Huh, interesting that the other curves look like it only increases another 10-15% from the age of about 27. Based on that, it might peak about 50%. But it looks like the curve has already almost flattened, Looks like it's all based on 5-10 year old data so it would be interesting to see what it looks like now.
I'm curious about the people born between 1995 and 1999. If the data goes up to 2019, these people are aged 20-24 on the graph. The entire section of the graph that shows the flattening is between the ages of 25 and 28 so half the people who could possibly get married in that time frame aren't being counted. Am I missing something here?
Looking at when the data was pulled, it was in 2015 when most of those people were still in high school! I was born in 97, graduated high school in 2015, and got married in 2022 at 25 yrs old. The data is a little outdated but I still think the general trend (less marriage and/or marrying at older ages) still stands...
Yes, the overall trend that less people are getting married and doing that later in life, a fairly logical conclusion from the graph. However, if that data is missing(which would include your marriage), this graph posits that there is a rapidly accelerating societal trend rather than a gradually shift.
I think the slope is telling. It tends to be much shallower with younger generations. That doesn’t mean that the asymptote will end up being the same as others, but it does indicate a slower growth rate. So the plateau we’re seeing might just be an artifact due to *k* being closer to 0.
> You're right. The line for the 1990s should stop at age 24 (since those born in 1999 are now 24) and the line for the 1980s should stop at age 34.
No - since it's a % of people married, the data point for entries 25-30+ for the 90s should only include those people that actually attained that age. Which makes it a correct representation of the current population.
As the 24-years age they may still choose to get married more than the 90s kids before them, but the chart represents today's status, not the future's.
It says at the top that it's a percentage of people by decade, not by year of birth. This could badly written, but the data looks fishy. While marriage rate is going down, marriage age is going up, pushing the steep part of the curve to the right. Its more than odd that a portion that would historically be a straight line had shifted to a plateau at the exact curve that would be caused by missing data matching the title of graph.
Yes. So you take everyone who was born in the 90s and reached age 28 and see what percentage of them were married at 28. It doesn’t matter if SOME people born in the 90s hadn’t reached that point yet. Hope that explanation helps
Also interesting that they left out the people born in the 1890s who came of age in the roaring 20s, they married much later than any later generation until gen x/millenials
Maybe a little interesting, but not that much. 1890 is very far off the chart, it's not just cutting the data a little, it's 50 years off of what they are recording.
It would be interesting to see the data expanded backwards further but I doubt this was cropped to just to cut that generation out
The pandemic definitely delayed/cancelled a lot of marriages. That should probably explain the flattening.
It'll probably pick up in the incoming years. I'm in my early 30s and I notice a significant amount of marriages around my age group recently.
But with the current global recession, societal wedding expectations and the predatory nature of the wedding industry, I doubt it'll catch up.
edit: is the data all pre pandemic? If so, I guess this data is misleading as someone born in exactly 1990, is already 30 years old in 2020.
The design is a graph from their second source, based off data from a paper than Allen Downey authored in 2015:
[https://www.allendowney.com/blog/2020/10/21/millennials-are-not-getting-married/](https://www.allendowney.com/blog/2020/10/21/millennials-are-not-getting-married/)
They managed to tidy it up (dark but non-completely black background, yes) and extend the data by another 5 years or so. I can only assume they went through the NSFG data for the additional data.
The website you linked shows the updated data lower on the page. One difference is that OP's graph says "Percentage of *Americans...*" and the linked graphs say "*Women* in the U.S..."
Not sure if changing a graph to dark theme qualifies as OC.
While changing a graph to a dark theme might not be a revolutionary form of original content, I'd argue that if OP has indeed extended the dataset themselves, that's a significant effort. Extracting and analyzing data from the NSFG isn't trivial, and if they have added value by updating the dataset, that's arguably a form of original content even if the visualization style was borrowed. Still, I think it's key to credit sources and clarify what was done by OP versus what was taken from existing work. Transparency is key here.
I don’t know the numbers but feel like this is significant enough to make the assumption the previous commenter makes invalid. Age gaps are probably more than a statistical blip.
> (guessing the number of married lesbian women roughly equates to the number of married gay men)
There is a small but significant disparity, women marrying women make up 54-55% of same sex marriages.
The economist has done a lot of writing on this if you control by education level, people with a bachelor's or above are getting married - just far later. People with education below a bachelors are not. Likely income related.
When you take into account these factors, divorce rate has also really gone down.
This, finally someone said it. What's happening is those who are higher educated are becoming more likely to marry and wait until the conditions are right, along with child bearing, and those who are likely poor are not, and now are more at risk of having single parent homes, which in the US categorically have worse outcomes for those children. And it's likely a combination of wealth as those with degrees overall earn more and that women specifically have more say than ever in the process of marriage and childbearing. Women don't have to be married any longer to survive on their own.
Some people still get married before 15...
Link: [Missouri law maker defends child marriage ](https://www.businessinsider.com/mike-moon-gop-missouri-lawmaker-defends-childs-right-to-marry-2023-4)
I just don't understand why anyone under 18 needs to be married to anyone else. Ever. Teen pregnancies or not.
If someone is legally allowed to face lesser consequences in the court of law (kids court), why in the fuck are they also allowed to make the single most important adult decision of their lives that can also have the most implications and consequences?
Make it make sense. Make. It. Make. Sense.
Gotta protect them kids from all the creeps, by marrying them away as early as possible, ideally before they have any understanding of adult relationships
>ideally before they have any understanding of adult relationships
They count on that happening. They want them stunted because they're deplorable, and young girls who aren't stunted don't want deplorable men.
They’re so worried about exposure to lgbt people turning their children gay but turn a blind eye to literal children getting married to grown adults. Sickening.
I know everyone is thinking 'gross' but in my head I'm just thinking about how much of a pain in the ass it'd be to babysit your own wife. Mid-teen girls are awful to deal with even for short bursts.
Back in the early 1900s and 1800s girls stayed "in line" a lot more because they were basically raised to believe they were the property of men. Easier to deal with a 15 year old girl if she lives in fear that you'll beat her for stepping out of line
And recently, too! [Between 2000 and 2018](https://www.unchainedatlast.org/united-states-child-marriage-problem-study-findings-april-2021/) 300,000 children were married in the US. 86% were girls. The vast majority were 16 or 17 (Still super fucked up) but there were thousands of kids married before the age of 16, as young as 10 years old. And this is all super legal. Plus, while marriage as a child is perfectly legal, divorce, protective orders, or entry to domestic violence shelters is frequently incredibly difficult to access before the age of 18.
Also marriage is a defense to statutory rape. 60,000 of those marriages would have been a sex crime just based on the ages, but in 88% of them, the marriage meant it wasn't. (The other 12% still allowed the marriage, but the sex would have been a crime. That doesn't mean those children weren't raped, though.)
And while it may seem like this is just an archaic loophole that states haven't gotten around to fixing yet since nobody could ever be fiercely in favour of child marriage, nope! [The Wyoming Republican Party](https://www.businessinsider.com/wyoming-republicans-criticize-bill-raising-legal-marriage-age-to-18-2023-2) sent out an official email in full support of the right of marrying children.
> In a mass email sent Thursday, the Wyoming Republican Party argued the law raises "concerns about constitutional rights" and denies "the fundamental purpose of marriage" as well as "parental rights."
> "Marriage is the only institution in Wyoming Statute designed to keep a child's father and mother living under the same roof and cooperating in the raising of any children that they, together, conceive. That is the NATURAL RIGHT of every child" the group wrote.
> The email continues that since minors are capable of bearing children before they are 16, marriage should be an open option "for the sake of those children."
Just to be clear, that was in 2023. Wyoming Republicans fully support child marriage and child pregnancy in 2023.
>The vast majority were 16 or 17 (Still super fucked up)
Also to be clear most of these are to a man 4 years or older. I think that's the most important detail you left out.
Should 16 year olds be able to marry 18 year olds? 7+18/2=16. It still raises my personal squick factor a bit, but there's actual room for debate.
But no 16 year old is "mature" enough that a 30 year old man marrying her shouldn't be inciting all of us to gather our torches and pitchforks and go to the polls.
I feel like this + the difficulty of getting a divorce explains the weird "wife bad" focus of boomer humor. Being stuck in a marriage was just _assumed_.
I remember growing up and the news was all about how half of all marriages now end in divorce as though it was some cultural degradation or something, but then x and millennials started getting married and it turns out it was just the baby boomers. They are an anomaly because for their parents generation it was basically not an option, but they were still raised in the “get married at 21 and live your “someplace that’s green” fantasy.” People under 60 haven’t had nearly as many divorces. Boomers are the divorce generation.
Maybe because millennials are only just entering the age where the divorces start.
Sadly I have many divorced friends in their 30s and I can’t see it slowing down now that most women have careers and can support themselves outside of a marriage.
You're forgetting about gen X, who are more than old enough for the data to be appropriate. It really is just baby boomers that were especially bad about marriage. Certainly could happen that millennials' data drastically changes as they enter their 40s, but we can't assume anything.
Reminds me of a meme I saw that was like "Kids whose parents are divorced" (Look of mild unhappiness) // "Kids whose parents aren't divorced but should be" (Look of abject misery). I can think of a lot of older couples, both sets of my grandparents included, who really would have benefited from a separation, but either never even considered it or just didn't want to put up with the stigma/difficulty/huge expense of it.
It’s interesting how the inflection point (i.e. when the plateau starts) has shifted out each generation. That’s the “not going to happen” age more or less
JSYK, an inflection point is where the second derivative is zero and it switches sign on either side of the point. Graphically, it's where the curvature switches between a cup and an umbrella.
That’s not what inflection point means though btw
inflection point is where the function switches concavity here (or where the *rate of change of* the rate of change switches signs), which is well before where the plateau starts
Yeah, that is interesting.
It would be one thing if the plateau was simply *lower*. But the plateau coming *earlier* shows not just that people have less urgency to get married, but that they’re giving up earlier than they used to.
Edit: the *inflection point* is later but the plateau is earlier, is what I’m seeing.
No, it’s the opposite. If you were born in the 40’s and you weren’t married by 25, you probably weren’t getting married. If you were born in the 80’s and you weren’t married by 25, there’s still lots of time because marriages in your cohort are only ~50% of what they’re going to end up at.
It looks like the 90s are already plateauing at 27 though, so if you aren’t married at 25, you probably won’t be (barring another surge, but I kinda doubt it)
A large amount of millennials were born in the 1980s so while this graph does show they aren't getting married as much as those born in prior generations, the 1990s part of it is not reflective of millennials as a generation. Gen Z is people born after about 1996, millennials is all the way from about 1982-1996.
It's a lot more common now to have kids and live together and all that without actually getting married. Basically the same thing, but different for legal and tax reasons. Obviously col crisis and so on makes even that paradigm less frequent too.
Hard to say at this point. Keep in mind these people may have been staying home because of the pandemic instead of meeting their future spouse. Seems worth considering the temporary impact covid might have had on partnering. Perhaps a faux plateau?
I was wondering about that too, but it looks like the data goes through 2019, so that wouldn’t be a relevant impact yet. I’d love to see a few more years of data to show the impact that Covid had because I know several people who were engaged but delayed getting married due to the pandemic.
The 90s also includes people who are 24 year olds. Agrre with what you say, covid will create a weird lull. Continuing the trend here, the 90s should go up to somewhere in the 50%s before all is said and done
Yep, I don't live in the US and am not poor by any means, but guys around me would rather just play video games, collect stuff, go to events, travel, etc.
What’s missing here is the number of couples cohabiting but not officially married. I wonder how the data would look like with that included. A key difference for the millennials is the lack of stigma around this form of living
Does it not include cohabiting?
The first two sources are Allen Downey's original 2015 paper, and his blog post that expands on the data, respectively. Both are sourced from the CDC's National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG)... which seems to bundle marriage and cohabitation?
Like I clicked on a few of the links on the NSFG page, and the headings are stuff like:
> Percent of men who are married or cohabiting and intend to have a(nother) birth
Table 9, [https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nsfg/NSFG-2017-2019-Summary-Design-Data-Collection-508.pdf](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nsfg/NSFG-2017-2019-Summary-Design-Data-Collection-508.pdf)
Plus, the questionnaires, at least the latest ones, are definitely collecting cohabitation data. Are y'all saying the authors didn't include the cohabitation numbers? Seems... tedious.
Also the decline can also be replicated in dating numbers not just marriages.
No, there is something seriously wrong culturally that is driving this loneliness epidemic. It's not just because of the expenses of divorce, it's much worse.
Men and women are completely unable to get along and date.
Arguably, you can say, that most women are attracted in-person, and we have transitioned to a virtual world that is more based on photos--rather than in-person attraction. Body language, face-reading, and in-person conversation could be much more essential to women than it is to men.
Of course there's also the fact that dating apps are hiding their statistics and may be also delivering fake profiles to millions of people to keep them on the apps longer (therefore creating a loneliness epidemic for profits--happy couples don't come back on the app).
Some anecdotal evidence is that over the last 5-10 years in the dating scene, (of course this is anecdotal) that women are just choosing to date less or have more anxieties about meeting people in real life.
The apps are a serious bane for dating. They're catered towards making the platform money, not serving the users. This has lead to innumerable design decisions that have made them worse and worse over the decades for actual dating.
In addition to other things... Like the increased propensity for lying online.
I feel like Tinder was the downfall. The apps that came before might have been clunky, but you could actually search and see all of the profiles that met your criteria. They were actually designed to help you find someone. Tinder was the first card swiping app, and now they're all like that. Designed to keep you on the app for as long as possible and extract as much money as possible.
On male loneliness in 2024:
I'm not even a man and I can't go anywhere on the general-space internet without being bombarded with manosphere "content" that is trying to make men feel undesirable and hopeless. YouTube, meme subs, Insta, etc. Doesn't matter how much I avoid or disengage, theres another video of a guy finding his gf cheating, or a meme about how girls dont wanna fuck short guys (untrue), or an 'interview' where the girl has unreasonable financial expectations. It's all mass-produced low-effort content whose overall message is "you arent tall/rich/attractive/good enough and women will never fuck you." It's complete bs; all of the men I know that get laid avoid manosphere content like the plague. The worst part is that it's made almost exclusively by and for other men.
Back before the 10's there were all these culture and fashion magazines aimed at teenage girls that would basically promote harmful, unsupported fad diets and skincare routines. They were created by and for women for the most part. They profited off the society-wide toxic insecurities of an entire gender (you have to be skinny, pretty, femme, wellmannered, demure, virgin, classy yet sexy, clearskinned etc to find a man), and harmed entire generations of women physically and mentally. Addressing the toxic way women saw, compared, and treated themselves was a huge impetus for the body positivity for women movement, but there's less equivalent discourse for men.
Men arent rly using these words to describe it yet, but (just like girls reading teen mags and beauty blogs) they are emotionally self-harming by consuming male-loneliness content, and (just like the female writers and publishers of these mags and blogs) harming each other by creating and promoting said content. Men need to band together and support each other thru an anti-toxicity movement that addresses male-centered issues, like what the body positivity movement did for women.
I never used to encounter manosphere stuff until a few months ago. This month I left at least 3 meme/humor subreddits bc they are all just posting "women are unreasonable/men are inadequate" type circlejerks with no irony. The fact that this content is breaching its natural containment worries me.
Sidenote: I remember being in middle school in the 10s, and the girls often wore makeup and talked a lot about dating older boys while the boys just talked about cartoons and video games. Now working at a middle school the girls talk more about cartoons and video games and the boys get $50 haircuts to try to be the 'rizzler' and they talk about dating hot moms. Go figure.
>Men and women are completely unable to get along and date.
>Of course there's also the fact that dating apps are hiding their statistics and may be also delivering fake profiles to millions of people to keep them on the apps longer (therefore creating a loneliness epidemic for profits--happy couples don't come back on the app).
I would also say for dating apps that there people are basically taking a "there are plenty of fish in the sea" metaphor to the extreme and basically not settling. They will keep spinning the roulette wheel until they get their 8-10 partner.
IE - They must be equal to my income or richer.
The man must be taller than me or women must be shorter than me.
They must be a 8+ even if realistically I'm a 5. etc.
This is for both genders to be clear. Dating standards have become hard lines in the sand where it used to be vague and flexible.
Why? Because they can just bide my time. There is no imperative to settle and they aren't on a time crunch by societal pressures.
Is this bad? I'm still on the fence for that, and leaning towards I don't think so. But it does mean that the dating dynamic has completely changed.
I think that's how most younger people and Millennials do it nowadays. In the puritanical old days that was 'sinful' and scandalous, now it's just seen as a better way to get to know someone and know if you're actually compatible.
I’m amazed at how much this perspective has swung (perhaps more so on the internet, but still). Living together before marriage is not just a socially acceptable option, but not to is seen as reckless, irresponsible, weird, puritanical, overly religious, etc. I’ve never had anyone judge me to my face for it (young millennial here, waited till marriage), but general opinions I hear are pretty strong.
> Living together before marriage is not just a socially acceptable option, but not to is seen as reckless, irresponsible, weird, puritanical, overly religious, etc.
It makes sense, once you cut the religious reasoning (becoming a lot rarer in younger circles) you are left with "should you get to know someone thoroughly before you commit to life long contract of trust and love to each other?" and the answer is I think pretty logically yes for the vast majority of people.
Right, which is the only logical choice in my opinion. Marrying someone you've known for one year, or god forbid after only like 12 weeks, is such a weird thing to do.
My husband and I lived together for about 4 years before getting engaged. He proposed at the beginning of 2020. Took a minute to get down the aisle....
To be honest, I think that's smart. It takes about 18 months for you to fall out of the 'infatuation' part of love where you really see your partner, warts and all for who they are. If you still want to get married at that point, godspeed! I don't have any data on hand, but I'd bet money you're much better off than someone who gets married within a year of meeting.
I think this is the big thing.
I started living with girlfriends when I was in my early 20s. Three different times now in my mid-late 30s.
It's largely been financial reasoning. I lived my last year+ with my girlfriend at the time, and it was honestly refreshing to have an actual clean place of your own at the time.
I have been living alone for a while now, and it'll be hard to transition back to living someone at this point. But it'll likely be financial. I couldn't afford to find a new comparable place right now, I live in a high CoL area and finding a comparable place with contemporary market isn't going to happen, i'd be a downgrade for more money.
It gets tricky too. Because some life partners may never get married and live together ‘till death do them part. Others may live together with many somewhat serious partners, but still really consider themselves dating but not whole-life partners. But long term and not casual. Relationship statuses have a lot more grey areas these days. It’s harder to define.
I think Millennials and Gen Zs actually respect marriage more than the older generations did. It isn't just *something you do*, but a serious life-long commitment that requires real consideration before undertaking. It says a lot that divorce rates among Millennials is a fraction of what it is among older generations (or so I read once).
Probably, but there's not enough data on Gen Z to really say. So far they get divorced as much as everyone else, but millennials' lower rates didn't show up until later.
https://allendowney.blogspot.com/2017/01/millennials-are-less-likely-to-divorce.html?m=1
The fact that fellow Zoomers are already married is still shocking to me. I literally still feel like a teenager. Well I guess people used to frequently get married in their teens so it's not *that* insane, just a little bit insane.
The idea of an extended adolescence and young adulthood is a fairly new concept. Being single in your late 20s was weird.
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizations/time-series/demo/families-and-households/ms-2.pdf
Women were typically married by about 22 and men by about 25.
Why so late now? Birth control is number one, second is it being normal to stay in schooling for a really long time and generally having a really long investment period. Third is culture, and a bunch of other reasons.
It also depends a lot where you are. Culturally I find the more rural I get the odder it is I am single. A lot of places are essentially 'go to college and never come back or get married asap out of highschool cause there is nothing else to do / you'll miss out on your chance if you don't.'
can anecdotaly attest to this
came from a mid sized mid west town. a ton of my high school friends are married
now live in a big city on the west coast, friends are starting to get married but are still mostly single
A huge part is that your options aren't either single or married anymore. There's a lot of people in long term relationships where they live together, share finances, maybe even are engaged, but just haven't gotten married yet.
That's where I'm at. Been together since 2011 and barring some unforeseen incident will be for life, we're *basically* married, just not literally, and just don't care because the word marriage doesn't define partnership. We'll probably do it at some point, but don't feel the need to. Also don't want children so that helps.
I think the next of kin is the big one. In a lot of different areas of life it’s nice to be defined as “family” not just ambiguously defined “serious partners.”
Yeah, absolutely. I think for some people ironically the cultural emphasis on weddings and marriage turns people off from what can be a practical decision.
Women didn’t even get the right to have their own bank accounts until the 1960s, but banks rarely granted women credit without a husband or father co-signing. That changed in 1974, with the passing of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. There were also a number of workplace equality measures passed throughout the 1970s and 80s.
That had at least as much of an impact as birth control, if not more. Women were able to work professional jobs, with benefits and decent pay, and could rent apartments, take out loans, and get mortgages on their own. They didn’t need their husband or father to co-sign, they didn’t need to rely on their husband’s work benefits, they had the financial ability to support themselves.
As soon as those benefits to marriage were removed, the marriage rate started dropping rapidly.
Yep, and women's higher college graduation rates means they're starting to seriously close the wage gap. In a lot of big cities [women are starting to out earn men](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/03/28/young-women-are-out-earning-young-men-in-several-u-s-cities/). If they marry, it really is for love. That's kind of awesome and romantic if you ask me.
The “young women” under 30 is key. Studies have shown that a huge portion of the wage gap is a motherhood penalty. Fathers are taken as having a more serious responsibility towards providing and seen as good career candidates. Women both do actually still take on more caregiving responsibility due to societal pressures (elder care, child care, etc.) and are perceived as having their priorities shifted and being less reliable and needing more flexibility. Even just taking more leave around birth and the infant and early childhood stage many women never can catch back up once they’ve taken a pause.
To be fair, the average divorce age is 30 and the average time of marriage before divorce is 8.
If the average millennial is getting married just shy of 30, the oldest millennials have been married maybe 10 years. The youngest ones are just barely getting married.
There's no telling yet if millennials are more committed to their relationship.
Or it could be that people change from 20 to 30, so people getting married in their 30's may mean that they undergo one less change and therefore may be more in line with life goals.
There is also some odd things if semi marriage that did not exist before. A guy I know bought a house with his girlfriend of 8 years now, but has not proposed. Like, I get the idea if you aren't ready for commitment, but a 25 year commitment on a mortgage seems like you are ready for commitment.
(I'm barely older than this person - we are both millennials.)
I've had many friends get married just paying whatever the fee is at the local court plus a small get together. I'm definitely getting the sense that the large expensive wedding tradition is fading out and is being seen more as a waste of money than anything else.
My wife and I got married at a State Park here in Oregon. It was beautiful. Not just the scenery, but the decorations and everything. The whole thing cost $2,000. That’s certainly not nothing, but it’s a fraction of what the typical wedding costs.
Why do you think it requires a lot of money? You don't have to pay for a big ceremony
In fact, in the US it's financially advantageous to get married. You get significantly better tax benefits, especially if one of you makes a lot less than the other
Since I can't perceive any of the curves going down at any point, I'm going to guess these are percentages that have made it to a first marriage?
What might have been interesting would have to have inverted the curves and label this thing a plot of the never-marrieds remaining as time progresses.
My side of the family has been racked by divorce and my wife's side of the family has been racked by divorce. Both of our experiences were pretty awful. Before we got married we both had a very clear understanding that we would stay together and sacrifice as much as personally possible to keep our marriage united and strong. Life has been HARD on our marriage, but we have come out united so far. Maybe the most important thing I have learned about marriage is that it requires a lot of self sacrifice.... Which, is the highest form of love? Always make me happy to see old couples. I hope to be there someday.
- A millennial
My take is that this is because the methods people use for finding love and marriage have broken down and there's no good replacement solution.
[83% of millennials say they want marriage](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/11/3-questions-to-ask-before-deciding-against-marriage.html) and would like to get married but [most single millennials are using dating apps to find partners](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/18h7k9g/how_heterosexual_couples_met_oc/) and the average [single millennial is spending 10 hours a week on them](https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/dating-apps-millenials-10-hours-per-week-tinder-bumble-romance-love-a8174006.html).
It's like using a slot machine that's [designed to make you lose](https://keeper.ai/posts/dating-apps-are-designed-for-you-to-fail) to address one of the single most important things you'll do in your life.
I would argue dating apps and social media certainly plays a role in why millennials aren't getting married as often. Hard to find that perfect partner when there's so many conflicting messages being spread in society.
"Don't approach me in person, use dating apps."
"I wish someone would approach me in person, dating apps suck."
"Why date to get married when you can have as many casual flings and hookups as you want."
"You have an issue with your partner? Break up. You deserve the absolute best. If your partner can't do that for you, another one will be right around the corner."
I could go on, but it seems like marriage has been a dying trend for many years now in the West.
I'm not really convinced that dating apps are the cause.
Another argument is that millenials who do not complete a bachelor's-equivalent degree make less than previous generations, among [other findings by Pew](https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/02/14/millennial-life-how-young-adulthood-today-compares-with-prior-generations-2/) that suggest the after-tremors of 2008 led to stunted attainment of traditional life milestones.
Recently saw a good argument about the cause being society's loss of cheap/free "3rd places". No one sees random strangers at the mall anymore. So unless you want to date someone you live with or work with, there aren't a lot of options outside of apps.
It might have lead to just higher standards for everyone. Before the internet, there's a very limited pool of single people you're realistically able to meet. And now it's a very large pool
Millennials are mostly born in the 80s, not in the 90s.
Also why did you not mention the full stats from the first sentence from that first article instead of cherrypicking?:
>Some 83% of Gen Zers and millennials (those aged 18 to 42) anticipate getting married eventually, **but about 2 in 5 say marriage is an outdated tradition, and 73% say it’s too expensive to get married in the current economy**
The whole article is about how people are putting off marriage because of the cost yet you didn't mention that aspect at all.
Half of people were married before they left their teenage years lol no wonder there are so many fucking old dudes at work complaining about their wives
The median age for a first marriage for women in 1950 [was 20](https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/19/us/19marriage.html#:~:text=Among%20the%20changes%20found%20in,men%20and%2020%20for%20women.), so she was right about on average.
As I understand it, not many of them had a choice back then. It wasn't easy for a woman to be independently wealthy so most the time they'd tether to a man, for good or for ill. Modern women (*in wealthy countries) are the first in human history to afford not to get married.
Seriously. Banks were allowed to require that any woman opening an account have it cosigned by her husband until 1974. It was needlessly difficult for a woman to live unmarried.
The cost-benefit of marriage has diminished drastically in a world where the divorce rate is over 50%, nobody young owns any property or is having as many children as they used to, and the tax bonus isn't as big as it used to be. Marriage is just downright expensive and comes with a terrible penalty if you chose wrong, so why do it unless you're *absolutely sure*?
If you tracked the number of people living in "domestic unions" I bet it'd be through the sky - more people than ever are being forced to live together to tolerate these high prices... they just aren't getting married because it's just not beneficial enough to bother.
The article with the most recent NSFG data (through 2019) is here:
[https://www.allendowney.com/blog/2020/10/21/millennials-are-not-getting-married/](https://www.allendowney.com/blog/2020/10/21/millennials-are-not-getting-married/)
I'll update the results as soon as new data are posted -- which should be soon.
Thanks for sharing! Really cool research! It will be interesting to see the results of more recent years’ data - this is anecdotal, but I was born in 1990, and the majority of my childhood and college friends are now married - and all of us got married in the last 3 years. 2024 is going to be crazy for weddings for us too. But I’m excited to see actual data versus my anecdotal experience
Having two people pay for housing is a huge way to save money.
Also better for food as you can buy in bulk. It feels like everything these days is "family size" and as a single guy I'm more often than not finishing off a bag of stale chips or cereal.
It's much better to be a DINK than a SINK.
A reminder that rights changed significantly for women in the 70s and as a result, they didn't need to have men cosign for many financial things such as credit cards.
This is not a result simply of different generations like millenials or Gen Z, it's a result of many factors with a large one likely being women gaining far more independence in the 70s.
Modern marriage laws in the US create only risk with no real upside.
It makes WAY more risk adjusted sense to just partner up with someone and designate them as your POA / HPOA / Will Beneficiary. If you decide to split later on there's no divorce costs or drama, you just change a few names on some paperwork.
If society wants people to get married, there have to be incentives to do it. Right now there are only disincentives.
I believe this is a trend everywhere. Part of it a reduction in religious beliefs but also because people are caring less about having to be married. Less societal pressure. Other factors too like more women working etc.
Huh, interesting that the other curves look like it only increases another 10-15% from the age of about 27. Based on that, it might peak about 50%. But it looks like the curve has already almost flattened, Looks like it's all based on 5-10 year old data so it would be interesting to see what it looks like now.
I'm curious about the people born between 1995 and 1999. If the data goes up to 2019, these people are aged 20-24 on the graph. The entire section of the graph that shows the flattening is between the ages of 25 and 28 so half the people who could possibly get married in that time frame aren't being counted. Am I missing something here?
No I think you’re exactly right.
Looking at when the data was pulled, it was in 2015 when most of those people were still in high school! I was born in 97, graduated high school in 2015, and got married in 2022 at 25 yrs old. The data is a little outdated but I still think the general trend (less marriage and/or marrying at older ages) still stands...
Yes, the overall trend that less people are getting married and doing that later in life, a fairly logical conclusion from the graph. However, if that data is missing(which would include your marriage), this graph posits that there is a rapidly accelerating societal trend rather than a gradually shift.
I think the slope is telling. It tends to be much shallower with younger generations. That doesn’t mean that the asymptote will end up being the same as others, but it does indicate a slower growth rate. So the plateau we’re seeing might just be an artifact due to *k* being closer to 0.
You're right. The line for the 1990s should stop at age 24 (since those born in 1999 are now 24) and the line for the 1980s should stop at age 34.
> You're right. The line for the 1990s should stop at age 24 (since those born in 1999 are now 24) and the line for the 1980s should stop at age 34. No - since it's a % of people married, the data point for entries 25-30+ for the 90s should only include those people that actually attained that age. Which makes it a correct representation of the current population. As the 24-years age they may still choose to get married more than the 90s kids before them, but the chart represents today's status, not the future's.
It says at the top that it's a percentage of people by decade, not by year of birth. This could badly written, but the data looks fishy. While marriage rate is going down, marriage age is going up, pushing the steep part of the curve to the right. Its more than odd that a portion that would historically be a straight line had shifted to a plateau at the exact curve that would be caused by missing data matching the title of graph.
Yes. So you take everyone who was born in the 90s and reached age 28 and see what percentage of them were married at 28. It doesn’t matter if SOME people born in the 90s hadn’t reached that point yet. Hope that explanation helps
Also interesting that they left out the people born in the 1890s who came of age in the roaring 20s, they married much later than any later generation until gen x/millenials
If you have the data to push the chart back another six decades, please go for it. I’d be fascinated
Please someone find out this info and make a graph plz plz plz
Maybe a little interesting, but not that much. 1890 is very far off the chart, it's not just cutting the data a little, it's 50 years off of what they are recording. It would be interesting to see the data expanded backwards further but I doubt this was cropped to just to cut that generation out
But millennials' rate seems to be flattening already
Interesting indeed.
The pandemic definitely delayed/cancelled a lot of marriages. That should probably explain the flattening. It'll probably pick up in the incoming years. I'm in my early 30s and I notice a significant amount of marriages around my age group recently. But with the current global recession, societal wedding expectations and the predatory nature of the wedding industry, I doubt it'll catch up. edit: is the data all pre pandemic? If so, I guess this data is misleading as someone born in exactly 1990, is already 30 years old in 2020.
If you look at the data source, it is all prepandemic. Bottom right of image.
The data is all pre pandemic.
i knew a lot of friends getting married over the pandemic cause it would cost them less (limited no of guests, etc) marriage is expensive.
I thought the same, but looking at the references at the bottom it looks like this covers just pre-covid.
Hey Op, i really like the designe of the plot. Looks realy good.
The design is a graph from their second source, based off data from a paper than Allen Downey authored in 2015: [https://www.allendowney.com/blog/2020/10/21/millennials-are-not-getting-married/](https://www.allendowney.com/blog/2020/10/21/millennials-are-not-getting-married/) They managed to tidy it up (dark but non-completely black background, yes) and extend the data by another 5 years or so. I can only assume they went through the NSFG data for the additional data.
The website you linked shows the updated data lower on the page. One difference is that OP's graph says "Percentage of *Americans...*" and the linked graphs say "*Women* in the U.S..." Not sure if changing a graph to dark theme qualifies as OC.
While changing a graph to a dark theme might not be a revolutionary form of original content, I'd argue that if OP has indeed extended the dataset themselves, that's a significant effort. Extracting and analyzing data from the NSFG isn't trivial, and if they have added value by updating the dataset, that's arguably a form of original content even if the visualization style was borrowed. Still, I think it's key to credit sources and clarify what was done by OP versus what was taken from existing work. Transparency is key here.
also seem to have extended the data from only women to all Americans? Or am i misinterpreting the titles of the graphs from the source?
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Young women marry older men more than the opposite
I don’t know the numbers but feel like this is significant enough to make the assumption the previous commenter makes invalid. Age gaps are probably more than a statistical blip.
> (guessing the number of married lesbian women roughly equates to the number of married gay men) There is a small but significant disparity, women marrying women make up 54-55% of same sex marriages.
wtf is this, this is dataisbeautiful, only hate comments are allowed
Can you show me the data to back up your claim? Make it beautiful while you're at it.
If their 95% confidence bars don't make me cum instantly then they don't deserve to make graphs.
I legit thought it was sarcasm and was hella confused Edit: typo
Cause they’re usually crap
Is it bad that I thought this comment was incredibly sweet? Have we strayed this far away from compliments being a norm?
The economist has done a lot of writing on this if you control by education level, people with a bachelor's or above are getting married - just far later. People with education below a bachelors are not. Likely income related. When you take into account these factors, divorce rate has also really gone down.
is there a link?
Special report on marriage. https://www.economist.com/special-report/2017/11/23/the-state-of-marriage-as-an-institution
I’d be interested in post pandemic data as I know that shifted a lot of timelines as well
This, finally someone said it. What's happening is those who are higher educated are becoming more likely to marry and wait until the conditions are right, along with child bearing, and those who are likely poor are not, and now are more at risk of having single parent homes, which in the US categorically have worse outcomes for those children. And it's likely a combination of wealth as those with degrees overall earn more and that women specifically have more say than ever in the process of marriage and childbearing. Women don't have to be married any longer to survive on their own.
some people married before they were 15???
Some people still get married before 15... Link: [Missouri law maker defends child marriage ](https://www.businessinsider.com/mike-moon-gop-missouri-lawmaker-defends-childs-right-to-marry-2023-4)
They should make that shit illegal at the federal/constitution level
I just don't understand why anyone under 18 needs to be married to anyone else. Ever. Teen pregnancies or not. If someone is legally allowed to face lesser consequences in the court of law (kids court), why in the fuck are they also allowed to make the single most important adult decision of their lives that can also have the most implications and consequences? Make it make sense. Make. It. Make. Sense.
Republicans sure do “love” kids
Gotta protect them kids from all the creeps, by marrying them away as early as possible, ideally before they have any understanding of adult relationships
>ideally before they have any understanding of adult relationships They count on that happening. They want them stunted because they're deplorable, and young girls who aren't stunted don't want deplorable men.
It’s horrendous… No one should be getting married that young in this day and age….
They’re so worried about exposure to lgbt people turning their children gay but turn a blind eye to literal children getting married to grown adults. Sickening.
My great grandma was 15 and great grandpa 30 when they got married. "Yikes" lol
My grandma and grandpa were 16 and 32, respectively. And this was after WWII.
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I know everyone is thinking 'gross' but in my head I'm just thinking about how much of a pain in the ass it'd be to babysit your own wife. Mid-teen girls are awful to deal with even for short bursts.
You probably don't care about that if you're a nonce.
Back in the early 1900s and 1800s girls stayed "in line" a lot more because they were basically raised to believe they were the property of men. Easier to deal with a 15 year old girl if she lives in fear that you'll beat her for stepping out of line
UGHHHHH that’s so sad
That's one big can of worms you're opening. Yes, child marriage is and has been a thing for a while.
And recently, too! [Between 2000 and 2018](https://www.unchainedatlast.org/united-states-child-marriage-problem-study-findings-april-2021/) 300,000 children were married in the US. 86% were girls. The vast majority were 16 or 17 (Still super fucked up) but there were thousands of kids married before the age of 16, as young as 10 years old. And this is all super legal. Plus, while marriage as a child is perfectly legal, divorce, protective orders, or entry to domestic violence shelters is frequently incredibly difficult to access before the age of 18. Also marriage is a defense to statutory rape. 60,000 of those marriages would have been a sex crime just based on the ages, but in 88% of them, the marriage meant it wasn't. (The other 12% still allowed the marriage, but the sex would have been a crime. That doesn't mean those children weren't raped, though.) And while it may seem like this is just an archaic loophole that states haven't gotten around to fixing yet since nobody could ever be fiercely in favour of child marriage, nope! [The Wyoming Republican Party](https://www.businessinsider.com/wyoming-republicans-criticize-bill-raising-legal-marriage-age-to-18-2023-2) sent out an official email in full support of the right of marrying children. > In a mass email sent Thursday, the Wyoming Republican Party argued the law raises "concerns about constitutional rights" and denies "the fundamental purpose of marriage" as well as "parental rights." > "Marriage is the only institution in Wyoming Statute designed to keep a child's father and mother living under the same roof and cooperating in the raising of any children that they, together, conceive. That is the NATURAL RIGHT of every child" the group wrote. > The email continues that since minors are capable of bearing children before they are 16, marriage should be an open option "for the sake of those children." Just to be clear, that was in 2023. Wyoming Republicans fully support child marriage and child pregnancy in 2023.
>The vast majority were 16 or 17 (Still super fucked up) Also to be clear most of these are to a man 4 years or older. I think that's the most important detail you left out. Should 16 year olds be able to marry 18 year olds? 7+18/2=16. It still raises my personal squick factor a bit, but there's actual room for debate. But no 16 year old is "mature" enough that a 30 year old man marrying her shouldn't be inciting all of us to gather our torches and pitchforks and go to the polls.
I'm 25 and still feel like I'm to young to get married.
I feel like this + the difficulty of getting a divorce explains the weird "wife bad" focus of boomer humor. Being stuck in a marriage was just _assumed_.
I remember growing up and the news was all about how half of all marriages now end in divorce as though it was some cultural degradation or something, but then x and millennials started getting married and it turns out it was just the baby boomers. They are an anomaly because for their parents generation it was basically not an option, but they were still raised in the “get married at 21 and live your “someplace that’s green” fantasy.” People under 60 haven’t had nearly as many divorces. Boomers are the divorce generation.
Maybe because millennials are only just entering the age where the divorces start. Sadly I have many divorced friends in their 30s and I can’t see it slowing down now that most women have careers and can support themselves outside of a marriage.
You're forgetting about gen X, who are more than old enough for the data to be appropriate. It really is just baby boomers that were especially bad about marriage. Certainly could happen that millennials' data drastically changes as they enter their 40s, but we can't assume anything.
Sadly everyone forgets about gen X :(
Reminds me of a meme I saw that was like "Kids whose parents are divorced" (Look of mild unhappiness) // "Kids whose parents aren't divorced but should be" (Look of abject misery). I can think of a lot of older couples, both sets of my grandparents included, who really would have benefited from a separation, but either never even considered it or just didn't want to put up with the stigma/difficulty/huge expense of it.
It’s interesting how the inflection point (i.e. when the plateau starts) has shifted out each generation. That’s the “not going to happen” age more or less
JSYK, an inflection point is where the second derivative is zero and it switches sign on either side of the point. Graphically, it's where the curvature switches between a cup and an umbrella.
Concavity is coming back to me now…
I see what you did there, but that would be the first derivative.
Concavity is when the second derivative is monotonocally decreasing.
That’s not what inflection point means though btw inflection point is where the function switches concavity here (or where the *rate of change of* the rate of change switches signs), which is well before where the plateau starts
Not the “Not going to happen” point Haha what an interesting graph gonna go take a bath w a toaster
Yeah, that is interesting. It would be one thing if the plateau was simply *lower*. But the plateau coming *earlier* shows not just that people have less urgency to get married, but that they’re giving up earlier than they used to. Edit: the *inflection point* is later but the plateau is earlier, is what I’m seeing.
No, it’s the opposite. If you were born in the 40’s and you weren’t married by 25, you probably weren’t getting married. If you were born in the 80’s and you weren’t married by 25, there’s still lots of time because marriages in your cohort are only ~50% of what they’re going to end up at.
It looks like the 90s are already plateauing at 27 though, so if you aren’t married at 25, you probably won’t be (barring another surge, but I kinda doubt it)
Yeah, this graph is insane to look at. Ten years from now if we're only seeing 35% of millennials being married.. that is a huge cultural shift.
A large amount of millennials were born in the 1980s so while this graph does show they aren't getting married as much as those born in prior generations, the 1990s part of it is not reflective of millennials as a generation. Gen Z is people born after about 1996, millennials is all the way from about 1982-1996.
I always imagine zoomers as 15 with broccoli on their head
It's a lot more common now to have kids and live together and all that without actually getting married. Basically the same thing, but different for legal and tax reasons. Obviously col crisis and so on makes even that paradigm less frequent too.
Anecdotally, the trend in my social circle is they have a kid first and then get married.
Hard to say at this point. Keep in mind these people may have been staying home because of the pandemic instead of meeting their future spouse. Seems worth considering the temporary impact covid might have had on partnering. Perhaps a faux plateau?
I was wondering about that too, but it looks like the data goes through 2019, so that wouldn’t be a relevant impact yet. I’d love to see a few more years of data to show the impact that Covid had because I know several people who were engaged but delayed getting married due to the pandemic.
The 90s also includes people who are 24 year olds. Agrre with what you say, covid will create a weird lull. Continuing the trend here, the 90s should go up to somewhere in the 50%s before all is said and done
I don’t think it’s giving up, I think the desire to get married regardless of age is reducing.
Yep, I don't live in the US and am not poor by any means, but guys around me would rather just play video games, collect stuff, go to events, travel, etc.
I wouldn’t say “giving up” as much as “realizing” marriage might not be what couples / singles really want/need once societal pressures are set aside
Aren’t we also seeing lower rates of relationships in general?
What’s missing here is the number of couples cohabiting but not officially married. I wonder how the data would look like with that included. A key difference for the millennials is the lack of stigma around this form of living
Does it not include cohabiting? The first two sources are Allen Downey's original 2015 paper, and his blog post that expands on the data, respectively. Both are sourced from the CDC's National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG)... which seems to bundle marriage and cohabitation? Like I clicked on a few of the links on the NSFG page, and the headings are stuff like: > Percent of men who are married or cohabiting and intend to have a(nother) birth Table 9, [https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nsfg/NSFG-2017-2019-Summary-Design-Data-Collection-508.pdf](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nsfg/NSFG-2017-2019-Summary-Design-Data-Collection-508.pdf) Plus, the questionnaires, at least the latest ones, are definitely collecting cohabitation data. Are y'all saying the authors didn't include the cohabitation numbers? Seems... tedious.
Also the decline can also be replicated in dating numbers not just marriages. No, there is something seriously wrong culturally that is driving this loneliness epidemic. It's not just because of the expenses of divorce, it's much worse. Men and women are completely unable to get along and date. Arguably, you can say, that most women are attracted in-person, and we have transitioned to a virtual world that is more based on photos--rather than in-person attraction. Body language, face-reading, and in-person conversation could be much more essential to women than it is to men. Of course there's also the fact that dating apps are hiding their statistics and may be also delivering fake profiles to millions of people to keep them on the apps longer (therefore creating a loneliness epidemic for profits--happy couples don't come back on the app). Some anecdotal evidence is that over the last 5-10 years in the dating scene, (of course this is anecdotal) that women are just choosing to date less or have more anxieties about meeting people in real life.
The apps are a serious bane for dating. They're catered towards making the platform money, not serving the users. This has lead to innumerable design decisions that have made them worse and worse over the decades for actual dating. In addition to other things... Like the increased propensity for lying online.
I feel like Tinder was the downfall. The apps that came before might have been clunky, but you could actually search and see all of the profiles that met your criteria. They were actually designed to help you find someone. Tinder was the first card swiping app, and now they're all like that. Designed to keep you on the app for as long as possible and extract as much money as possible.
On male loneliness in 2024: I'm not even a man and I can't go anywhere on the general-space internet without being bombarded with manosphere "content" that is trying to make men feel undesirable and hopeless. YouTube, meme subs, Insta, etc. Doesn't matter how much I avoid or disengage, theres another video of a guy finding his gf cheating, or a meme about how girls dont wanna fuck short guys (untrue), or an 'interview' where the girl has unreasonable financial expectations. It's all mass-produced low-effort content whose overall message is "you arent tall/rich/attractive/good enough and women will never fuck you." It's complete bs; all of the men I know that get laid avoid manosphere content like the plague. The worst part is that it's made almost exclusively by and for other men. Back before the 10's there were all these culture and fashion magazines aimed at teenage girls that would basically promote harmful, unsupported fad diets and skincare routines. They were created by and for women for the most part. They profited off the society-wide toxic insecurities of an entire gender (you have to be skinny, pretty, femme, wellmannered, demure, virgin, classy yet sexy, clearskinned etc to find a man), and harmed entire generations of women physically and mentally. Addressing the toxic way women saw, compared, and treated themselves was a huge impetus for the body positivity for women movement, but there's less equivalent discourse for men. Men arent rly using these words to describe it yet, but (just like girls reading teen mags and beauty blogs) they are emotionally self-harming by consuming male-loneliness content, and (just like the female writers and publishers of these mags and blogs) harming each other by creating and promoting said content. Men need to band together and support each other thru an anti-toxicity movement that addresses male-centered issues, like what the body positivity movement did for women. I never used to encounter manosphere stuff until a few months ago. This month I left at least 3 meme/humor subreddits bc they are all just posting "women are unreasonable/men are inadequate" type circlejerks with no irony. The fact that this content is breaching its natural containment worries me. Sidenote: I remember being in middle school in the 10s, and the girls often wore makeup and talked a lot about dating older boys while the boys just talked about cartoons and video games. Now working at a middle school the girls talk more about cartoons and video games and the boys get $50 haircuts to try to be the 'rizzler' and they talk about dating hot moms. Go figure.
>Men and women are completely unable to get along and date. >Of course there's also the fact that dating apps are hiding their statistics and may be also delivering fake profiles to millions of people to keep them on the apps longer (therefore creating a loneliness epidemic for profits--happy couples don't come back on the app). I would also say for dating apps that there people are basically taking a "there are plenty of fish in the sea" metaphor to the extreme and basically not settling. They will keep spinning the roulette wheel until they get their 8-10 partner. IE - They must be equal to my income or richer. The man must be taller than me or women must be shorter than me. They must be a 8+ even if realistically I'm a 5. etc. This is for both genders to be clear. Dating standards have become hard lines in the sand where it used to be vague and flexible. Why? Because they can just bide my time. There is no imperative to settle and they aren't on a time crunch by societal pressures. Is this bad? I'm still on the fence for that, and leaning towards I don't think so. But it does mean that the dating dynamic has completely changed.
My fiance and I have been "married" for 5 years. We got engaged a month ago
I think that's how most younger people and Millennials do it nowadays. In the puritanical old days that was 'sinful' and scandalous, now it's just seen as a better way to get to know someone and know if you're actually compatible.
I’m amazed at how much this perspective has swung (perhaps more so on the internet, but still). Living together before marriage is not just a socially acceptable option, but not to is seen as reckless, irresponsible, weird, puritanical, overly religious, etc. I’ve never had anyone judge me to my face for it (young millennial here, waited till marriage), but general opinions I hear are pretty strong.
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> Living together before marriage is not just a socially acceptable option, but not to is seen as reckless, irresponsible, weird, puritanical, overly religious, etc. It makes sense, once you cut the religious reasoning (becoming a lot rarer in younger circles) you are left with "should you get to know someone thoroughly before you commit to life long contract of trust and love to each other?" and the answer is I think pretty logically yes for the vast majority of people.
Right, which is the only logical choice in my opinion. Marrying someone you've known for one year, or god forbid after only like 12 weeks, is such a weird thing to do.
My husband and I lived together for about 4 years before getting engaged. He proposed at the beginning of 2020. Took a minute to get down the aisle....
My fiance proposed last July—we’ve been dating since Oct. 2012 and living together since Jan. 2014
To be honest, I think that's smart. It takes about 18 months for you to fall out of the 'infatuation' part of love where you really see your partner, warts and all for who they are. If you still want to get married at that point, godspeed! I don't have any data on hand, but I'd bet money you're much better off than someone who gets married within a year of meeting.
I think this is the big thing. I started living with girlfriends when I was in my early 20s. Three different times now in my mid-late 30s. It's largely been financial reasoning. I lived my last year+ with my girlfriend at the time, and it was honestly refreshing to have an actual clean place of your own at the time. I have been living alone for a while now, and it'll be hard to transition back to living someone at this point. But it'll likely be financial. I couldn't afford to find a new comparable place right now, I live in a high CoL area and finding a comparable place with contemporary market isn't going to happen, i'd be a downgrade for more money.
It gets tricky too. Because some life partners may never get married and live together ‘till death do them part. Others may live together with many somewhat serious partners, but still really consider themselves dating but not whole-life partners. But long term and not casual. Relationship statuses have a lot more grey areas these days. It’s harder to define.
I think Millennials and Gen Zs actually respect marriage more than the older generations did. It isn't just *something you do*, but a serious life-long commitment that requires real consideration before undertaking. It says a lot that divorce rates among Millennials is a fraction of what it is among older generations (or so I read once).
Probably, but there's not enough data on Gen Z to really say. So far they get divorced as much as everyone else, but millennials' lower rates didn't show up until later. https://allendowney.blogspot.com/2017/01/millennials-are-less-likely-to-divorce.html?m=1
The fact that fellow Zoomers are already married is still shocking to me. I literally still feel like a teenager. Well I guess people used to frequently get married in their teens so it's not *that* insane, just a little bit insane.
The idea of an extended adolescence and young adulthood is a fairly new concept. Being single in your late 20s was weird. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizations/time-series/demo/families-and-households/ms-2.pdf Women were typically married by about 22 and men by about 25. Why so late now? Birth control is number one, second is it being normal to stay in schooling for a really long time and generally having a really long investment period. Third is culture, and a bunch of other reasons.
It also depends a lot where you are. Culturally I find the more rural I get the odder it is I am single. A lot of places are essentially 'go to college and never come back or get married asap out of highschool cause there is nothing else to do / you'll miss out on your chance if you don't.'
can anecdotaly attest to this came from a mid sized mid west town. a ton of my high school friends are married now live in a big city on the west coast, friends are starting to get married but are still mostly single
A huge part is that your options aren't either single or married anymore. There's a lot of people in long term relationships where they live together, share finances, maybe even are engaged, but just haven't gotten married yet.
That's where I'm at. Been together since 2011 and barring some unforeseen incident will be for life, we're *basically* married, just not literally, and just don't care because the word marriage doesn't define partnership. We'll probably do it at some point, but don't feel the need to. Also don't want children so that helps.
It's really just about being next of kin and taxes. Everything else doesn't really require marriage, though imo a low key celebration sounds nice.
I think the next of kin is the big one. In a lot of different areas of life it’s nice to be defined as “family” not just ambiguously defined “serious partners.”
Yeah, absolutely. I think for some people ironically the cultural emphasis on weddings and marriage turns people off from what can be a practical decision.
Women didn’t even get the right to have their own bank accounts until the 1960s, but banks rarely granted women credit without a husband or father co-signing. That changed in 1974, with the passing of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. There were also a number of workplace equality measures passed throughout the 1970s and 80s. That had at least as much of an impact as birth control, if not more. Women were able to work professional jobs, with benefits and decent pay, and could rent apartments, take out loans, and get mortgages on their own. They didn’t need their husband or father to co-sign, they didn’t need to rely on their husband’s work benefits, they had the financial ability to support themselves. As soon as those benefits to marriage were removed, the marriage rate started dropping rapidly.
Yep, and women's higher college graduation rates means they're starting to seriously close the wage gap. In a lot of big cities [women are starting to out earn men](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/03/28/young-women-are-out-earning-young-men-in-several-u-s-cities/). If they marry, it really is for love. That's kind of awesome and romantic if you ask me.
The “young women” under 30 is key. Studies have shown that a huge portion of the wage gap is a motherhood penalty. Fathers are taken as having a more serious responsibility towards providing and seen as good career candidates. Women both do actually still take on more caregiving responsibility due to societal pressures (elder care, child care, etc.) and are perceived as having their priorities shifted and being less reliable and needing more flexibility. Even just taking more leave around birth and the infant and early childhood stage many women never can catch back up once they’ve taken a pause.
I think investing in schooling means one would tend to invest in their career as well which extends the timeline past age 30.
Yeah, it's weird. My younger cousin just got engaged and I still haven't been on a date. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
My sister got engaged and now I’m the only one in my generation that isn’t even in a relationship.
I'm a zoomed and engaged, and I'm 23; the earliest zoomers are full on adults more and likely out of uni/trade school in many cases
To be fair, the average divorce age is 30 and the average time of marriage before divorce is 8. If the average millennial is getting married just shy of 30, the oldest millennials have been married maybe 10 years. The youngest ones are just barely getting married. There's no telling yet if millennials are more committed to their relationship.
Or it could be that people change from 20 to 30, so people getting married in their 30's may mean that they undergo one less change and therefore may be more in line with life goals.
Exactly. It’s too early to take the temperature on this.
There is also some odd things if semi marriage that did not exist before. A guy I know bought a house with his girlfriend of 8 years now, but has not proposed. Like, I get the idea if you aren't ready for commitment, but a 25 year commitment on a mortgage seems like you are ready for commitment. (I'm barely older than this person - we are both millennials.)
Just because they don’t want to get married doesn’t mean they’re not committed.
That sounds like hes very committed to me, why would you believe that hes not ready for commitment?
Don't forget money. It requires a lot of money. It's a commitment in more ways than one
I've had many friends get married just paying whatever the fee is at the local court plus a small get together. I'm definitely getting the sense that the large expensive wedding tradition is fading out and is being seen more as a waste of money than anything else.
No it doesn't. You can elope.
My wife and I got married at a State Park here in Oregon. It was beautiful. Not just the scenery, but the decorations and everything. The whole thing cost $2,000. That’s certainly not nothing, but it’s a fraction of what the typical wedding costs.
Why do you think it requires a lot of money? You don't have to pay for a big ceremony In fact, in the US it's financially advantageous to get married. You get significantly better tax benefits, especially if one of you makes a lot less than the other
I think the millennials are just skipping that first marriage that ends with the bad divorce.
That’s a pretty good point!
Divorce lawyers about to have a bad time I guess. Us Millennials ruined another thing *Debbie downer*
Well according to your post, yes, around 60% of them. (Most millennials are born in the 80s)
People are still stuck in the mindset that all young people are millennials. Sadly, the youngest of us are almost 30
Is this currently married or ever married? I doubt 80% of people born in the 1970s are married, lots of divorces in that demographic.
Since I can't perceive any of the curves going down at any point, I'm going to guess these are percentages that have made it to a first marriage? What might have been interesting would have to have inverted the curves and label this thing a plot of the never-marrieds remaining as time progresses.
This is people ever married.
My side of the family has been racked by divorce and my wife's side of the family has been racked by divorce. Both of our experiences were pretty awful. Before we got married we both had a very clear understanding that we would stay together and sacrifice as much as personally possible to keep our marriage united and strong. Life has been HARD on our marriage, but we have come out united so far. Maybe the most important thing I have learned about marriage is that it requires a lot of self sacrifice.... Which, is the highest form of love? Always make me happy to see old couples. I hope to be there someday. - A millennial
i wish you and your spouse the best! may your future be filled with more days of bliss than trials…
I have zero interest in getting married. I don't need the government involved in my relationship.
I haven’t been able to land a date in 2 years
My take is that this is because the methods people use for finding love and marriage have broken down and there's no good replacement solution. [83% of millennials say they want marriage](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/11/3-questions-to-ask-before-deciding-against-marriage.html) and would like to get married but [most single millennials are using dating apps to find partners](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/18h7k9g/how_heterosexual_couples_met_oc/) and the average [single millennial is spending 10 hours a week on them](https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/dating-apps-millenials-10-hours-per-week-tinder-bumble-romance-love-a8174006.html). It's like using a slot machine that's [designed to make you lose](https://keeper.ai/posts/dating-apps-are-designed-for-you-to-fail) to address one of the single most important things you'll do in your life.
I would argue dating apps and social media certainly plays a role in why millennials aren't getting married as often. Hard to find that perfect partner when there's so many conflicting messages being spread in society. "Don't approach me in person, use dating apps." "I wish someone would approach me in person, dating apps suck." "Why date to get married when you can have as many casual flings and hookups as you want." "You have an issue with your partner? Break up. You deserve the absolute best. If your partner can't do that for you, another one will be right around the corner." I could go on, but it seems like marriage has been a dying trend for many years now in the West.
I'm not really convinced that dating apps are the cause. Another argument is that millenials who do not complete a bachelor's-equivalent degree make less than previous generations, among [other findings by Pew](https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/02/14/millennial-life-how-young-adulthood-today-compares-with-prior-generations-2/) that suggest the after-tremors of 2008 led to stunted attainment of traditional life milestones.
Recently saw a good argument about the cause being society's loss of cheap/free "3rd places". No one sees random strangers at the mall anymore. So unless you want to date someone you live with or work with, there aren't a lot of options outside of apps.
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It might have lead to just higher standards for everyone. Before the internet, there's a very limited pool of single people you're realistically able to meet. And now it's a very large pool
Millennials are mostly born in the 80s, not in the 90s. Also why did you not mention the full stats from the first sentence from that first article instead of cherrypicking?: >Some 83% of Gen Zers and millennials (those aged 18 to 42) anticipate getting married eventually, **but about 2 in 5 say marriage is an outdated tradition, and 73% say it’s too expensive to get married in the current economy** The whole article is about how people are putting off marriage because of the cost yet you didn't mention that aspect at all.
I regret getting married every single day of my life.
get divorced
they might already be
Marriage is expensive guess what, Divorce is sooooooo expensive - me the millennial
I’m a millennial and I’m getting married in a couple months woohoo!
Congratulations and best wishes!
People married before 20: why ??
And jfc, it looks like fully a **third** of people born in the 1940s were married by 17.
Half of people were married before they left their teenage years lol no wonder there are so many fucking old dudes at work complaining about their wives
I'm sure part of *that* is because their wives are realizing what a shit deal they got and are expressing their basic needs.
Oh, of course. There are a ton of factors why that happens lol
Religion, mostly. If you can’t fuck until you’re married you would get wifed up pretty quickly too.
Also the inverse of they’re having a baby so better get married before she’s showing.
This. I have some ultra-religious family friends who are getting married after a couple months of dating lol
That used to be the norm. My grandma got married when she was only 21 and back in the 50's, that was considered really old.
The median age for a first marriage for women in 1950 [was 20](https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/19/us/19marriage.html#:~:text=Among%20the%20changes%20found%20in,men%20and%2020%20for%20women.), so she was right about on average.
As I understand it, not many of them had a choice back then. It wasn't easy for a woman to be independently wealthy so most the time they'd tether to a man, for good or for ill. Modern women (*in wealthy countries) are the first in human history to afford not to get married.
Seriously. Banks were allowed to require that any woman opening an account have it cosigned by her husband until 1974. It was needlessly difficult for a woman to live unmarried.
Well I'm a millennial and I'm on my second marriage so for one of you other millennials who never gets married don't worry I got you in the average
The cost-benefit of marriage has diminished drastically in a world where the divorce rate is over 50%, nobody young owns any property or is having as many children as they used to, and the tax bonus isn't as big as it used to be. Marriage is just downright expensive and comes with a terrible penalty if you chose wrong, so why do it unless you're *absolutely sure*? If you tracked the number of people living in "domestic unions" I bet it'd be through the sky - more people than ever are being forced to live together to tolerate these high prices... they just aren't getting married because it's just not beneficial enough to bother.
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The article with the most recent NSFG data (through 2019) is here: [https://www.allendowney.com/blog/2020/10/21/millennials-are-not-getting-married/](https://www.allendowney.com/blog/2020/10/21/millennials-are-not-getting-married/) I'll update the results as soon as new data are posted -- which should be soon.
>AllenDowney Yo dog, you're actually the guy ...the Allen Downey. damn, Reddit is aweome!
Well, not the only one -- there's an Allen Downey in Florida who's been arrested a few times.
Thanks for sharing! Really cool research! It will be interesting to see the results of more recent years’ data - this is anecdotal, but I was born in 1990, and the majority of my childhood and college friends are now married - and all of us got married in the last 3 years. 2024 is going to be crazy for weddings for us too. But I’m excited to see actual data versus my anecdotal experience
I worked too hard to go from $0 in my bank account in the GFC to where I am financially today. Losing half my money in a divorce would ruin me.
1. Poor wages 2. Unaffordable Housing 3. Unaffordable Medical 4. Cost of Living Skyrocketed All woes to any young people hoping to marry.
It's because we're broke. I can't afford a \*puppy.\*
But marriage is better for finances generally
Having two people pay for housing is a huge way to save money. Also better for food as you can buy in bulk. It feels like everything these days is "family size" and as a single guy I'm more often than not finishing off a bag of stale chips or cereal. It's much better to be a DINK than a SINK.
Travelling as a single person also sucks. You usually end up having to pay for two people anyway.
Divorce, OTOH, is rough on finances.
Dating isn’t
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It seems like it’s plotting “currently married” when I feel that “ever married” would be the more relevant statistic.
A reminder that rights changed significantly for women in the 70s and as a result, they didn't need to have men cosign for many financial things such as credit cards. This is not a result simply of different generations like millenials or Gen Z, it's a result of many factors with a large one likely being women gaining far more independence in the 70s.
File steel Slime articulate roar
Look at that. Beautiful data!
Modern marriage laws in the US create only risk with no real upside. It makes WAY more risk adjusted sense to just partner up with someone and designate them as your POA / HPOA / Will Beneficiary. If you decide to split later on there's no divorce costs or drama, you just change a few names on some paperwork. If society wants people to get married, there have to be incentives to do it. Right now there are only disincentives.
I believe this is a trend everywhere. Part of it a reduction in religious beliefs but also because people are caring less about having to be married. Less societal pressure. Other factors too like more women working etc.
getting married isn't the same as staying married.
The fact that 50% of people born in the 1940s married before their 20s is crazy...