
Millennials are still not getting married - wyldfire
http://allendowney.blogspot.com/2016/10/millennials-are-still-not-getting.html
======
niftich
Anecdotally, as a millennial with a full-time non-SV software job, I socialize
with entirely different cohorts of millennials who experience vastly different
lives.

Some of my peer group has attained professional success early on by landing
well-paying jobs early. These are the people I notice marrying in their
mid-20s, forming two-income families, transitioning from apartment living to
buying houses, taking several family vacations, and pondering (or dismissing)
the idea of having children. These young families orient their social lives
towards themselves or work-related functions. I guess this is the life
previous generations expect us to have.

Some other friends of mine have dropped out of college and are under-employed,
working retail or foodservice. At these incomes, living alone is financially
impossible, so friends band together in groups of three or four to share a
rental. Social bonds are tight-knit but spread out to a core group of around a
dozen, in which there's an overarching feel of solidarity and shared
circumstance. Several people in the group have dated each other in the past,
and have since broken up amicably; volatile breakups usually result in one of
the parties ostracized. In this group, long-term romantic bonds do develop,
but marriage is seldom taken as an option. I know multiple groups of such
friends in entirely different cities, between which I'm the single common
link.

These two lifestyles couldn't be further apart; whenever I read about
generalizations applied to millennials I am conflicted because it's unclear
which group they refer to; in many cases, the other group is almost entirely
exempt.

~~~
BerislavLopac
So it's, essentially, Friends vs. Dharma & Greg? ;-)

------
thex10
Well, we're taught to prioritize career and education before other people, for
a variety of reasons.

As an anecdote, I, a female millennial, was told through most of my
adolescence by my whole family, "don't let a man ruin your future." (Before
anyone wants to reply to whine about this statement - you don't know anything
about what the women of my family had been through at the hands of men. So
whine elsewhere.) By marrying age, getting married was certainly one of the
/last/ things I cared about.

~~~
EdSharkey
Consider freezing your eggs in case you find Mr. Right later rather than
sooner.

~~~
CorpOverreach
Or consider the fact that not having kids is a perfectly okay decision.

~~~
danieltillett
Freezing your eggs does not mean you will have kids, just you can have kids.

~~~
erroneousfunk
It certainly doesn't mean that you _can_ have kids, but it improves your odds
a bit for an extra 5-10 years.

------
seanca
Watched my parents split. Currently watching older colleagues going through
messy financial divorces or staying with someone to avoid said messy financial
divorce.

Until outrageous divorce laws are fixed, I'll opt out of signing that
trainwreck of a contract.

~~~
jomamaxx
In most places, living with someone is basically the same thing as 'marriage'
from a legal perspective.

And yes, the laws are often unfair.

~~~
gnicholas
> In most places, living with someone is basically the same thing as
> 'marriage' from a legal perspective.

If this is a reference to common law marriage, it's not actually that
widespread anymore (only in 10 states in the US). It also typically requires
the couple "hold themselves out as married" in the community, which makes the
bar substantially higher than just living together for a long time.

If this isn't a reference to common law marriage, I'm not sure what it is—feel
free to enlighten me!

~~~
jomamaxx
It is, and you're probably right.

By 'places' I was referring to the 'Western World' :).

------
AdmiralAsshat
There's a very simple reason we're not marrying: we don't want to be held
financially responsible for our spouse's student loans.

~~~
imaginenore
And not just the loans. Marriage is heavily stacked in the favor of women and
the slides who make less money. More and more men just don't see the upside.

And what are the actual upsides? Visitation rights. Medical decision rights.
Slightly lower taxes. Not testifying against your spouse. Anything else?

~~~
jacalata
It turns out that the benefits of legal marriage have been carefully
enumerated during the movement for legal gay marriage, so it's pretty easy to
look this up. Here's a report from the federal government enumerating all the
federal laws around marriage:
[http://www.gao.gov/archive/1997/og97016.pdf](http://www.gao.gov/archive/1997/og97016.pdf)

------
dogma1138
They can't afford getting divorced, with divorce rates being in the 50% and
common knowledge no one wants that.

Even if it was affordable why would you want the trouble?

Divorce forces you to effectively hate the person you loved, and likely still
love and care deeply about even if you are separating.

Long term breakups aren't easy, adding a financial and legal mess into them
isn't something anyone would be looking forward too.

~~~
mhurron
> divorce rates being in the 50% and common knowledge

No they're not. [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/upshot/the-divorce-
surge-i...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/upshot/the-divorce-surge-is-
over-but-the-myth-lives-on.html)

And where are you getting the idea that a diverse occurs between people that
care about each other? If they still did, the divorce wouldn't be happening.

~~~
dogma1138
Since I can't reply to both of you, thank you for the correction but oddly the
facts aren't "important" for this case.

Myself and pretty much everyone I know if asked what is the average divorce
rate would say it's around 50%, many of us also have the pleasure of having
close friends who married really early (early 20's) going through a divorce
right about now (in their late 20's to early 30's) which solidifies this
perception even further.

In this case like in many others the perception is what matters, even if in
reality it's quite different, I wonder why this hasn't been addressed more
frequently since in the early and mid 90's the trope of the 50% was
broadcasted all the time.

------
koder2016
Because ambition drops slower then opportunity:
[https://rationalmale.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/smv_curve1....](https://rationalmale.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/smv_curve1.jpg)

~~~
toomuchtodo
TIL about SMV = "sexual market value".

Seems to jibe with Okcupid's data: [https://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-
case-for-an-older-wom...](https://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-case-for-an-
older-woman/)

"A woman's desirability peaks at 21, which, ironically enough is the age that
men just begin their "prime," i.e. become more desirable than average.
Following that dotted line out, you can see that a woman of 31 is already
"past her prime," while a man doesn't become so until 36. As we mentioned
above, after age 26, a man has more potential matches than his female
counterparts, which is a drastic reversal of the proportion in young
adulthood, when women are much more sought-after. Because men's dating
preferences skew so young, and women's are age-equitable, men peak later, and
have a longer plateau of desirability, than women."

EDIT: Don't shoot the messenger, I didn't make the personal choices underlying
the dataset.

EDIT 2: I'm _very curious_ how this data correlates with data about vast
swaths of underemployed or completely unemployed men who simply aren't
interested or able to compete in the economic system to signal status to
attract a partner:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/americas-quiet-
catas...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/americas-quiet-catastrophe-
millions-of-idle-
men/2016/10/05/cd01b750-8a57-11e6-bff0-d53f592f176e_story.html?utm_term=.dab900a36541)

along with the data that women are more particular about dating men below
their own education level, causing there to be an imbalance between women and
men in the dating pool:

[http://www.vice.com/read/youre-single-because-there-arent-
en...](http://www.vice.com/read/youre-single-because-there-arent-enough-
men-253) (TL;DR There are enough men, just not enough that meet the standards
of single women in the dating pool; law of unintended consequences of societal
employment changes, men's attitudes shifting from past generations about what
happiness and responsibility looks like, and much larger cohorts of college-
educated women in the dating pool)

"So, where are all the men?

I mean they exist, they're just not going to college. This isn't China or
India where they have a man-made gender imbalance because of all sorts of
horrendous things. [Men are] out there, they're just not going to college.
Last year about 35 percent more women than men graduated from college."

"But there have been multiple studies on this and it turns out Americans have
become less likely, over the past 50 years, to marry and date across
educational lines. So educational intermarriage—I don't know if that's a real
term, maybe I just made it up—is at its lowest rate in 50 years."

~~~
antisthenes
This should be required reading for every modern man.

------
jcslzr
Fewer Men have jobs who can support a family comfortably and fewer of those
jobs are for a lifetime.

Women find it below them to simply be a housewife and instead of being a
copilot now they want to be in charge which makes marriage these days a 1 on 1
basketball game.

~~~
genzoman
I agree 100%. Throughout human and whatever other animal we can understand
well enough to interact with there has virtually always been an alpha in a
pack and betas. Society is dictating that there are no longer alpha/beta
hierarchies in relationships, but just one level.

People don't want to "cave" to being "exploited" and everyone is hyper alert
about having their feelings hurt so they avoid it all together.

An interesting point I've heard recently is that with working/protecting dogs,
it's almost always a bad idea to have two females. They never decide who is
the alpha and will fight to the death whereas one male gets his ass kicked and
tucks his tail from there on out.

~~~
vorotato
If were were dogs this information would be relevant. Unlike someone's
generation we didn't rush into marriage and then get divorced.

------
strathmeyer
Still need jobs. 35 and still unclear when I will be able to start a family.
Younger women I'm dating always asking why they aren't making more money. With
all the personal time getting a job in software development requires they
never told us the wages would be so low. I've still never earned what they
told us the entry level wage for software developers was in middle school.

~~~
chrisseaton
It costs next to nothing to get married at a courthouse if you don't have much
money but still want to get married.

------
campuscodi
Probably those one-sided divorce settlements have something to do with it

------
carsongross
A society that is unable to replicate itself via either biological or memetic
means is not long for this world.

I am watching the best of the millennial generation be effectively genocided
by anti-family propaganda, economic malaise and cultural ennui.

It is very depressing.

~~~
icebraining
I consider it my responsibility not to bring a child into a society that
equates a lower birth rate with genocide.

~~~
carsongross
Of course.

But you do see the darwinian implications of this, correct?

------
Mz
Eh, in spite of the judgey-sounding title (and defensive sounding replies here
on HN), a skim suggests this is just factual data, without suggestions as to
_why_ this is a trend.

I think one factor that gets largely overlooked is that these are people who
grew up in The Information Age. My 29 year old son has told me that long
before he knew sex was supposed to be enjoyable, he understood it could lead
to life altering responsibilities (baby, long term ties to the mother) or even
deadly disease.

Lots of marriages are not happy -- even if it doesn't end in divorce, you can
just be stuck with a sucky situation. I don't see any reason to assume we need
to have everyone aspiring to marriage. With 7 billion people on the planet, it
is not like there is some population shortage that needs to be remedied.

~~~
jxramos
But there's a difference between population shortage and looming population
shortage based on sub-replacement fertility rates. I think folks alive today
are going to witness some pretty unprecedented things. Someone posted this on
HN sometime back, or maybe one of the articles from it
[http://graphics.wsj.com/2050-demographic-
destiny/](http://graphics.wsj.com/2050-demographic-destiny/) I've been
wondering when this stuff is going to hit and what it's going to look like
tangibly.

~~~
Mz
It's interesting, but it is also unnecessarily negative in subtle ways, such
as: _Empowering women tends to lower fertility rates._

Everything I have read indicates that empowering women -- a topic I am highly
interested in, what with being a woman -- first lowers infant mortality rates.
In country after country after country, fertility rates fall _after_ child
mortality rates come down. The result is a swell in population during that
period when mortality rates are declining but fertility rates are not.

I have read quite a few articles on the ways in which we are increasingly
using technology to empower seniors to remain independent and stay in their
own home longer while getting the support they need as they age.

People are living longer in part because of general improvements to health.
This bizarre idea we have that everyone over age 65 should be retired is
modern crazy talk. When 65 was picked as the age at which Social Security
would start, I believe 67 was the average life expectancy. This was envisioned
as taking care of seniors in extreme old age, in the last couple of years of
their life, after most of them had worked very physically hard in factories or
on farms. It was not envisioned as "All humans have some god given right to a
permanent vacation of a decade or more merely for surviving to the magic
number."

Change is coming. That doesn't mean it is necessarily something terrible.

------
andymoe
My partner and I have two kids. We prioritized that over the marriage ritual.
I suspect we will probably get around to it eventually... Is this still so
much of an outlier?

I'd like to see the same graphs for birthrates. Of course I suspect there is
still a high correlation between marriage and having children and so these
graphs are problematic for our future.

Eventually, if we want more babies to be born, we are going to need to vastly
improve our support system for families in all their forms.

------
dbjacobs
Many people seem to be saying don't get married because divorce is horrible. I
believe that is the wrong focus. The horribleness comes from cleaving a long
term relationship where your lives have become intertwined regardless of
marital status.

Without marriage, you still have child support, you still have to divide any
joint assets and one or both sides will feel betrayed and taken advantage of.
The main difference is when you are not married the division is governed by
contract law rather than divorce law. Contract law will often leave the lower
power/ lower earning spouse in MUCH worse shape.

Historically that has been women (which is why they would push for marriage).
But I see a reversing trend in my wife's family law practice where it is
becoming more common for women to hold more power and income and are
complaining just like the men used to about divorce outcomes.

------
asteadman
I'm a millennial that got married at 25. Now, I'm almost 30 and have 2 kids. I
can honestly say I'm glad that I'm not any older. Kids take a lot more of your
time/energy than you expect, and to wait until you're 40 seems crazy to me.
(Marriage is obviously not required to have kids, but still)

------
ronjouch
Don't miss the iPython notebook linked at the end of the article:
[https://github.com/AllenDowney/MarriageNSFG/blob/master/marr...](https://github.com/AllenDowney/MarriageNSFG/blob/master/marriage.ipynb)

------
douche
There's a lot of downside if marriage goes bad, and a lot of them do. In some
states, a divorce can be a sword of Damocles hanging over threatening half of
anything you've ever or will have.

Just the amount of student and credit card debt a lot of people rack up before
they finish their twenties is scary if you have your shit more together and
are thinking of entering into a financial union.

------
plandis
Well sure. Anecdotally, I'd (born in 1990) rather have fun now that I'm
financially independent before potentially starting a family.

It's appealing to work hard and play hard in your 20s for a large portion of
my friends (totally survivorship bias in who I'm friends with, but still there
are dozens of us, Dozens!)

------
cymbalrush
Marriage is an archaic institution. I prefer to not have the government
enforce my personal relationships and tax me more because the tax laws are
structured to benefit wage disparities in partners not partnership itself.

------
gjolund
Marriage is like saying "I love you so much, lets get the government
involved."

Why would we want to get married after watching every marriage around us end
with a nasty divorce.

~~~
draw_down
Have you ever been married? That certainly hasn't been my experience of what
it's like.

~~~
gjolund
Yes.

~~~
Mz
I am sorry for your (apparently) negative experience, but there is a reason
the LGBT community has fought so hard for marriage rights: Marriage gives
couples more than a 100 distinct rights and protects them from malicious
behavior by blood relatives, such as tossing the partner out into the street
with nothing and taking the house if one of them dies.

~~~
gjolund
Like I said, the only reason to get married is the rights afforded to married
couples by the government.

My ex and I are on great terms, and our divorce was mutual yet somehow still a
huge pain in the ass.

