes more voluntary and revocable, and the family correspondingly more varied, smaller and self-chosen. The relationship is thus reciprocal — changing conditions reshape marriage, and changing marriage reshapes the family.
The Indian experience illustrates the connection vividly. The steady erosion of the joint family and the spread of the urban nuclear household have accompanied a rise in the age at marriage, growing acceptance of self-choice or "love" marriages alongside arrangement, and, in metropolitan centres, the tentative appearance of live-in relationships. Rising divorce among the urban middle class has begun to produce single-parent and reconstituted families that were once rare. The direction of change confirms the general pattern: as marriage becomes more individualised, the family becomes more diverse.
In sum, the contemporary trends in marriage and the changing forms of family are not two separate phenomena but two faces of a single transformation. Choice-based, delayed, cohabiting, dissoluble and newly inclusive marriage patterns generate nuclear, dual-earner, single-parent, reconstituted and same-sex families. The relationship is one of mutual constitution: marriage makes the family, and as marriage changes, so, inevitably, does the family.
Examiner's perspective
The examiner rewards candidates who treat this as a question about a relationship rather than an invitation to describe marriage and family separately. The strongest scripts take each marriage trend and explicitly name the family form it produces, weaving theory — Giddens, Beck, Parsons, Stacey — through the argument rather than bolting it on. Indian illustration of the joint-to-nuclear shift and of emerging live-in and single-parent forms lifts the answer into the top band.
The common failure is the two-list answer: a paragraph on marriage trends followed by an unconnected paragraph on family forms, with the causal link left implicit. Because the command is examine the relationship, the connections must be made explicit at every step. A crisp definition of both terms at the outset, a trend-by-trend demonstration of their linkage, and a synthesising conclusion on mutual constitution are what distinguish a high-scoring response.