That’s a damned nice taxonomy. Thank you.
I know I can’t help answer question C as much as desperately want to know the answer.
According to my 5 minutes of research:
People have been getting married later in life since the 50s
The percent of young adults getting married has been decreasing.
The percent of adults who never married is increasing.
So I think the A is definitely true. The question is why?
I think there is less societal pressure to get married these days, but I think it also creates an overwhelming number of options for single people. In the past, you might settle down because you didn’t want to be the person prepping meals for one and showing up at events without a plus one at 29 while all your friends were busy being married and raising kids. These days, I know plenty of single people who lead fulfilling lives as singles with friends, hobbies, career and so on. In many cases, maybe even more fulfilling, looking at the dour faces of the parents at my kid’s school.
That can be a challenge for people who actually do want to settle down and raise families. As anyone who has ever been to the toothpaste aisle at the supermarket knows, too many choices can be as bad as too few. Particularly when trying to weed through which of those brands are just jerks wasting your time.
It does. But I don’t care what anyone says, regardless of inflation, a million dollars is a lot of money for most people.
As you pointed out, there have always been women who look for rich guys. But I think there is just something with social media these days where it just skews people’s perspective. It normalizes a mentality that real jobs are stupid and everyone is out there getting rich posting content on TikTok.
According to the essay I summarized earlier, one factor is that women have raised their standards as their economic and social freedoms have increased, and men haven’t changed nearly as much. Women were far more apt to settle for much less than they’d hoped when remaining unmarried was a humiliating and usually impoverished fate for them. They still want to couple up but can’t find good men.
I agreed, as mentioned, but that’s not what the OP asked. The debate about getting married and having children is a sidetrack.
The key question here is are younger people not getting into relationships BECAUSE THEY DON’T WANT TO?
I don’t see any evidence for that. There is some that young people are less likely to be in a relationship (just like they have less close friends, on average*), but nothing I’ve seen has said that is because they don’t want a relationship, rather than they are generally less social and more lonely, so not able to find anyone to have a relationship with. .
As I mention above there is a certain percentage of people, regardless of age, that has no interest in relationships or commitment of any kind, but I don’t see any evidence that percentage is any larger for Zoomers than for Boomers.
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- I’m not 100% convinced of the numbers here, as I mentioned, everything I’ve seen is based on surveys, and I’ve no idea how statistically sound those are (for all I know we are taking about a Fox News online poll)
I think this is very true. I know plenty of women in their thirties+ who aren’t all that focused on marrying. They have good jobs, and are in comfortable living situations – the bar for “marrying this guy will be a net gain to my life” is a lot higher now.
OTOH, the ‘Non-I love you madly and can’t live without you’ type of incentives for men don’t seem to have altered as much. I personally know more than a handful of single men who have complained about not finding an ‘old fashioned’ woman to marry. Where further talk reveals that ‘old fashioned’ means something like a woman who accepts that the majority of effort to run a household (the cooking, cleaning, shopping, laundry, dealing with organizations trivia, etc.) will somewhat automatically be HER job. Meaning HIS life will be improved by marrying.
Also random thought on the on Hollywood trope in the OP, which is anything but a new thing. It probably had very different connotations back in the day. A few decades ago the “Confirmed Bachelor” trope had nothing to with straight men who were commitment averse, and was (in many cases a least) just a euphemism for being gay, in the days when homosexuality was the “love that dare not speak its name”.
I can believe that. I don’t have any stats, but anecdotally I could craft a hypothesis that younger generations are growing up leading lives that are more structured, more supervised, following more planned out life roadmaps. They spend more time online than building face to face relationships. This results in less developed social skills. Things like initiating a conversation or dealing with conflict constructively or simply having the world not work exactly as they want it to.
I theorize that this is why I constantly see a narcissistic attitude being displayed on social media (reinforced by constantly viewing narcissistic attitudes).
They may “want” a relationship buy maybe only according to their own schedule and their own terms.
I do not really know any men that have married a woman for her to be a homemaker. Basically zero.
For one it’s expensive today. My ex stayed home after having kids and once she left me then it got a lot more expensive for me. Whereas the split ups where both work seem to be a lot more equitable. Generally having a partner of either gender stay at home is not something I’d be willing to do again.
Also plenty of men stay very involved in their kids’ lives even post divorce or if there was no marriage in the first place.
Personally, though I would be leery of extended commitment at this point. Perhaps it’s sexist but I just think women tend to have more dissatisfaction with partners over time, independent of any behaviors on the partner’s part. So I don’t think that my actions, as a man with a woman in a relationship, are going to fix the cause of that dissatisfaction.
Though I’m probably in the 5% that doesn’t really fall in love, I actually enjoy being in relationships and find love over time. Maybe I’ll have to seek out my fellow 4% among women.
The question isn’t only who, if anyone, becomes a SAH. The question is, who does how much of the necessary work of running the household, and who decides who’s going to do that work?
There are plenty of women who work full time and who nevertheless find themselves expected to do most of the household work on top of it.
It’s partly “being involved in their kids’ lives” but that’s nowhere near all of it – and at least some of it needs to be done even if their are no kids. And, of course, there’s the question of what “being involved” means – for instance, does it mean being the one dealing with the puking kid who can’t go to childcare for several days?
Exactly - I know a few women who ended up SAH but I know many more who had a job outside the home and still did much more of the household / childcare work than their husbands. In a lot of ways their lives would have been easier without the husband.
Do these statistics show the number of people in near-marriage relationships? I’ve seen dozens of people on Wheel of Fortune (which does not recruit wild and crazy contestants) who have been together for a decade, have two children, and just got engaged. These kind of relationships happened 40 years ago, but were less common and less socially acceptable in the heartland.
Expected by whom? The man or themselves?
I will first point out that many women who work do very well at living a balanced relationship. Because they are not trying to “do it all.” They can keep their egos in check, realize they do not have time or ability to do it all because they are working full time. So they are capable of appreciating a partner and their talents, which may be different than their own.
I was not married to such a person. Now my ex has for decades paid for a cleaning service so when we were married and I was working and she wasn’t, I don’t really see that she should get credit for cleaning the house. Since she wasn’t contributing to that. She did cook, but when we were single and she was working she was the cliched single woman with two things in her refrigerator. I had been single a while and certainly knew how to cook for myself. Of course this was something she felt she needed to “take over” during the course of our relationship.
To have an equal partner, you have to invite someone to be an equal partner in a relationship with you. Some people are not very good at doing this or sustaining it. My ex was one of those people. It didn’t help that she had very specific desires and a guy she ultimately left me for. Had I known, never would have gotten involved with her, but of course I didn’t know.
I also do think women are treated a lot differently than men when they lodge complaints about the nuts and bolts of a relationship. Not much receptivity towards men doing this IMO. So yes, in my experience, sometimes dialogue or reports about what’s going on in a relationship are not very accurate.
Again I will point to what I originally said, where there are quite a number of women more attuned to developing a truly equal partnership - often by realizing they really can’t do it all and being appreciative of the partners’ help. I just didn’t happen to have that sort of situation.
That I don’t know. My wife and I were actually in that sort of relationship where we lived together forever until eventually getting married and having children.
It’s actually a fairly common scenario in rom coms and TV shows. Now part of it is having the “will they or won’t they” tension over many television seasons. But I can name a dozen movies where the plot consists of some variation of
- Boy meets girl
- Something something profit$
- 15 years later they finally get married.
Despite your personal anecdote, statistics aren’t on your side here.
Here’s a Gallup poll from 2020 that shows that women are significantly more likely to be responsible for every household task except yard work and car maintenance.
Nathan Detroit:
It is mine and Adelaide’s 14th anniversary. We are engaged 14 years today.
My older daughter lived with her boyfriend a long time before they got married. He’d have done it before, but she wanted to wait until they were in a stable situation. My younger daughter did it for a shorter time. My wife and I didn’t because we never lived closer than 600 miles from each other until we got married, and I figured asking her to move such a long distance without committing would be a dick move.
So my point is that singles may not be as relationship averse as the marriage statistics indicate. Relationships just look different these days.
Rather than hijack this thread, I’ve started a new one on very long term relationships.
I grew up very Mormon and getting married early and having as many kids as possible was taught repeated, again and again. The amount of pressure was constant, although at the time, I didn’t see it as unwelcome, just that was what was expected.
Boys went on missions at age of 19, came back at 21 and were encouraged to get married right away. At that time, women couldn’t go on missions until they were 21 because they were supposed to get married earlier than that. If they lasted until they were 21 then they could go on missions. That has changed now.
Even now, the mean marriage age for Mormons is 22, while this source gives the average marriage age in the U.S. is 29 for men and 27 for women
They really pushed getting married to other Mormons and explicitly taught that as long as we married other faithful members, it really didn’t matter whom you got married to. Many young men came back from missions, started dating someone and quickly became engaged within months.
You should read it for the pleasure of Gibbon’s lapidary prose. However flawed his historical analysis, the man could craft a sentence:
When I got married, I started out doing a lot of the housework. I did it when I was single, why wouldn’t I continue doing it after I got married? But on a consistent basis, my lovely wife would give me negative feedback on what I did. She’d come along behind me and “correct” whatever I had done. Like I’d load the dishwasher, and she’d rearrange the dishes before starting it. In my mind, I’m not doing anything wrong I’m just not doing it exactly the same way she does it. If I clean the house it’s fine for a little while but the first time she can’t find something, usually a document, she says, “I hope you didn’t throw it away.” Or when I moved the garden hose into the garage so nobody would trip over it on Halloween instead of thanking me the first thing she said was, “I hope it doesn’t get water all over anyting.”
Maybe this situation is very specific to me, but I sometimes wonder if other men are in the same position. I’ve got very little incentive to help with house work because I feel as though I’m going to get some sort of negative feedback no matter what I do.