It’s because he had an affair with Marion Cotillard.It’s because he smokes pot.It’s because he drinks.It’s because they had different parenting styles.It’s because she’s weird and he’s normal.It’s because someone has anger issues.It’s because Brad spends too much time with Angie’s dad.It’s because she sleeps with women.It’s because they had crazy travel schedules.It’s because what do you expect, they’re celebrities and freaks.Us Weekly was the first publication to assert, based on a “close source,” that “something happened” to motivate Angelina to initiate their divorce. The news broke shortly thereafter that Brad had allegedly been verbally abusive toward and “got physical” with one of their children on their private plane on a runway at LAX. The police were involved. The police weren’t involved. More whiplash.But even that bombshell of an accusation seems unlikely to slake our thirst and put an end to our questions.What on Earth, we want to know — even those of us who don’t admit we want to know — really went wrong? What could that something, that inciting incident, that breaker of a 12-year bond and a two-year marriage between Hollywood’s two hottest people and biggest stars, soldered into a single, synergistically superheated supernova — BRANGELINA — be?Our questions about Hollywood’s most glamorous, contemporary-seeming couple are arguably more profound than they seem, underscoring as they do our culture’s evolving relationship with marriage. Fixating on the whys of Brangelina may be irresistible because it is a nifty tensional outlet for our overarching, nagging anxiety about a massive social shift: the fact that the main trope we have used to organize our world, our individual lives, our families, and our very identities — marriage — may now be more or less irrelevant. Not just for celebs, but for all of us.This insistence that there must be “a reason”? Could it be that it’s a fantasy, a way for us to hold onto the quaint-as-a-gingham-apron notion that, in an utterly changed-up world, there is only one reason a marriage fails? Obsessing over why Brangelina is no more, worrying at the truth of it, helps us ward off a larger truth: It’s not just this marriage and many marriages that are ending. The end is near for Marriage. In an ecological niche like Hollywood, for a woman like Angelina Jolie, frankly, it may be more trouble than it's worth. The same goes for you.For so many reasons, we’re just not that into it — in fact, many millennials are no longer married to marriage at all.In 1960, 72% of adults were married; that number plunged to just over 50% in 2010. Why the free fall? Second-wave feminism, birth control, women entering the workforce, divorce laws, and other radical social shifts contributed to young men and women alike delaying marriage and childbearing. More recently, the recession messed with marriage in a big way, and like the economy, marriage has yet to fully recover. A May 2016 Gallup Analysis found that nearly 60% of people aged 20-36 are single and have never been married, and an Urban Institute study found that the percentage of people in that age group marrying by age 40 will fall lower than for any previous generation of Americans. We increasingly live in a world, these and other researchers tell us, of married haves and unmarried have-nots. More and more Americans are opting out of marriage, either because we don’t feel like it or don’t feel we can afford it.For many women of this generation, it may be both. “Student loans, living with their parents, reduced job prospects, high rents in the places they want to live — for some millennials, marriage may not be the first thing on their minds,” says Sally Applin , a Silicon Valley-based anthropologist who studies human communication and our adaptations to technology. She adds that documenting each other with mobile phones and social media like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat can change how people connect and engage romantically, or don’t. And such changes in courtship behavior can impact our attitudes toward marriage. So does living in a world where great strides in gender equality and the rise of trans and gay rights and intersectional feminism mean we question not just the meaning of marriage, but the units of meaning that were once thought to constitute marriage — “maleness,” “femaleness,” “monogamy,” and “commitment” among them.