Way way OT: Marriage rates in the US
So, I thought I would throw out what I think is an interesting topic that is (hopefully) non-political and can effectively distract us from the COVID madness.
I read an interesting NPR article in my Quora feed basically saying that marriage is at an all time low in the US. As a preface, I'm happily married to a Hispanic immigrant. My reaction to the article was "so be it, if people are not choosing to be married, then that's OK with me, its none of my business". Her reaction was the opposite: "this is so bad for society. If people don't marry, then they don't have someone to live life with and have children"
I chalked it up to cultural differences which is no big deal, but it got us to talking to the question of: "why is it this way?" I certainly have some thoughts on this, but I think because almost all of my close guy friends are married, I don't think of it as an issue. My wife has several/many older (i.e. late 30s) girlfriends who are not married and are not anywhere near being married...and that has caused A LOT of drama.
But I thought I would just throw it out to the board to discuss. Mods delete if its too OT.
So, what say you MgoBoard?
Decades of happy singledom (at least for the poster who mentions they prefer that) and potentially a few months of dying alone at the end of life vs. decades of being not as happy and having someone you know there to change your diaper in those last few months?
I think it's quite possible that you could be in poor health, but still alive for decades alone as well.
You can be in a relationship without being married. At my age, if my wife leaves or passes, I'm not getting married again. My kids are grown, I'm not having anymore, so I see no reason to marry again. Doesn't mean I have to be lonely
I feel the same. No way would I get married again. But some people feel differently. I know a woman who had two additional husbands after her husband died at a fairly early age. She married the third husband when she was in her 70's. The second husband died of an age-related illness.
Kids change everything. I had thoughts like this in my 30s, for sure, but I would not trade what I have now, two very young girls and a wife, for any amount of wealth or property. I think because of how I was raised, family is everything to me.
I'm engaged and don't want kids, but one thing I've noticed is that once many of my friends had kids, the guys complained about their sex lives. The women seemed OK being just mothers and not having sex much any longer, but the men seem to be dissatisfied with it. Do you find that to be the case for men with kids, or are there plenty out there with good sex lives, or maybe also others out there also happy with just being a father and no longer super interested in their sex life?
Sex life has taken a hit, on the whole. More like once or twice a week rather than 5-6. I suspect that is common. But TBH my closest friends are still without kids.
Sex life definitely takes a hit when you have kids. So does social life, work life, hobby life, watching Michigan football/basketball life, etc. You get the point. Having kids is truly special, and totally worth the hit to all the aspects outlined above. But its not for everyone. Those who do have them, like myself, have to learn to adjust.
That makes sense. I think that's why I don't think it's for me. I don't think it would impact my work life much as a teacher, but I don't think I could give up my 2 hours at the gym every day. I guess I could give up watching UM sports live since I already kinda do because my fiancee loves outdoor fall things, but the gym...not sure I could give that one up.
Do you not trust your judgement in women? If you meet someone who is kind to everyone around her, responsible, has a lot of common sense, and other women really respect, what are the statistical odds that you'll have to go through a nasty divorce?
Pretty much every guy around me that married a person lovely on the inside are happy and content with the occasional funny grumbling
I am right there with you dude. I am 40, I am doing well for myself, marriage is just too much risk for me. I honestly have very few married friends, most of them were screwed in their divorce. Why would I risk my home, my retirement, and my future for a woman who has a 65 percent chance to leave and crush me financially. And for what? Not a lot of women these days are worth it.
I feel like I'm pretty qualified to speak on this given my situation. I'm 34 and have never been married. Girlfriend is 32 and we've been together 8+ years. She nags me consistently about how we need to "get married", but I see no reason why. Neither of us want kids, although she did at one point. Everyone looks at us and wonders why we're not married, but I don't feel any urge and since we're both happily committed, I don't get why I'd lock myself into an institution.
People who are married, what am I missing/what's "wrong" with me?
there is nothing 'wrong' with you, but maybe look at it another way: marriage, like children, is a blessing. he who finds a wife finds a good thing, and finds favor with the Lord.
as it relates to secular things, married people on average live longer, have more assets, are happier, and yes, they even fool around more.
also true is that children born out of wedlock are a disproportionate amount of the criminal justice system.
of course that doesn't mean, as magnus said, that unmarrieds can't be great parents, that step parents can't be great parents (and thankfully many times they are) and that bio parents can't be nightmares - we all know that's true, too.
choose wisely. choose someone that wild horses couldn't drag you away from. share your vision for what you want your life to look like. watch out for red flags. nobody is perfect, oh man, but there are some wonderful people out there who would love to be your spouse and vise-versa.
My wife and I dated for 7 years before getting married. I was 40 and she was 33. Waiting a while was a good idea for us.
For me, a marriage certificate is meaningless from an emotional perspective, but the act of marriage and making a lifelong promise and commitment to her in front of family, friends, and God is what matters most to me.
We also never planned on kids and really enjoyed life with just the two of us. Then as she turned 37ish she REALLY wanted a baby so we had a baby last summer. Be ready for that.
Just my two cents. Do your thing.
I met my wife during first week of move in makers at Michigan. We were 5 doors down from each other in Couzins. We started dating second semester of freshman year and dated for 9 years before getting married. Celebrating our 3rd wedding anniversary but we’ve been together a long time.
Neither of us are sure if we want kids. Other than my relationship, I feel like my life is too uncertain to make that kind of commitment. But maybe it’s the meaning I need to stay grounded and grateful for all my blessings. My wife is getting more clarity and wants kids. I just have some goals to accomplish first (decide on long term career, start working towards it, hit target savings level, and lose 40 more pounds.
Mostly you're missing the legal stuff, even more important if you had kids (which you still could at some point, biologically speaking).
Even though I have been married 20 years, I actually agree with your perspective
for me personally.... the only reason to get married is to have kids
You would marry her because you love her enough to make the commitment. It's just that simple. And if you don't marry her, it's fairly likely that she'll figure out that you don't.
For me, I'd decided she was the one, and couldn't wait to officially tie the knot and spend the rest of my life with her. Life has thrown curveballs like jobs, finances, health etc at us, but together we're weathering it through, and she's the best co-pilot in the world.
Lets say you hypothetically had a wonderful daughter or sister, and they're with a guy for 12+ years. Your daughter or sister tell you they do want to get married but the guy doesn't want to get married. He's comfortable but afraid of being locked in, of making it official.
What would your advice be to them?
I know you weren't asking me, but I'll answer anyway since I have a wonderful daughter (though she's many many years away from marriage etc). My approach would be:
1. Do you want kids? If not, then I don't think there is a real pressing need to get married. You've been together happily for 12 years. What will "a piece of paper" prove?
2. If you want kids or marriage is something you want to do, then maybe reduce the risk to make him feel more comfortable? Maybe pre-nup?
If your girlfriend is the most important person in the world to you, then taking care of her and making her happy should be the biggest priorities in the world for you. That is what I define as a commitment. If marriage would make her happy, then you should get married. Simply because it would make her happy.
Nothing is wrong with you. My wife and I got married a little while ago, but it honestly hasn't really changed much. We just decided it was the right choice for us. We will not be having any kids either, so that was not a factor. On that note, consider getting a vasectomy. They're cheap, quick, safe, and add a lot of peace of mind. I think mine cost me about $180 out of pocket at Planned Parenthood and I was back to normal after around 2 or 3 days (just don't forget that your junk can still be loaded for a while after the procedure, so you need a confirmation that you're shooting blanks).
One positive aspect is that it makes you invest more into the relationship since divorce is such a chore. So it incentives you to work through salvageable problems that might otherwise lead to a breakup.
That being said, since you have been together for so long I assume you have quite a few financial entanglements (lease/mortgage, joint accounts, etc) so splitting up would be more difficult than for a couple who’ve just been dating 6 months
I don’t think it’s a big deal, but I can understand why some would find it sad.
The generation that is most likely to be getting married right now is millennials (I am one) and my generation had to deal with a bunch of our parents being divorced. Both my wife and I come from divorced families. I am still close to my parents, but my wife has ZERO interaction with her father and is very close to her mother. She hasn’t spoken to her dad in ten or so years (he’s a POS). I can’t blame people for choosing not to jump into marriage when they had a poor model throughout their lives. This is absolutely not the only reason marriage rates are down, but it’s a factor.
100% of divorces begin in marriage.
I think the truth is closer to millennials being less able to support themselves, a significant other or children due to economics, and/or less of a willingness to make long term sacrifices for the sake of a relationship. They hear things like 50% of marriages end in divorce and figure why bother being a statistic?
And there is a cultural component. Hispanics and Asians have greater respect for the institution and divorce at a much lower rate from what I've seen in the legal profession and also from having married into a Vietnamese family.
Millennials don't like to get married. It is probably related to the fact that their parents (baby boomers) had a high divorce rate, which led to their kids having a sour taste about marriage, and also a sour taste about parenting (objectively, divorced parents tend to lead to poor parent-child relationships).
Also, marriage rates are dropping across the globe and not just in the US. I read something recently that the same thing is happening in Asian countries.
I wonder if Millenials are just waiting longer to get married and marriage rates might go back up in a handful of years
I think the decline in percentage of adults married has been on the decline since the early 80s when no-fault divorce was instituted.
Well I haven’t read the article, but the marriage rate in the US over the last month has been zero since everything is cancelled so if they are using recent stats it could be skewed. Besides that fact, I think with academic inflation and the use of IVF, people born from the mid-80s to mid-90s are too busy to get married, and realize that you can begin a family in your mid-30s, so some are delaying. I think a similar number of people will get married in trend with population growth, there have been a lot of trends in society and whatnot to delay it for the time being. Also I just had to postpone my June wedding for a year so fuck COVID
I personally think it’s good that marriage rates are dropping. One of the main reasons that divorce rates are so high in the first place is because so many young people see marriage as something that would be fun and they treat it like some kind of game rather than the serious commitment it is.
Marriage is a pretty big damn deal and takes a lot of work. I just don’t think a large majority of people under 25ish, especially in the US, really have the ability to appreciate everything that goes into making it work.
Contrary to what every single generation wants to think about the generations that follow them, those generations are no more mature or immature than their generation; just different.
It's natural that most people need to think their generation is older and wiser and dealt with more hardships in order to feel better about themselves. The generation before you thought that way about you and the generation before them thought that way about them as well.
EDIT: I should probably add that I'm not a millenial.
Okay Boomer!
/did I do that right???
I don't see it as bad for society at all. People are ultimately free agents whether they are married or not. I got married when I was 22 (she was 20). It has been 32 years of hell.
jk
While society is becoming more egalitarian vis-a-vis gender, there is no doubt that it is still a male-dominated culture. In this sense I'm still old school in that I think it's the right and decent thing to do for a man to marry a woman who has made a commitment to him.
Not all but the majority of women press for marriage because it offers them some security and confidence in their future. A lot of women who later seek divorce do so because the dude they married is an asshole. Really, unless your wife is batshit nuts it is not that hard to be a decent husband.
And as a man looking at the back side of life, marriage just offers the security of companionship going forward. You won't know it until you get there but the advancing years get damn frightening as you move through them. It's good to have a partner.
While this will sound counter-intuitive, the drop in marriage rate doesn’t mean that less people will get married. People hear these figures and assume there are now many more people living and dying alone, or living together but not being ‘married’, and while those rates change a bit over time, too, that’s often not the case.
The thing about all this research is that they are measuring marriage rates at a point in time. What’s happening in this country (and most others), is that people are choosing to get married later. What that means is that studies that measure the marriage rates of people being married at certain ages (especially lower ones) are much lower than before. It also means the rate of people getting married is lower as people used to get married younger and are now stretching that out.
But if you were to fast forward 50 years and look at how many people alive in 2020 ultimately got married, the rate would likely not be much lower than before (and much closer than these ‘studies’ suggest).
I’ll see if I can dig the article up, but it did show some stats that the number of people who never get married is the highest it’s been in years. You’re right though, the marriage rate is at a point in time, but the reason it’s so low now is a combination of divorce and people not getting married.
But even when you say “never get married”, it is still just a point in time and suffers from the exact flaw I described. The only way to truly measure ever-married is to look back retrospectively after decades have passed. I have yet to see any of the research that makes it into the popular press based on this kind of analysis. Instead, the only solid conclusion you can make from this research is that people are getting married later in life.
Sure it’s culture shift but from what I’ve read a big part of the decline in marriage rates, birth rates, home ownership, etc is financial.
Some interest socioeconomic differences when you dig into the headline rate a little more. A large part of this is a function of "The Two Americas" (i.e. educational and financial divides).
And another big part is that economic opportunities for women have given them the option to support themselves and put marriage off for much longer. This is a global trend:
Thanks. Very informative. I have subscription to the Economist and for some reason I missed this.
Marriage is great and I strongly recommend it. It's actually underrated. Not only does it statistically improve outcomes and levels of happiness and satisfaction, but is turns out to be a blast.
Sure, it takes work. It takes putting the good of someone else above oneself.
But man is it worth it.
I think your wife is right, OP. Long post to follow.
I think that people today, generally, are too selfish for marriage. People are taught that they can and should do whatever they like and that any limits put on their behavior is "oppressive". That any partnership should be exactly 50/50. When that's the common culture, is it any wonder that people aren't getting married anymore?
Getting married to me meant that I was no longer a singular person. The I was replaced with we. I view my wife and myself as a single entity, separated only by physical reality. Every decision I make is as we, not I. We don't have separate bank accounts with "her" money and "my" money. I know her email password and she knows mine. I took my vows seriously and even though we've come close a couple times, divorce just isn't really seen as an acceptable option for either of us, regardless of what happens. I think she'd be more likely to kill me than divorce me to be honest.
Now here's where I'm going to get in trouble. My marriage is not a 50/50 partnership, and I think that most successful marriages aren't either. When it comes to making major decisions, we discuss them together, often at length, and then I call the play. I'd say that 90% of the time we're in complete agreement, but when we're not, my wife defers to my judgment. Some people think that's old fashioned, but it's what has always worked for us.
I was lucky to marry the love of my life, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
I know her email password and she knows mine.
Okay, but does she have your MGoPassword?
My one secret. Not counting the hookers and blow, of course.
Your marriage sounds awesome to be honest. And it’s not that different than mine (I do know my wife’s email password and vise versa), but I view it as an exception, not the rule.
Part of the conversation with my wife and her single friends has been around the term “soulmate” or “love of my life”. It is my belief that it’s too idealistic to universally believe in such things. These things set you up for failure IMO. Love is important, but not the most important thing IMO. Respect is more important. Respect and trust will get a relationship through tough times more than love.
My parents have been married forever. But I don’t think they “love” each other in the way we think of love. I don’t think they’ve ever held hands in front of me. But they respect the hell out of each other, which is the basis for a very healthy marriage for them.
The sad reality, for women at least, is that delaying marriage while looking for Mr. Perfect, significantly lowers their chances of finding a decent partner.
If I were to suddenly be single I sure as hell wouldn't be dating women my own age.
If I were to suddenly be single I sure as hell wouldn't be dating women my own age.
That's basically the age old money/financial security exchange for beauty. That only works if you have money and she doesn't, but is more attractive than you. The problem with that for women is their beauty has a shelf life whereas your money likely only grows...but you have to have it to start with. The problem with that for men if to get someone really hot you have to have a lot of money. And, you're likely not getting a great partner, only a hot one.
We don't have separate bank accounts with "her" money and "my" money. I know her email password and she knows mine.
I would like to be that way, but unfortunately I don't make enough money to support my fiancee and neither does she make enough to support me. So, we have joint accounts to pay common bills like rent, cable, utilities, etc. since we live together. But, for example her car payment is twice what mine is and I had no influence over her car choice, so I don't feel like paying for her to have a more expensive car than me when I'm lucky if I can afford my own.
Did you read the fine print? Marriage rates are going down because they met the other person's mom.