The proportion of unmarried Americans has reached an all-time high, according to a new Pew report. Clare Cain Miller looks at a major reason why:
Though marriage was once a steppingstone to economic stability, young adults now see
financial stability as a prerequisite for marriage. More than a quarter of those who say they want to marry someday say they haven’t yet because they are not financially prepared, according to Pew.
“If you go back a generation or two, couples would literally take the plunge together and build up their finances and nest eggs together,” said Kim Parker, director of social trends research at Pew. “Now it seems to be this attitude among young adults to build up households before they get married.” In other words, marriage has gone from being a way that people pulled their lives together to something they agree to once they have already done that independently.
Kat Stoeffel remarks, “It’s not that we forgot to get married. We’re just being nominally picky”:
According to Pew, 78 percent of unmarried women “place a great deal of importance on finding someone who has a steady job” — a population in decline. The number of employed men ages 25 to 34 per 100 women of the same age “dropped from 139 in 1960 to 91 in 2012,” says Pew, even though there are more 25- to 34-year-old men than women. So, no, you are not imagining it: There is a quantifiable shortage of eligible men. [As Pew puts it,] “If all never-married young women in 2012 wanted to find a young employed man who had also never been married, 9% of them would fail, simply because there are not enough men in the target group.”
Jordan Weissmann adds, “A dearth of eligible bachelors isn’t the only reason marriage has been on the wane”:
Young people are getting married later in part because they spend more time in school. … Oh, and then there’s birth control, changing social mores about sex out of marriage, etc. But economics are an obvious and unavoidable dimension of the issue. That’s why it’s far-fetched to think we can revive the institution of marriage in a meaningful way without addressing the underlying forces that have left young men in such shabby financial shape.
Update from a reader:
The way Pew presents this data only shows half the story. Specifically, it only shows the 2nd half of the 20th century. If you look at a wider range of data, a different story appears. It’s not covering the exact same data, but this table shows the wider story. The year 1960 was a low-point for the percentage of population that’s unmarried. Before and after, the % of the population that was never married was much higher. At the turn of the last century, it was much higher than today. In many ways, the 1950s and ’60s are proving to be the aberration, not the rule. (See also: Political partisanship – can’t find a reference at the moment, sorry- and income inequality.)
The Dish 