The Reported Decline of Marriage: A Few Thoughts

It is a commonplace today that marriage and dating are in decline among the younger adult cohorts (especially the naturally much-watched 18-30s), and while there is much argument over how to read the relevant statistical data, I know of nothing to refute the essential claim that they are rather less likely to be married than their parents and grandparents at the same point in their lives.

It seems to me easy enough to explain this in terms of plain and simple economics. The way the cost of living has exploded--the result of burgeoning college costs and mounting student debt and massive underemployment among college graduates who gambled on expensive credentials and lost, housing non-policies that favor real estate speculators over the human need for shelter, and much, much else connected with them have not made it easier to start a life, all as those who grew up in the shadow of a Great Recession which never ended, and a pandemic which never ended, and which hit the younger portion of the work force especially hard, can scarcely be blamed for being more concerned for personal security than an earlier generation. (Indeed, given the cost of just going out and meeting people, and certainly the often expensive, humiliating, even risky rituals of social life, and still more, courtship, can seem prohibitive for the pinched.) Thus young people delay, maybe to the point at which marrying seems less and less plausible an option, or even give up on the idea altogether.

However, it only seems fair that if the economics are the rightful first object of our attention, they need not be the only object of such attention, with two other things usefully kept in mind:

1. Those whom marriage simply does not suit now have more freedom to decline it, all as there may be more dissatisfaction with the institution than before, the more in as men and women alike regard themselves as getting a raw deal out of the arrangement--and one-sided as the arguments tend to be, it may be that both have claims here. After all, if we are living in a society where it feels like nothing is working, why would we expect marriage, which is not some bubble impervious to the forces of the world outside the "home circle," to somehow be an exception? Indeed, in a society where the swaggering idiot "apologists and admirers of injustice, misery and brutality" seem to ever more dictate the conventional wisdom, it does not seem implausible that there are that many more people who, having had little consideration, courtesy, respect, empathy, sympathy, acceptance from others, and little comfort or pleasure from others' company--who have found that being with other people mainly means being ignored, insulted or bullied by them--simply choose to have as little to do with others as possible, all while knowing that the "dating market" is a particularly brutal scene of social life, and dreading the thought of being tied to another person "for as long as you both shall live."

2. Because that freedom to decline marriage is greater those who really are open to marriage, or even really desirous of marriage, are also less likely to marry simply to be married. The result is that if not liking the dating market as they find it they are more prepared to decline to marry at all rather than marry unsatisfactorily. After all, prudish and hypocritical as the discussion of such matters is, few will really deny that we speak of "conventional attractiveness" because, whatever the aspect of a possible mate at issue (physical, financial, temperamental), most people's desires are conventional, and not up for negotiation; and the relevant qualities are distributed very unequally among the population at large; leaving a comparative few "in demand" and the great majority not so much, this especially the case where any sort of long-term commitment is concerned (people understandably pickier about that). Faced with that a great many persons have the choice between being with someone they do not really want, and who is not all that excited about being with them either, and thus "settling" or being single, and choose the latter rather than the former.

Of course, points 1. and 2. have to do with individuals' concern for what will suit them personally--make them happiest, or at least, given that in real life "choice" is something the privileged have while those less advantaged face only dilemmas, what will make them least unhappy.

By contrast those who speak of the present situation in tones of alarm are not in the slightest concerned with what individuals think will make them happy. They are sure there must be one rule for everybody, and that this is a lifelong, exclusively monogamous, partnership with another individual centered on cohabitation with a shared household and the rearing of children--and they get flustered the way Tony Randall does in Pillow Talk if someone asks them "Why?"

However, others have a reason "Why" in mind, albeit one not with the interest of the individual in mind. What they expect of the populace is that it work, and raise children who will be the workers of tomorrow, and provide the military-age cohorts required by the demands of realpolitik, all while being as small a drain as possible on the resources of those who own everything, and for whose benefit society is arranged, and whose interests are what people mean when they say such things as "society expects." If the individual does not agree, well, that is a want of virtue on the part of the individual, who had better learn to like it. If marrying and bringing up a family means their sacrifice of what little freedom or comfort or security they may have in their lives, tough. If it means raising children in conditions of hardship and insecurity, such that the children will be deprived or worse during their upbringing, and grow up with small prospects, and can only expect hard lives when they become adults, tough. Indeed, that they should think of such things at all is occasion to sneer that "Life's not fair" (oblivious to how the resort to nihilism is self-defeating for those pushing any agenda), while all this is underlined by the brazen expressions of the expendability of those who do not serve such purposes (highlighted by the way so many policymakers not-so-secretly welcomed the "culling" of the elderly by the COVID-19 pandemic, and Ivy League professors openly calling for mass suicide for the elderly).

Of course, whatever their motive those whose views skew this way must be noticing that merely browbeating and shaming and bullying the young does not get them to do what they want them to do--but there is little sign of this failure making them think about all of those societal problems whose amelioration might actually make those who want to have marriages and families and children more likely to do so.