The marriage rate in the United States has
fallen to the lowest level ever recorded. So why is this
happening? Well, the truth is that there are a lot of reasons
why so many young people are choosing not to get married today.
One big reason is money. Young adults in the U.S. are really
struggling to find good jobs, and many are hesitant to take a big
step like marriage without achieving a certain level of financial
security first. And as you will see below, many young adults
(especially women) do not even want to date someone that is not
employed. In this harsh economic environment, money makes a big
difference in the world of romance. Another big reason for the
decline of marriage in America is a seismic shift in cultural
attitudes. Americans (especially young people) do not place the
same kind of importance on marriage and having children that they
once did. Instead, more Americans are choosing to “move in
together” than ever before. But if the percentage of
Americans that choose to get married continues to decline, what is
that going to mean for our future, and what is our country going to
look like moving forward?
According
to a startling
new study conducted
at Bowling Green University, the marriage rate in America has fallen
precipitously over the past 100 years.
In
1920, there were 92.3
marriages for
every 1,000 unmarried women. In 2012, there were only 31.1
marriages for
every 1,000 unmarried women.
That is not just a new all-time low, that is a
colossal demographic earthquake.
That
same study found that the marriage rate has fallen by an astounding60
percent since
1970 alone.
As a result, U.S. households look far different
today than they once did.
Back
in 1950, 78
percent of
all households in the U.S. contained a married couple. Today,
that number has declined to 48
percent.
That is a very troubling sign if you consider
the family to be one of the fundamental building blocks of society.
When young people are asked why they are
delaying marriage today, one of the things that always seems to get
brought up is money. There is a feeling (especially among men)
that you should achieve a certain level of financial security before
making the big plunge.
And
it is a fact that the more money you have, the more likely you are to
be married. Just check out the following stats about income and
marriage from a recent Business
Insider article…
83% of 30- to 50-year-old men in the top 10% of
annual earnings are married today, whereas only 64% of median earners
and half of those in the bottom 25th percentile are hitched.
Now, compare that to men in 1970, whose
marriage rates were 95% (top earners), 91% (median earners), and 60%
(bottom 25th percentile of earners), respectively.
A
lot of people like to think that “love is the only thing that
matters” when it comes to marriage, but the cold, hard numbers tell
a different story. In fact, one
very shocking survey discovered
that 75
percent of
all American women would have a problem even dating an unemployed
man…
Of the 925 single women surveyed, 75 percent
said they’d have a problem with dating someone without a job. Only
4 percent of respondents asked whether they would go out with an
unemployed man answered “of course.”
“Not having a job will definitely make it
harder for men to date someone they don’t already know,” Irene
LaCota, a spokesperson for It’s Just Lunch, said in a press
release. “This is the rare area, compared to other topics we’ve
done surveys on, where women’s old-fashioned beliefs about sex
roles seem to apply.”
Unfortunately
for American men, there simply are not enough good jobs to go
around. In fact, the number of working age Americans without a
job has increased by
27 million since
the year 2000, and businesses in the U.S. are being destroyed faster
than they are being created.
Due
to a lack of economic opportunities, a rising percentage of our young
people have been giving up on the “real world” and have been
moving back in with Mom and Dad. For much more on this, please
see my previous article entitled “29
Percent Of All U.S. Adults Under The Age Of 35 Are Living With Their
Parents“.
And when you break down the numbers, you find that young men are
almost twice as likely to move back in with their parents as young
women are.
But economic factors alone certainly do not
account for the tremendous decline in the marriage rate that we have
witnessed in this country. Shifting cultural attitudes also
play a huge role.
A
whole host of opinion polls and surveys show that Americans simply do
not value marriage and having children as much as they once did.
For example, the
Pew Research Center has
found that the younger you are, the more likely you are to believe
that “marriage is becoming obsolete” and that “children don’t
need a mother and a father to grow up happily”.
In fact, an astounding 44 percent of all
Americans in the 18 to 29-year-old age bracket now believe that
“marriage is becoming obsolete”.
And why should they get married? Our
movies and television shows constantly tell them that they can have
the benefits of being married without ever having to make a lifelong
commitment.
This sounds particularly good to men, since
they can run around and have sex with lots of different women without
ever having to “settle down”.
But there are most definitely consequences for
this behavior. The “sexual revolution” has left behind
countless broken hearts, shattered dreams, unintended pregnancies and
devastated families.
In addition, the U.S. has become a world leader
when it comes to sexually-transmitted disease.
It
is hard to believe this number, but according to the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention approximately one-third of the entire
population of the United States (110
million people)
currently has a sexually transmitted disease.
So nobody should claim that the “sexual
revolution” has not had any consequences.
But
most Americans don’t actually run around and sleep with lots of
different people at the same time. Instead, most Americans seem
to have adopted a form of “serial
monogamy“.
In America today, most people only sleep with
one person at a time, and “living together” is being called “the
new marriage”.
According
to the
CDC,
74 percent of all 30-year-old women in the U.S. say that they have
cohabitated with a romantic partner without being married to them,
and it has been estimated that 65
percent of
all couples that get married in the United States live together
first.
Many
believe that by “trying out” the other person first that it will
give them a much better chance of making marriage work if they
eventually do choose to go down that path. Unfortunately, that
does not seem to work out very well in practice. In fact, the
divorce rate for couples that live together first is significantly
higher than
for those that do not.
And when it comes to divorce, America is the
king.
For years, the U.S. has had the highest divorce
rate in the developed world.
But
it wasn’t always this way. Back in 1920, less
than one percent of
all women in the United States were currently divorced or separated.
Today, approximately 15
percent of
all women in the United States are currently divorced or separated.
So why are so many people getting divorced?
Of
course there are a lot of factors involved (including money), but a
big one is cheating. According to one survey, 41
percent of
all spouses admit to infidelity. Many Americans simply find it
very difficult to stay committed to one person for an extended period
of time.
As a result of what I have discussed so far, it
is easy to see why people in our society are so lonely and so
isolated. Less people are getting married, more divorces are
happening and couples are having fewer children. This means
that our households are smaller and we have far fewer family
connections than we once did.
100
years ago, 4.52 people were living in the average U.S. household, but
now the average U.S. household only consists of 2.59
people.
That is an astounding figure.
But we weren’t meant to live alone. We
were meant to love and to be loved.
Often, those that are being hurt the most by
our choices as a society are the children. They need strong,
stable homes to grow up in, and we are not providing that for
millions upon millions of them.
When
you look at just women under the age of 30 in the United States,more
than half of all babies are
being born out of wedlock.
That would have been unimaginable 100 years
ago.
And
of course when there is no marriage involved, a lot of times the guy
does not stick around. At this point, approximately one
out of every three children in
the United States lives in a home without a father, and in many
impoverished areas of the country the rate is well over 50 percent.
In addition, women are waiting much longer to
have children than they once did.
In
1970, the average woman had her first child when she was 21.4
years old.
Now the average woman has her first child when she is 25.6
years old.
In the
United States, three-quarters of people surveyed by Gallup last year
said the main reason couples weren’t having more children was
a lack of money or fear of the economy.
The trend emerges as a key gauge of future
economic health — the growth in the pool of potential workers, ages
20-64 — is signaling trouble ahead. This labor pool had expanded
for decades, thanks to the vast generation of baby boomers. Now the
boomers are retiring, and there are barely enough new workers to
replace them, let alone add to their numbers.
We are waiting longer to have children and
having fewer of them, but those children are needed for the economic
future of this country.
Fifteen
years from now, one out of every five Americans will
be over the age of 65.
All of those elderly Americans are going to want the rest of us to
keep the financial promises that were made to them. But that is
going to turn out to be quite
impossible.
We simply do not have enough people.
In the end, the economics of marriage does not
just affect those that are thinking of getting married or those that
are already married.
The truth is that the economics of marriage
affects all of us.
So what do you think is in store for the future
of the institution of marriage in this country?
Please feel free to share what you believe by
posting a comment below…
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