I'm going to hammer on a point I've made here before.
France has a civil union (PACS) open to everyone which is culturally accepted to enter into at around the point when a couple start living together. Even most rural grandmas are OK with their granddaughter in Paris sharing a flat with her boyfriend, as long as they are pacsé.
It poses no barrier to subsequently getting married (unlike civil unions in some countries, where "upgrading" to a marriage is a complex legal process, you just tick a box when applying for a marriage license and the PACS is then automatically ended when you marry).
The result is many that couples still go in for the grand marriage when they marry, but that's often after years (sometimes as many as ten) as pacsé and after having a child or two.
Undoing a PACS is considerably easier than divorce (and, of course, there's no religious component to the PACS, so the Catholic church has no issue with someone who has been pacsé several times, while divorcing from a marriage is absolutely not on with that church).
All of this has the great advantage of giving some of the legal protections of marriage at a much earlier stage.
Aside: legally, the PACS bill was introduced as a civil union for same-sex couples long before same-sex marriage in France; conservatives managed to attach an amendment allowing all couples to form a PACS as a poison pill to kill the bill, but the left decided to "swallow the poison pill" (ie accept the amendment) and it turned out to have substantial cultural benefits; the French wouldn't give up the PACS now, whereas the same-sex-only civil unions seem to have died away in almost every country that had them and now has same-sex marriage. They're still on the books, but the numbers taking them up are minimal, even where they have been extended to all couples.
The whole thing of just prudently delaying marriage a few years, without anything else, leads to fewer kids and smaller families. You just run out of time/fertility window.
There is obviously a lot more going on wrt the global fall in fertility than trends among educated Gen Z folks, but you could get a substantial fall in TFR just by delaying starting your family a few extra years.
I would love to read another one of these about having children. They're related concepts, but I feel like so much of the dialogue right now is why "not" to have kids, instead of why people themselves decided to have kids. There are a ton of pieces about the sociological benefits, but those are not why the humans doing the act actually decide to do it.
I volunteer to be interviewed (33 year-old father of one), should you do such an article!
Couldn't you use this same analysis on age of entering the workforce? 1900s, it was not uncommon to do so under the age of 18. We literally allowed 10-14 year olds enter the workforce in 1900.
Contrast to last year, most of the stats have the youngest age bracket up to 25. Average age is 42! Is it any surprise people aren't moving on to the next stages of life with marriage and children? They have largely learned they can put off the next step for a long long time.
Abigail's framing of "creating and maintaining a home for your loved ones" as merely "unpaid domestic labor" makes me despair a bit about this generation.
But it's also true that nobody was paying a salary for my (very smart and highly-educated) wife to stay home with our kids, and if you reckoned our relative contributions to the family in dollar terms, you'd get a really screwy result.
I think we're both on the same page about wanting people to appreciate the value of homemaking. But I also think you are glossing over the connotations of your emphasis on the "unpaid" and "labor" portions of this.
I have spent decades of my life parenting my kids. I could refer to that time as "unpaid childcare", and that would literally be true. But that framing completely elides why people do it, and I think the phrasing of "unpaid domestic labor" does as well.
Lordy, just get married already. My spouse and I had lived together for 6 years before we tied the knot in 1996. I turned 30 three days before we got married, and it was lost in the maelstrom of wedding preparations. Milestone after milestone. But I wanted to tell the world: my family, my friends, Uncle Sam that this was the woman I wanted to spend my life with. We've had our ups and downs. But she is still my best friend and co-conspirator and perfect rival. We will hit 30 years in June. The best advice I ever read (and I can't remember who wrote it or where I even read it) was just: you love her, that is your only job. Just keep loving her. That is so much harder than it sounds but I am so glad I've followed it. Marriage and raising children has been an absolute triumph and an absolutely misery, always rolled into one, from day to day. But, man, what else are you going to do with your one and precious life?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
She can imagine that, right up until she decides she doesn't like being poor. OTOH, the few people I know who actually did take a big break from a traditional career track had also made a conscious decision to be single.
I'm going to hammer on a point I've made here before.
France has a civil union (PACS) open to everyone which is culturally accepted to enter into at around the point when a couple start living together. Even most rural grandmas are OK with their granddaughter in Paris sharing a flat with her boyfriend, as long as they are pacsé.
It poses no barrier to subsequently getting married (unlike civil unions in some countries, where "upgrading" to a marriage is a complex legal process, you just tick a box when applying for a marriage license and the PACS is then automatically ended when you marry).
The result is many that couples still go in for the grand marriage when they marry, but that's often after years (sometimes as many as ten) as pacsé and after having a child or two.
Undoing a PACS is considerably easier than divorce (and, of course, there's no religious component to the PACS, so the Catholic church has no issue with someone who has been pacsé several times, while divorcing from a marriage is absolutely not on with that church).
All of this has the great advantage of giving some of the legal protections of marriage at a much earlier stage.
Aside: legally, the PACS bill was introduced as a civil union for same-sex couples long before same-sex marriage in France; conservatives managed to attach an amendment allowing all couples to form a PACS as a poison pill to kill the bill, but the left decided to "swallow the poison pill" (ie accept the amendment) and it turned out to have substantial cultural benefits; the French wouldn't give up the PACS now, whereas the same-sex-only civil unions seem to have died away in almost every country that had them and now has same-sex marriage. They're still on the books, but the numbers taking them up are minimal, even where they have been extended to all couples.
The whole thing of just prudently delaying marriage a few years, without anything else, leads to fewer kids and smaller families. You just run out of time/fertility window.
There is obviously a lot more going on wrt the global fall in fertility than trends among educated Gen Z folks, but you could get a substantial fall in TFR just by delaying starting your family a few extra years.
Great piece!
I would love to read another one of these about having children. They're related concepts, but I feel like so much of the dialogue right now is why "not" to have kids, instead of why people themselves decided to have kids. There are a ton of pieces about the sociological benefits, but those are not why the humans doing the act actually decide to do it.
I volunteer to be interviewed (33 year-old father of one), should you do such an article!
Couldn't you use this same analysis on age of entering the workforce? 1900s, it was not uncommon to do so under the age of 18. We literally allowed 10-14 year olds enter the workforce in 1900.
Contrast to last year, most of the stats have the youngest age bracket up to 25. Average age is 42! Is it any surprise people aren't moving on to the next stages of life with marriage and children? They have largely learned they can put off the next step for a long long time.
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
Abigail's framing of "creating and maintaining a home for your loved ones" as merely "unpaid domestic labor" makes me despair a bit about this generation.
But it's also true that nobody was paying a salary for my (very smart and highly-educated) wife to stay home with our kids, and if you reckoned our relative contributions to the family in dollar terms, you'd get a really screwy result.
I think we're both on the same page about wanting people to appreciate the value of homemaking. But I also think you are glossing over the connotations of your emphasis on the "unpaid" and "labor" portions of this.
I have spent decades of my life parenting my kids. I could refer to that time as "unpaid childcare", and that would literally be true. But that framing completely elides why people do it, and I think the phrasing of "unpaid domestic labor" does as well.
Lordy, just get married already. My spouse and I had lived together for 6 years before we tied the knot in 1996. I turned 30 three days before we got married, and it was lost in the maelstrom of wedding preparations. Milestone after milestone. But I wanted to tell the world: my family, my friends, Uncle Sam that this was the woman I wanted to spend my life with. We've had our ups and downs. But she is still my best friend and co-conspirator and perfect rival. We will hit 30 years in June. The best advice I ever read (and I can't remember who wrote it or where I even read it) was just: you love her, that is your only job. Just keep loving her. That is so much harder than it sounds but I am so glad I've followed it. Marriage and raising children has been an absolute triumph and an absolutely misery, always rolled into one, from day to day. But, man, what else are you going to do with your one and precious life?
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.
Once again, some excellent journalism here. Thank you.
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.
So, seems like the kids are ... all right? *
*yes , skewed samples, etc
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!
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!)
"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
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.
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.
"...she could also imagine quitting to travel, or to coach pickleball."
WTF?
C'mon, Ken: coaching pickleball *and* being married? Like, how is that ever supposed to work?
She can imagine that, right up until she decides she doesn't like being poor. OTOH, the few people I know who actually did take a big break from a traditional career track had also made a conscious decision to be single.
Zzzaazzazoomers are going to hit 30 soon? I am not that old! Can’t be! No!