Though marriage rates have declined each year since 1970, for millennials, it’s not a matter of if they marry — but when. Marrying during or right after college is a rare occurrence in 2016, as more individuals choose to wait.
According to the U.S Census Bureau, “since 1970, the median age for women to get married increased by 4.3 years to 25.1 years; for men the increase was 3.6 years to 26.8 years,” ABC News reported.
With the average citizen in no rush to get married, it’s only natural to question what reasons are stalling the majority of citizens.
“More than twice as many women are going to college than 30 years ago,” ABC News noted. “Second, many women are putting their careers first, so they can put some money in the bank before settling down.”
Thirty years ago, the expectation was that young women would marry early and stay at home as a house wife, with dinner on the table when her husband arrived home from work. That is not often the case for career-driven women today.
Though women desire to pursue a career, it does not suggest they are uninterested in marriage.
“In a poll by Pew Research Center, 74 percent of the entire scope of participants surveyed all agreed that ‘marriage was still a meaningful institution,’ with 75 percent of older participants believing that ‘marriage was still relevant and led to a happier, healthier, more fulfilled life,” Cameron Norsworthy of Romper observed. “Millennials respect marriage, they just choose not to partake in it to the same degree.”
Justifiable factors including financial stability and finding the right partner fall in line with many millennials’s reasoning for not rushing into married life.
“While other generations have faced tough employment markets as they entered adulthood, as some Boomers did during the 1981-1982 recession, the labor market recovery for Millennials has been much less robust following the Great Recession,” Pew Research Center’s Eileen Patten and Richard Fry reported. “When asked the reasons that they have not gotten married, 29 percent say they are not financially prepared, while 26 percent say that they have not found someone who has the qualities they are looking for and an additional 26 percent say that they are too young and not ready to settle down.”
With millennials taking their time to find a suitable spouse and gain stability within the workplace, “the millennial marriages that do occur have lower instances of divorce … nearly two-thirds of marriages will never involve a divorce,” University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers predicts. So despite critics’s assumptions that the 20-t0-30-somethings are lazy and uncommitted, studies are proving there is no harm in waiting to tie the knot.
