Millennials are still not getting married | Hacker News Reader

Millennials are still not getting married

allendowney.blogspot.com

50 pointswyldfire72 comments

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.

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

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.

What are your thoughts now? Still one of the last things on your priority list?

Thanks for asking - I'm happy to say I've enjoyed good relationships overall. I got engaged at the end of undergrad, married at the end of grad school, and am now happily married (a rarity among my unmarried peers). :)

If your family's women have had a 'hard time' at the hands of men, it's perfectly understandable that they would say this, that doesn't make it right.

One, probably 'very important' thing that came from their relationships was you :).

Also - having grown up mostly with my mother, who didn't have that much negative to say about my father or other men - still - it took me 30 years to process just how 'one sided' these kinds of things are. 'It takes two' to disagree. There is always another side. I've seen women psychologically abuse and harass men to their breaking point and they felt no remorse or responsibility in the matter (as well as men who were just as bad).

They should have said "don't let a bad man ruin your future," they probably had experiences limited to their own circles of men, but it was short-sighted of them to think you would be constrained to the same fate.

Is it okay for a good man to ruin her future?

Since you know a lot about short-sightedness, can you comment on whether it's short-sighted to correct a stranger's family's advice based on your guesses of their experiences?

Re-frame the context hypothetically, using race instead of gender, and then tell me if you still feel that what you're saying is fair.

How about "Don't ruin your future"? It doesn't matter what the cause is: "man", "good man", "purple man", "flesh-eating bacteria", etc.

That takes a bit of work, since the context is that she's expected to marry a man, but she's not expected to marry someone of any particular race. However, in cultures where you have an expectation to marry within your race, it'd be fair. I come from one of these cultures, and I find a lot of what my family tells me about race and dating to be reprehensible, but if they were to say something like this about the race that we all are and that I'm semi-expected to marry within, it would be very different from when they stereotype other races.

Probably a good point! But how easy is it to tell good vs bad partner before taking collateral damage? Certainly it's easier to punt the issue until after you become self-sustaining, IMO

I've found the opposite to be true. It's harder to build the type of commitment necessary for a successful marriage when neither of you really needs the other one. If both of you prioritized career over family leading up to the point of marriage, that's not likely to change after you're married. This is fine (if somewhat less meaningful) as long as you both remain financially and professionally independent, but the moment one of you loses a job or faces a major life challenge that strips you of your success, the other is going to be faced with a choice of either reorienting their priorities or letting you go. Often people choose the former.

In the case of my wife and I, we built our lives together. When we met, we had little or nothing. So our priorities were never material, always each other, and everything we have is shared.

It's harder to build the type of commitment necessary for a successful marriage when neither of you really needs the other one.

In the case of my wife and I, we built our lives together.

I hope you and your wife have a long, happy marriage. But, I think you are oversimplifying by quite a lot. Needing each other is not automatically a recipe for a successful marriage.

I was married more than 20 years. I am divorced. The divorce was amicable and I have no regrets. For various reasons, I have thought about this quite a lot, and I think no matter your circumstance, finding a real meeting of the minds is a serious challenge. If two people can achieve that, I think they can be okay. If they cannot, they will not be -- regardless of whether they stay together or divorce.

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

I dislike this sentiment. Not everyone wants kids. Usually meeting Mr. Right doesn't change whether someone wants children or not.

This is true, but then again not everyone thinks the same in their twenties as their forties. Unfortunately, time waits for no one and if you do change your mind then you can.

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

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

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

There can be a lot of hurt feelings on all sides of the issues of fertility, sexuality, and relationships.

I want to get two things out before too many feelings are hurt:

1) Not being able to conceive because your eggs are too old is agonizing. Past age 35, egg quality tends to degrade quickly. Inability to conceive with one's own eggs can lead couples to spend tens of thousands of dollars to try and cheat time with therapies. Ultimately you might have to go egg donor or even surrogate mother if you've got more problems because you REALLY want a baby, which is now in buku dinero territory.

And all the while that you're going through these expensive, invasive, painful, and depressing rounds of treatment, you're thinking, "if ONLY I had a chance to conceive in my 20's when my chances were so much better!"

2) You can now freeze unfertilized eggs, this wasn't even possible 5 years ago. The technology is now officially amazing. YES, it costs a lot, maybe your parents can help pay for it since this is for them as well. Think of it like buying insurance. If you're a female with the means, I think you should do it.

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.

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

And yes, the laws are often unfair.

> 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!

It is, and you're probably right.

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

In many cases it is not the laws as such, but the judge that is the problem.

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.

Yep.

I am a recently married millennial. We dated for 5 years and deliberately delayed our legal marriage because of student loan debt.

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?

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

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.

> 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...

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.

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.

Wanting to live and share your life with someone and caring for someone is not the same thing.

It's a myth that 50% of marriages end in divorce. The fact that it is accepted to be true by so many people, however, may support your hypothesis.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/19/health/divorce-rate-its-no...

and mhurron beat me to the punch...

Most long term couples have financial entanglements anyway - especially if kids are involved, or if there has been any financial or logistical support of one partner by the other (e.g. A quit their job so they could move with B to the other side of the country for B's job). Not being married doesn't make it easier to split a house.

Because ambition drops slower then opportunity: https://rationalmale.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/smv_curve1....

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...

"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...

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... (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."

Interesting, reminds me of some old provocative article by Timothy Reichert "Bitter Pill" someone told me about sometime back. In that instance it was something along the lines of women being in a prisoners dilemma with regards to contraception and some economic market analysis stuff about women's SMV although I forget if he used that term or some other form of market value applicable to the ladies.

This should be required reading for every modern man.

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.

The fact that you see that a woman should be subservient says more about you then why this diverse group called millennials isn't getting married.

The parent did not imply that they thing women should be subservient. The charitable interpretation is that they're making a comparison with previous generations, when women were — without making any value judgements — more likely to be subservient and more likely to be happy in that role.

This is a strange way to look at the world.

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.

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

It's definitely a story of economics. Raising a family doesn't mesh well with being a fungible producer of labor.

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.

Where are you located? Your job market sounds like the opposite of my experience in California.

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

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

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.

This article is about marriage rates, not birth rates.

Also, why are millenials unable to replicate memetically? I don't see any evidence of that. If we're determined to effect change through technology and environmental activism, surely we're capable of spreading these ideas far faster than breeding. Surely working harder to provide a stable human population with access to healthcare, education, and security is a far higher goal than "marry and make babies"

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

Of course.

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

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.

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/ I've been wondering when this stuff is going to hit and what it's going to look like tangibly.

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.

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.

To me, the real question should be if this is symptomatic of larger issues.

Perhaps people aren't getting married because they don't want to. If so, eh, more power to 'em.

But if it's because of, say, a lack of economic opportunities, lack of adequate health care coverage, lack of adequate savings, excess debt, increasing inflation, etc, etc, well, those are issues that need to be dealt with, not to "save" marriage, but to ensure the economy and broader society function in a way that best benefits everyone.

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.

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.

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)

Don't miss the iPython notebook linked at the end of the article: https://github.com/AllenDowney/MarriageNSFG/blob/master/marr...

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.

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!)

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.

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.

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

Yes.

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.

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.

The government is a proxy for the community in which you live or at least isn't that supposed to be the idea? If people don't feel 'sort of' aligned with their community then what's the point, indeed!

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