Huge caveat with my comments. I married when I was 23 and have been married for over 30 years. We had our first kid after 9 years of marriage, at the end of grad school.
I 100% agree with this person in the article: "His conclusion, offered with some regret, was that the security they’re waiting for is largely illusory." Even in your 30s or 40s, your jobs might take you to different cities; a family member might become very sick and you move or leave your job to be with them; you might lose a job or have something financially devastating, like a fire, set you back; and on and on. I am old enough to know that these sorts of things are not particularly uncommon. Don't get married just for the heck of it, but if what you are waiting for stability, well, stop waiting and just do it. In a perfect world, I would have had kids younger than I did for the same reason.
I agree. I also got married young and went to law school after getting married. We have been really lucky to have each other through it all. We had our first kid after a decade of marriage.
There is no true insurance against an unhappy marriage or divorce. The best thing you can do is maintain your relationships with family and friends. They are the only real social safety net when it comes to divorce.
Live together before marriage, or don’t. Have sex before marriage, or don’t. It doesn’t matter. People can and do change. You won’t know if both of you has what it takes to weather a storm until it happens.
Vet your future partner by all means, but vetting doesn’t predict the future. There are no guarantees, but the marriage premium is worth the gamble.
"This is the asymmetry that runs through the heterosexual couples in this survey. Women are more often the ones setting the pace, and they are setting it slower."
This is interesting. It matches my anecdotal experience as well (I'm 32). But then when I read about women's dating experiences in online discourse, I hear constant complaints from women about situationships, about men who don't want to commit, about men who string women along. (See this CHH article for just one example: https://www.cartoonshateher.com/p/the-men-who-sabotage-womens-fertility)
I don't know how to reconcile these two narratives.
Well, keep in mind that the author interviewed college grads whereas the online discourse include non-colleged educated folks and in that group, marriage really has tanked.
I was planning to comment on exactly this. The only reason I’m unmarried is that the man I dated throughout my 20s lied about wanting to marry (promised to marry me after a year and then made excuses for the next six years or so). I’ve personally heard of many women in the same situation and none in the reverse. At this point I’m just happy enough being single and no longer interested in the whole thing.
This points to one of my minor peeves with economists treating all labor mobility as pure cogs to move around. People should be free to move within their country, and immigration systems should be flexible and somewhat accommodating.
But their are real costs to mobility that virtual relationships only partly ameliorate.
Anyway to the people living with someone and rating marriage a 1 or 2, buying a house with someone is more of a commitment than marriage. Though tbh, you shouldn't marry anyone that rates marriage that low or buy a house with them.
This is insanely huge, and people sleep on it. A lot of childcare that used to be free (and relatively joyous, if still hard work) is now expensive and professionalized.
Generally speaking, it seems like moving far away from where you are from mostly has negative consequences. But I'm from a nice place, so that probably throws off my calculation.
I think many of the advantages of moving away are easier to see than the costs. But on the other hand, good grief, I would never ever *ever* move back to the small town where I graduated high school.
My now wife loaned me the downpayment for my first one. It was a leap of faith the relationship would work out. 20+ years and 3 kids later it was a smart investment. Plus the thing doubled in 2 years. Was a great time to be in DC real estate.
My partner and I have done it twice! I suppose the first time we did it, we could have gotten married in California before moving to Texas, but we couldn’t get married in Texas - still, no one, from the realtor, to the banks, to the seller, cared that we weren’t married (or were same sex).
I wonder how this shakes out to different education levels, demographics and regions. A lot of the intra-national mobility in the 20th century was the Great Migration of Southern black agricultural workers moving to the north for more lucrative factory work and (at least a facsimile of) political equality. I would not be surprised if college-educated/affluent people are moving more than in the past, but that has also always been a relatively mobile class.
I'm sure there is some good scholarship on the subject if you have anything handy. (I can Google it/ask a robot so no pressing need.)
In my experience in academia, it’s probably more natural to say that the job *requires* mobility, but not in a way that you get to choose, usually. If the job you get is in College Station, TX, that’s where you move, even if you’d rather stay in Los Angeles (or move to Seattle).
I think one thing people often miss is that is that for a relationship to really reach its highest potential, people have to jump in with both feet. That excitement and commitment begets more excitement and commitment, as well as trust and grace when one is not at their best. To put it another way: you can drag out the relationship for a decade before marrying, but when you do marry, chances are one of you will carry resentment and distrust into the marriage from all the hemming and hawing. You can mar a perfectly good relationship with a great person with poor timing.
Fantastic work here! I love the use of your own small scale study.
I would quibble with the off-handed claim that Gen-Z moves more. While that might literally be true over last couple years, the relevant comparison would be against other generations at the same age/stage of life. On this measure, Gen Z is almost certainly below most prior generations, and is therefore not likely a causative factor, except perhaps in the reverse direction.
Yep. We're steadily growing less mobile as a country. This has been going on for decades. It's probably due to higher housing costs and a decrease in economic specialization. People think "Oh, I need to move to New York if I want to be in finance." But the finance sector's share of total jobs doesn't really vary all that much from location to location. Same goes for healthcare. And education. And tech. And...
(Sure, the commanding heights of many sectors will generally point you in the direction of star cities. But most people in finance aren't seven figure Lazard MDs—they're six figure analysts).
Pretty clearly substantial numbers of Americans move to access cheaper housing, but it must be the case that this driver of mobility doesn't make up for the fact that fewer people are migrating for jobs.
One commenter upstream wrote of the Northern European Marriage Pattern (look up John Hajnal, the guy who first described it). Late, or rather, “late” - mid 20’s - marriage was the norm in Northwest Europe (there is a boundary called the Hajnal Line which divides the “apprentice or servant and then marry late” cultures versus the “marry early and live with extended family” ones), at least if you were not royalty or nobility (and even then, you’d be surprised! Anne of Cleves was 24 when sent to marry Henry VIII and nobody thought her over the hill; the reason for their marriage not working was Henry’s ego, not Anne’s age). The people in Halina’s survey and “Gen Z” more generally are marrying a few years later than that, BUT the idea that you get some life experience under your belt first, and then marry, is hardly a novelty. Even if your 16th century Johns and Alices were not “self actualizing” but merely trying to survive.
What changed in the mid 20th century, when marriage ages dropped to one of the lowest levels EVER - 20 for women, 22 for men - was the easy availability of well-paying jobs for those with only a high school education. You didn’t *have* to go to college. Dad went to work in a factory and Mom worked in a clerical or sales job until the kids arrived and went right back to Macy’s Housewares after they were in school. Combined with far fewer opportunities or expectations to “be a well rounded person,” travel, etc. and premarital sex being stigmatized, meant that you might as well marry once you got out of high school. Or find your future spouse in college, if you were one of the few to go. (Married student housing was a thing!) People of 18 and 20 thought of themselves as adults; these days everyone in their 20’s is “still a kid!” I think that extended education and the economy forcing young people to live with parents for longer than in the recent past is to blame.
Nowadays, college is much more expected, and “finding yourself,” “growing as a person,” travel, etc. is also expected. So it makes sense to marry later. The world isn’t going to end. Northwest Europe, at any rate, went through a phase of comparatively late marriage. Great Britain and the Netherlands continue to exist despite that. (But you are still a grown-ass adult at 18. Not a smol bean. Or “really a minor why are you picking on me I’m just a kid?”)
I do think that having kids later *does* limit family size, though not drastically - someone might have one kid and preferred to have two, or have two when they really wanted three, but few people start out wanting four or five and wind up having one. It’s true that older parents have less energy to spare, but I am thinking of other factors that tip the scale toward smaller families - intensive parenting, and even ones like car seat requirements and “back to sleep/safe sleep” - these may seem small in the scheme of things, but few vehicles have room for three or more car seats, and if Baby is perpetually cranky and screaming because they’re uncomfortable sleeping on their back, sleep-deprived parental zombies might just give up and be “one and done.”
Off that subject, I do have a newsflash for the “why spoil a good thing with marriage” crowd: LEGAL ISSUES. Especially if you are in a queer or interracial relationship, marriage protects you! You are automatically your spouse’s Power of Attorney, you get to keep the house if your spouse dies instead of their parents swooping in and booting you out. (besides, if you can’t commit to marrying someone for god’s sake don’t buy a house with them, jeez Louise, that’s as big a commitment as marriage if not more!)
As for the last paragraph, I'm reminded of Stieg Larsson, the writer of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, who died shortly after finishing the series. His long term live-in girlfriend who helped him write the novel was 100% disinherited because they were not married. Larsson's family inherited everything and to my knowledge gave her nothing, and were 100% within their legal rights to do so. As you said, this story alone is a great case for marriage.
Honestly, divorce today is so easy, why the heck not?
I hadn’t heard of the Stieg Larsson estate situation. What the family did was no doubt an *asshole* move but it was, as you note, perfectly *legal.* If she were the wife and not the long-term live-in girlfriend she’d have the estate.
Divorce is harder once you get children in the mix, but, nowadays, with unmarried parents still wanting custody/visitation/support, not getting married isn’t going to make splitting up any easier. The people I can see not wanting to marry are the older folks who already have homes, maybe get Social Security from a former spouse, and don’t want to complicate matters for their adult children. (And even then - it all tends to work out OK until one half of the couple gets dementia or another one of those long-term illnesses that afflict the aged, and there is a throwdown between the partner and the adult children.)
And honestly I’d sooner marry someone than try and buy a house with someone I’m not married to. Yeesh. The paperwork is hard enough as a single person. I’d rather have a spouse just automatically own the house with me instead of trying to go through an elaborate paperwork and lawyers song and dance.
Correct. The oldest member of Gen Z is 29. What the 30- to 35-year-olds in the survey provided was some useful context and perspective from the youngest millennials. Many of those in that age group who responded had valuable thoughts about their own headspace at the age Gen Z is.
The first non-arbitrary cohort since the Baby Boom—the kids who were in school during the pandemic and had their minds and educations fucked up as a result—should be known as Gen Z or “Zoomers”. Whatever defined this “generation” before this is how it should be defined now. It’s silly to lump in people who were born after 1997 but already out of school when the pandemic started with the vast majority of people who were still in school, and then to also lump the small cohort of the kids who started school during the pandemic with kids who wouldn’t be born until after it subsided.
We’re going to be dealing with the particular bullshit of this cohort of poorly educated/socialized kids for the rest or lives, so we should define it in a way that makes it easier to explain and talk about.
It seems that if you've been in a relationship five, six, seven, eight, etc years and not yet married, either both of you think marriage is merely a formality for your truly solid commitment or the two of you harbor some doubt about whether to truly commit. And if it's the latter, that's truly sad because your future is not filled with infinite possibilities and this is something you probably knew long before the passage of five, six, seven, eight etc years.
ISTM that the issue is mainly about agreeing on what commitment you're making. A couple that buys a house together, mixes their finances, has kids, etc, without ever getting married might be just fine if they're both making the same commitment and understand it and make sure to get the legal details (wills, power of attorney, finances) straight. My guess is that things go badly when they don't agree on that, when there's some explicit or implicit commitment that one person believes they have and the other doesn't, whether that's "you'll care for me if I get sick" or "you won't leave me when I've gained 50 lbs after my second pregnancy" or "you'll give up your job to move with me to my next job because my career is the primary one" or whatever.
This reads a lot like the pre-19th century "Northern European marriage pattern": many men (at that time the initiators) waited until they were established (eg beyond apprentice) to marry. The marriage ages for men and women were later than in the rest of Europe, though not as late as this. And the never-married rate for women was also higher than it was elsewhere.
And while most women did not work *after* they were married, it was *expected* of young single girls and women to put in a few years as domestic servants (while their future husbands were being apprentices). It was considered to build character, teach housekeeping skills, and be an opportunity to save a little money. Not “girlbossing” by a long shot, but definitely spending some young adult years as not-a-wife.
I have a possibly crackpot hypothesis. We have a discourse with a lot of people talking about their ADHD and their autism, these often cause developmental delays. Which creates a discourse around age that's actually underrating younger people's capacity to deal with life.
My wife and I were talking about this about teen (adult) relationships with low 20s people and how she thought it was inappropriate and then I responded but 18-20 year olds did a lot of big things in history including having a lot of successful relationships. We're both autistic and to us the idea of being married before 25 and honestly before 32 was hard to really fathom but it seems like generalizing from an unusual baseline.
Cartoons Hate Her mentioned something recently about millennials seeing marriage as something that happens after you’ve grown into yourself, not as a way you grow together. Seems it’s true of Gen Z as well.
This was a nice article, and I found much of it resonating with my experience (I'm still 35 and would've barely qualified to enter - although I'm not Gen Z). However, Halina hinted at the results in the beginning paragraphs: "The data tells us that college-educated women are still marrying — they are just marrying later. It’s actually the numbers among non-college-educated women that are falling."
In a follow-up, it would be interesting to hear why non-college educated people are marrying less! Is it because they have the same standard for life-settlement and they're failing to achieve it? Different norms and cultural values? Etc
Matt did an interview a few years ago with an economist who was studying this issue. Non-college educated people saw marriage as this unattainable thing. It was a bigger commitment than having children together, which continues to boggle my prudent mind.
My own suspicion growing up in a place where vast majority of people never attend college is that my their culture is stuck between worlds. They still view heterosexual relations very patriarchally, but they like the freedom and forgiving nature of liberal values. These worlds are incompatible.
Patriarchal culture requires a lot of shame to push people into making the required sacrifices. Men need to be stable providers or else they are not deserving of marriage, or the spoils of patriarchy. It was as true in the past as it is now. Women aren’t going to be willing to undergo traditional marriage if they can’t trust that the man isn’t going to be a deadbeat, porn addict, who gambles away the house.
"This is a generation that grew up with divorce as a background condition."
Which has been the norm since Gen X was young. The US divorce rate peaked from 1979–1981. Gazeth Past Thy Navel.
You make a good point, but you make it rather rudely.
In the big wide world one needs to have grown thicker skin.
GenZ can relearn this lesson.
Apparently you, personally, could stand to relearn manners.
No thanks, quite tired of Lefty prissyness and pious church lady habit.
Well, fuck right off, then.
There we go, that's the spirit.
Huge caveat with my comments. I married when I was 23 and have been married for over 30 years. We had our first kid after 9 years of marriage, at the end of grad school.
I 100% agree with this person in the article: "His conclusion, offered with some regret, was that the security they’re waiting for is largely illusory." Even in your 30s or 40s, your jobs might take you to different cities; a family member might become very sick and you move or leave your job to be with them; you might lose a job or have something financially devastating, like a fire, set you back; and on and on. I am old enough to know that these sorts of things are not particularly uncommon. Don't get married just for the heck of it, but if what you are waiting for stability, well, stop waiting and just do it. In a perfect world, I would have had kids younger than I did for the same reason.
I agree. I also got married young and went to law school after getting married. We have been really lucky to have each other through it all. We had our first kid after a decade of marriage.
There is no true insurance against an unhappy marriage or divorce. The best thing you can do is maintain your relationships with family and friends. They are the only real social safety net when it comes to divorce.
Live together before marriage, or don’t. Have sex before marriage, or don’t. It doesn’t matter. People can and do change. You won’t know if both of you has what it takes to weather a storm until it happens.
Vet your future partner by all means, but vetting doesn’t predict the future. There are no guarantees, but the marriage premium is worth the gamble.
"This is the asymmetry that runs through the heterosexual couples in this survey. Women are more often the ones setting the pace, and they are setting it slower."
This is interesting. It matches my anecdotal experience as well (I'm 32). But then when I read about women's dating experiences in online discourse, I hear constant complaints from women about situationships, about men who don't want to commit, about men who string women along. (See this CHH article for just one example: https://www.cartoonshateher.com/p/the-men-who-sabotage-womens-fertility)
I don't know how to reconcile these two narratives.
Well, keep in mind that the author interviewed college grads whereas the online discourse include non-colleged educated folks and in that group, marriage really has tanked.
Maybe the dissatisfied women are more vocal complainers than the dissatisfied men.
I was planning to comment on exactly this. The only reason I’m unmarried is that the man I dated throughout my 20s lied about wanting to marry (promised to marry me after a year and then made excuses for the next six years or so). I’ve personally heard of many women in the same situation and none in the reverse. At this point I’m just happy enough being single and no longer interested in the whole thing.
This points to one of my minor peeves with economists treating all labor mobility as pure cogs to move around. People should be free to move within their country, and immigration systems should be flexible and somewhat accommodating.
But their are real costs to mobility that virtual relationships only partly ameliorate.
Anyway to the people living with someone and rating marriage a 1 or 2, buying a house with someone is more of a commitment than marriage. Though tbh, you shouldn't marry anyone that rates marriage that low or buy a house with them.
> But their are real costs to mobility that virtual relationships only partly ameliorate.
Like raising children with no family in driving distance.
This is insanely huge, and people sleep on it. A lot of childcare that used to be free (and relatively joyous, if still hard work) is now expensive and professionalized.
Generally speaking, it seems like moving far away from where you are from mostly has negative consequences. But I'm from a nice place, so that probably throws off my calculation.
I think many of the advantages of moving away are easier to see than the costs. But on the other hand, good grief, I would never ever *ever* move back to the small town where I graduated high school.
Though at 24 I would have said a 5 give or take, and got married at 32.
Very interesting post Halina.
I can't imagine buying a house with someone I'm not married to
My now wife loaned me the downpayment for my first one. It was a leap of faith the relationship would work out. 20+ years and 3 kids later it was a smart investment. Plus the thing doubled in 2 years. Was a great time to be in DC real estate.
My partner and I have done it twice! I suppose the first time we did it, we could have gotten married in California before moving to Texas, but we couldn’t get married in Texas - still, no one, from the realtor, to the banks, to the seller, cared that we weren’t married (or were same sex).
>But their are real costs to mobility that virtual relationships only partly ameliorate.<
We've steadily grown *less* mobile as a country over the last several decades.
I wonder how this shakes out to different education levels, demographics and regions. A lot of the intra-national mobility in the 20th century was the Great Migration of Southern black agricultural workers moving to the north for more lucrative factory work and (at least a facsimile of) political equality. I would not be surprised if college-educated/affluent people are moving more than in the past, but that has also always been a relatively mobile class.
I'm sure there is some good scholarship on the subject if you have anything handy. (I can Google it/ask a robot so no pressing need.)
This two-body problem normally comes up because one of the partners has a job that is not mobile.
In my experience in academia, it’s probably more natural to say that the job *requires* mobility, but not in a way that you get to choose, usually. If the job you get is in College Station, TX, that’s where you move, even if you’d rather stay in Los Angeles (or move to Seattle).
I think one thing people often miss is that is that for a relationship to really reach its highest potential, people have to jump in with both feet. That excitement and commitment begets more excitement and commitment, as well as trust and grace when one is not at their best. To put it another way: you can drag out the relationship for a decade before marrying, but when you do marry, chances are one of you will carry resentment and distrust into the marriage from all the hemming and hawing. You can mar a perfectly good relationship with a great person with poor timing.
Fantastic work here! I love the use of your own small scale study.
I would quibble with the off-handed claim that Gen-Z moves more. While that might literally be true over last couple years, the relevant comparison would be against other generations at the same age/stage of life. On this measure, Gen Z is almost certainly below most prior generations, and is therefore not likely a causative factor, except perhaps in the reverse direction.
I don’t have definitive source, but looking at overall trend since the 60’s is pretty convincing to me. Yes the link is embarrassing. https://www.hireahelper.com/moving-statistics/
Yep. We're steadily growing less mobile as a country. This has been going on for decades. It's probably due to higher housing costs and a decrease in economic specialization. People think "Oh, I need to move to New York if I want to be in finance." But the finance sector's share of total jobs doesn't really vary all that much from location to location. Same goes for healthcare. And education. And tech. And...
(Sure, the commanding heights of many sectors will generally point you in the direction of star cities. But most people in finance aren't seven figure Lazard MDs—they're six figure analysts).
Pretty clearly substantial numbers of Americans move to access cheaper housing, but it must be the case that this driver of mobility doesn't make up for the fact that fewer people are migrating for jobs.
Stuck! by Schleicher, banger paper
One commenter upstream wrote of the Northern European Marriage Pattern (look up John Hajnal, the guy who first described it). Late, or rather, “late” - mid 20’s - marriage was the norm in Northwest Europe (there is a boundary called the Hajnal Line which divides the “apprentice or servant and then marry late” cultures versus the “marry early and live with extended family” ones), at least if you were not royalty or nobility (and even then, you’d be surprised! Anne of Cleves was 24 when sent to marry Henry VIII and nobody thought her over the hill; the reason for their marriage not working was Henry’s ego, not Anne’s age). The people in Halina’s survey and “Gen Z” more generally are marrying a few years later than that, BUT the idea that you get some life experience under your belt first, and then marry, is hardly a novelty. Even if your 16th century Johns and Alices were not “self actualizing” but merely trying to survive.
What changed in the mid 20th century, when marriage ages dropped to one of the lowest levels EVER - 20 for women, 22 for men - was the easy availability of well-paying jobs for those with only a high school education. You didn’t *have* to go to college. Dad went to work in a factory and Mom worked in a clerical or sales job until the kids arrived and went right back to Macy’s Housewares after they were in school. Combined with far fewer opportunities or expectations to “be a well rounded person,” travel, etc. and premarital sex being stigmatized, meant that you might as well marry once you got out of high school. Or find your future spouse in college, if you were one of the few to go. (Married student housing was a thing!) People of 18 and 20 thought of themselves as adults; these days everyone in their 20’s is “still a kid!” I think that extended education and the economy forcing young people to live with parents for longer than in the recent past is to blame.
Nowadays, college is much more expected, and “finding yourself,” “growing as a person,” travel, etc. is also expected. So it makes sense to marry later. The world isn’t going to end. Northwest Europe, at any rate, went through a phase of comparatively late marriage. Great Britain and the Netherlands continue to exist despite that. (But you are still a grown-ass adult at 18. Not a smol bean. Or “really a minor why are you picking on me I’m just a kid?”)
I do think that having kids later *does* limit family size, though not drastically - someone might have one kid and preferred to have two, or have two when they really wanted three, but few people start out wanting four or five and wind up having one. It’s true that older parents have less energy to spare, but I am thinking of other factors that tip the scale toward smaller families - intensive parenting, and even ones like car seat requirements and “back to sleep/safe sleep” - these may seem small in the scheme of things, but few vehicles have room for three or more car seats, and if Baby is perpetually cranky and screaming because they’re uncomfortable sleeping on their back, sleep-deprived parental zombies might just give up and be “one and done.”
Off that subject, I do have a newsflash for the “why spoil a good thing with marriage” crowd: LEGAL ISSUES. Especially if you are in a queer or interracial relationship, marriage protects you! You are automatically your spouse’s Power of Attorney, you get to keep the house if your spouse dies instead of their parents swooping in and booting you out. (besides, if you can’t commit to marrying someone for god’s sake don’t buy a house with them, jeez Louise, that’s as big a commitment as marriage if not more!)
This is a great comment.
As for the last paragraph, I'm reminded of Stieg Larsson, the writer of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, who died shortly after finishing the series. His long term live-in girlfriend who helped him write the novel was 100% disinherited because they were not married. Larsson's family inherited everything and to my knowledge gave her nothing, and were 100% within their legal rights to do so. As you said, this story alone is a great case for marriage.
Honestly, divorce today is so easy, why the heck not?
I hadn’t heard of the Stieg Larsson estate situation. What the family did was no doubt an *asshole* move but it was, as you note, perfectly *legal.* If she were the wife and not the long-term live-in girlfriend she’d have the estate.
Divorce is harder once you get children in the mix, but, nowadays, with unmarried parents still wanting custody/visitation/support, not getting married isn’t going to make splitting up any easier. The people I can see not wanting to marry are the older folks who already have homes, maybe get Social Security from a former spouse, and don’t want to complicate matters for their adult children. (And even then - it all tends to work out OK until one half of the couple gets dementia or another one of those long-term illnesses that afflict the aged, and there is a throwdown between the partner and the adult children.)
And honestly I’d sooner marry someone than try and buy a house with someone I’m not married to. Yeesh. The paperwork is hard enough as a single person. I’d rather have a spouse just automatically own the house with me instead of trying to go through an elaborate paperwork and lawyers song and dance.
"So it makes sense to marry later. The world isn’t going to end."
Individually of course not. But for society, as a whole, fertility rates, being weigh under replacement value really is a huge problem.
And delayed marriage is probably part of that problem
Took a break from some game 7s to read this. As the kids say, "I'm SAT".
I just want to get on record again with the objection that 35 year olds are not Zoomers.
Correct. The oldest member of Gen Z is 29. What the 30- to 35-year-olds in the survey provided was some useful context and perspective from the youngest millennials. Many of those in that age group who responded had valuable thoughts about their own headspace at the age Gen Z is.
So long as we leave the term “zillennial” on the trashheap of history…
The first non-arbitrary cohort since the Baby Boom—the kids who were in school during the pandemic and had their minds and educations fucked up as a result—should be known as Gen Z or “Zoomers”. Whatever defined this “generation” before this is how it should be defined now. It’s silly to lump in people who were born after 1997 but already out of school when the pandemic started with the vast majority of people who were still in school, and then to also lump the small cohort of the kids who started school during the pandemic with kids who wouldn’t be born until after it subsided.
We’re going to be dealing with the particular bullshit of this cohort of poorly educated/socialized kids for the rest or lives, so we should define it in a way that makes it easier to explain and talk about.
If you didn't grow up with a cabinet TV and at least one rotary phone you ain't a millenial.
Been there, done that.
I don’t think my parents ditched the tube TV until it actually died.
The article says "The oldest member of Gen Z is 29 years old." Where is 35 coming from?
Survey was taking feedback from “Zillennials” up to 35, lol.
It seems that if you've been in a relationship five, six, seven, eight, etc years and not yet married, either both of you think marriage is merely a formality for your truly solid commitment or the two of you harbor some doubt about whether to truly commit. And if it's the latter, that's truly sad because your future is not filled with infinite possibilities and this is something you probably knew long before the passage of five, six, seven, eight etc years.
ISTM that the issue is mainly about agreeing on what commitment you're making. A couple that buys a house together, mixes their finances, has kids, etc, without ever getting married might be just fine if they're both making the same commitment and understand it and make sure to get the legal details (wills, power of attorney, finances) straight. My guess is that things go badly when they don't agree on that, when there's some explicit or implicit commitment that one person believes they have and the other doesn't, whether that's "you'll care for me if I get sick" or "you won't leave me when I've gained 50 lbs after my second pregnancy" or "you'll give up your job to move with me to my next job because my career is the primary one" or whatever.
If you do all those things but refuse to actually just go ahead and get married seems, I dunno, a little precious.
I would say within 2 or 3 years you should know.
This reads a lot like the pre-19th century "Northern European marriage pattern": many men (at that time the initiators) waited until they were established (eg beyond apprentice) to marry. The marriage ages for men and women were later than in the rest of Europe, though not as late as this. And the never-married rate for women was also higher than it was elsewhere.
And while most women did not work *after* they were married, it was *expected* of young single girls and women to put in a few years as domestic servants (while their future husbands were being apprentices). It was considered to build character, teach housekeeping skills, and be an opportunity to save a little money. Not “girlbossing” by a long shot, but definitely spending some young adult years as not-a-wife.
I have a possibly crackpot hypothesis. We have a discourse with a lot of people talking about their ADHD and their autism, these often cause developmental delays. Which creates a discourse around age that's actually underrating younger people's capacity to deal with life.
My wife and I were talking about this about teen (adult) relationships with low 20s people and how she thought it was inappropriate and then I responded but 18-20 year olds did a lot of big things in history including having a lot of successful relationships. We're both autistic and to us the idea of being married before 25 and honestly before 32 was hard to really fathom but it seems like generalizing from an unusual baseline.
Cartoons Hate Her mentioned something recently about millennials seeing marriage as something that happens after you’ve grown into yourself, not as a way you grow together. Seems it’s true of Gen Z as well.
This was a nice article, and I found much of it resonating with my experience (I'm still 35 and would've barely qualified to enter - although I'm not Gen Z). However, Halina hinted at the results in the beginning paragraphs: "The data tells us that college-educated women are still marrying — they are just marrying later. It’s actually the numbers among non-college-educated women that are falling."
In a follow-up, it would be interesting to hear why non-college educated people are marrying less! Is it because they have the same standard for life-settlement and they're failing to achieve it? Different norms and cultural values? Etc
Matt did an interview a few years ago with an economist who was studying this issue. Non-college educated people saw marriage as this unattainable thing. It was a bigger commitment than having children together, which continues to boggle my prudent mind.
My own suspicion growing up in a place where vast majority of people never attend college is that my their culture is stuck between worlds. They still view heterosexual relations very patriarchally, but they like the freedom and forgiving nature of liberal values. These worlds are incompatible.
Patriarchal culture requires a lot of shame to push people into making the required sacrifices. Men need to be stable providers or else they are not deserving of marriage, or the spoils of patriarchy. It was as true in the past as it is now. Women aren’t going to be willing to undergo traditional marriage if they can’t trust that the man isn’t going to be a deadbeat, porn addict, who gambles away the house.
>It was a bigger commitment than having children together, which continues to boggle my prudent mind.
Consider my mind boggled too
This sounds like a job for Richard Hanania!
Zzzaazzazoomers are going to hit 30 soon? I am not that old! Can’t be! No!
I strongly feel that after 2 or 3 years, you should either be getting married or breaking up. Either they are the one or not. You should know by then.
Stop wasting each other's time. Locations, jobs etc are all compromises that will always have to be worked out.
But your spouse should ALWAYS be more important than a job