Census Finds More Than a Half Million LGBT Weddings This Decade

More than a half a million LGBT Americans have married their same-sex partner since marriage equality first allowed them to marry, reports the United States Census Bureau this week.

Gay Star News reports that while the Census Bureau estimated only 182,000 married gay couples in 2012, revised estimates from the bureau's 2013 American Community Survey raised that figure to almost 252,000 -- not including those couples who had divorced.

Until this May, the Census Bureau lumped those in same-sex marriages with unmarried couples living together, making it harder to determine exactly how many LGBT Americans have tied the knot since Massachusetts became the first state to allow it, in May 2004.

Overall, they found that marriage in general was down, with only about 50 percent of people over 18 years old in married relationships in 2013, as opposed to more than 72 percent in 1960, an all-time high.

The Charlotte Observer noted that there is now a total of 56 million married couples in the U.S. Unmarried same-sex and opposite-sex couples who live together are both counted as "unmarried partners."

The Census Department reveals that between 2007-2008, the Bureau made improvements in how they collect data, and how that data is edited and processed. They also made it more difficult to accidentally mark both male and female, given the Bureau a more accurate estimate of same-sex couple households.

They also noted that 16 percent of these couples had a child in 2011, with 10 percent of male/male couples and 22 percent of female/female couples having kids.

Moving forward, the Census Bureau plans in 2020 to test a new relationship question that better defines who these 'domestic partners' are, with options including "same-sex husband/wife/spouse" and "same-sex unmarried partner" among the choices.