Millennials Are Causing the U.S. Divorce Rate to Plummet | Hacker News Reader

Millennials Are Causing the U.S. Divorce Rate to Plummet

bloombergquint.com

164 pointsjoering2253 comments

They really buried the lede. There are two things happening here that can arguably be traced to one cause:

Educated millennials apparently see marriage as something you do _after_ you've finished establishing yourself. It is a goal, not a given.

Uneducated millennials apparently have the _same_ point of view, but they aren't established and therefore they aren't getting married.

Given that marriage often means you end up with the lower of the two credit scores, you're on the hook for debts, you're going to be paying jointly filed taxes regardless of future marital status, etc -- it absolutely makes sense not to get married until you're financially established. Now that the mystique of marriage is broken (thanks to those baby boomers get divorced in record numbers), it's no longer a rite of passage into adulthood.

> Given that marriage often means you end up with the lower of the two credit scores

Does anyone actually think this way?? Honestly I can’t imagibe ever thinking financially when I proposed.

Yes, they do. proposal =/= legally married; I know several people who held off a little while... either until they were out of school, or made a major purchase (such as a house, that sort of thing).

Of course people think this way. It's foolish not to, especially when couples can commit to each other in so many ways other than legal marriage. I'm shocked there's someone on hacker news who doesn't.

Thinking in terms of credit scores seems to be a US thing though. Sure, when you consider marriage you will be aware of each other's financial situation (including debts), and ideally you'll be living together and sharing finances for a couple of years already (ten years in my case), but credit scores seem pretty localized.

A meta comment, this kind of thread is why I don't respect hackernews commenters anymore. It frequently goes like so:

- Comment: Something - Reply: But my experience says otherwise, why are you so wrong?

There is a persistent lack of ability to see other people's point of view. Surely it is not everyone here, but it's enough such that things get really boring here.

Why are you talking a comment thread so seriously? It sounds like that's your problem.

Wasn't the post more "am I wrong?" rather than "poster is wrong"?

And the responses were useful.

In many cases I think it goes beyond a lack of ability, to wilful obtuseness.

That's part of what I like about Hacker News. They may not be able to see each other's POV, but I can. I come out with a richer appreciation for the diversity of experience out there from reading it, even if all the participants do is argue.

I like his comment. I think what he's saying is not that he doesn't appreciate diversity, his complaint is the way in which people discuss these issues: instead of being respectful and level-headed, they act like extremists. I think this is common to people in this profession. There's some other forums where I see a similar dynamic, and then there's other forums where it's completely different. Let's just say that the forums where people are nicer and more respectful have few, if any, engineers.

Remember, there was a study a while back that showed that engineers have a greater propensity to become terrorists. People who gravitate toward engineering have much more black-and-white thinking, and with that comes a greater tendency towards extremism.

I was raised in a very poor environment, and I still have connections to and experiences from that sort of life. Credit affects a ton of your life in ways that people who aren't poor can't appreciate. If you want cable, they are going to run a credit check on you and if the results aren't great, you need to pony up a large deposit. If you want to open a bank account, your options are greatly diminished if you have bad credit. You are automatically disadvantaged if you're trying to rent a desirable apartment. It's probably obvious, but you also don't have credit cards without pre-paying, and that complicates life in a number of ways (and most people with bad credit also don't have the resources to pre-pay a credit card).

Not so surprisingly, this all factors into whether or not to get married to someone!

Essentially everyone thought this way up until maybe 100 years ago. Marriage was just as much an economic union as for love and companionship.

In many ways it still is whether people acknowledge it or not.

The credit score remark is a reference to losing half your assets and/or taking on your partners debt if things go wrong.

That assumes you are marrying someone with zero resources.

Most people in the US have less than $10000 in savings.

Do most people really not marry with prenup?

I didn't. We are committed til death do us part. Not just saying that.

California has a difficult relationship with prenups. My wife and I essentially have to keep our pre-wedding finances completely separate or they become marital assets and subject to a 50/50 split. Any debts we incur past the date of our marriage are marital debts I believe, and prenups aren’t enforceable.

In my social circle, it's not all that uncommon for it to be a purely financial decision. One pair of friends, I didn't find out they got legally married until much later, when it came up incidentally in a conversation about filing taxes. And I was no more offended about it than I'd be about them not keeping me up to date on whether they itemize or take the standard deduction, or deciding not to invite me along for a mortgage refinance.

I don't know if it's boomers treating divorce as a recreational sport, or if it's the whole 90's/00's DOMA subplot in the story of marriage in the US, or something else entirely, or all of the above. But, at some point, the idea that "love == government licensure" just stopped seeming reasonable.

What sort of social circle is this?

I sure did! Marriage is, primarily, a financial and risk sharing arrangement. That’s the point of it.

Good God, you're kidding right?

Making sure you are financially compatible with your spouse is just as important as making sure you are emotionally compatible. Financial issues are the #1 cause of stress in marriages.

Civil marriage is very similar to a business partnership.

Unintended pregnancy in US teens has consistently dropped by quite a bit [1], and I have to imagine that has reduced the number of "shotgun weddings" at a young age. That said, the number of unintended pregnancies by people at and below the poverty line has actually risen somehow.

[1] https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/unintended-pregnancy-u...

The somehow is the access to contraceptives being severely curtailed. Outside of condoms pretty much every form of contraceptive is much more expensive and harder to get than it once was. Free/Cheap birth control was an excellent way to prevent pregnancies but various entities have conspired to take that away, with the ridiculous idea that people will just stop having sex. Condoms can be expensive if you are living below the poverty line but people aren't going to stop having sex. Thus you have these obvious consequences.

> somehow

Note that access to reproductive care continues to be impeded on in places like Utah and Texas - see the recent filibuster in Texas by Wendy Davis, for instance, or Utah's "abstinence-only" school curriculum. It is not usually middle class families hurt by policies like these (e.g. Utah's laws assume the parents will deal with sex ed, and by and large, middle class families do just that).

Instead, abortion/birth control restrictions and/or poor sex ed hurt lower educated, lower income families. Single moms (whose husbands are in prison) have no time to ensure each of their kids gets proper attention, have no control over the next pregnancy because lack of education/PTO to drive to the next state for abortion, new child is born, cycle continues and unintended pregnancy rate for people below poverty line increases.

The concerted effort to shut down Planned Parenthood, probably.

When you remove and important and often sole provider of family planning, the planning part goes astray.

My biggest question is who profits from eliminating places like that? I don't buy that it's just about abortion and religion (and therefore politics, in the US.)

Don't underestimate the power of religious, irrational thinking. People in the middle east have been fighting to the death over completely irrational religious issues for literally thousands of years now. Not everything has a profit motive behind it.

Pregnancy can still be a meal-ticket in some states. Particularly if there is a definite father that it can be pinned on.

My wife and I got married young, 21 and 20. Neither of us had any financial issues because we were too young to have any financial issues. Twelve years later and we are still married. By sharing our 20s together it allowed us to see each other grow personally, professionally and together in many ways.

Neither of us views marriage in terms of financial purposes. There are economic benefits we see. For example I work from home and she is a stay at home mom. 90% of our meals of made from scratch by her e.g., we render leaf fat to use in pie dough and get peaches from farmers market to use in the pies. I am certain people view this as a 1950s arrangement but we are healthy to the point we can't remember the last time we've been to the doctor. Added bonus our kids will be out of the house when we are in our early 40s!

> Neither of us had any financial issues because we were too young to have any financial issues

Can I guess that your lifestyle doesn't vary hugely from that of your parents? I see most millennial having to contend with a relative shack vs their parents relative mansions and stability and stuff - the general feeling that you are "very" behind your parents.

We both were air traffic controllers in the Air Force and met at our first base. My dad was enlisted military and her mom immigrated here, working as a nurse in the prison system. I now work from home as a data scientist for a cyber-security company.

Congratulations on finding yourselves so young and more importantly, being in a position where you were both able to grow with one and other. :)

I'm rather envious. But like the OP above you mentioned, I wasn't in a position where I could or should be committing to life with some one. I guess that's where today's culture is a lot more forgiving and not forcing our generation to adhere to traditional social roles.

I can't imagine anyone who'd have married to the younger version of myself would have made it far, and inevitably found myself on the wrong side of the documented statistics. So, yay... I guess.

I can't say our first few years of marriage were easy by any stretch of the definition. We struggled with a variety of issues - sudden death of her father, back to back deployments (her and I) and the general stresses of marriage and the military. The first 2 - 3 years were the most difficult but once she decided to separate marriage became easier. Then I separated and marriage was blissful - now that I work from home we have afternoon delights.

Back to reality, there are also issues of finding yourself/ourself; on our own and together. The younger versions of ourselves are shells of what we've become together. Marriage is never easy, regardless of when you choose to get married; 20, 30, 40...

Younger people divorce quicker for many of the reasons mentioned throughout the post but my belief is they quit through the hard times as they have an unfounded belief marriage is easy and without growth individually and together. We stuck it out through all those hard times; in part because we were the only constant in our lives as we moved overseas. Now in our 30s we understand and react better to those times life throws us a curveball.

Don't be envious, but do view marriage as a partnership through life - not a financial decision.

Thank you for your kind words :). I appologise if I implies in any part that your marriage would have been easy, I'm envious... but I'm not naive! :D

My comment about my own perception was being in a position where I tried, relentlessly, to make relationships work with several different people where in hindsight it was clear neither I or my then partner where in a position where we could.

It took many years before I got to the place where I am at today. I'm now comfortable with being alone but also in a position where I'd be capable of truly looking after another and respecting boundaries. They were not always something I managed at all well.

If I can ask, "but once she decided to separate marriage became easier. Then I separated and marriage was blissful - " - you separated marriage?

Or did you mean your wife left the Military and then you followed suit?

No need for apologies, as you did not imply anything. I added for additional perspective. Relationships are difficult and I couldn't fathom trying to wade in today's waters.

You are correct, being comfortable alone while looking after another and respecting their boundaries is acquired through experience. My wife and I learned these traits through many hard lessons. For me, I was an ultra-marathoner during my mid-20s. The training and races provided me many lessons I still use in life.

Ah yes, separated from the military (left the military), not marriage.

I have to whole-heartedly agree. My wife and I both got married young as well (23/21), spent the first two years of marriage living in separate states, were broke as crap but not in debt, and came out the other side doing great. I think the key to marriage is simple, you both _commit_ to being married no matter what. You can work through any problem as long as you are committed to doing so.

You got lucky, and you possibly also made a good choice. You also found each other at a time when you were both young and impressionable and not set in your ways or scarred by failed marriages or relationships. But largely, I think you were lucky: you managed to find someone who wasn't going to be a financial disaster for you. You could have married a girl who, as soon the paychecks started rolling in, wanted to spend it all on crap.

I can see being unlucky finding someone who will spend it all on crap. Hopefully, before people decide to get married they can have a sense of their spending habits. Difficult to completely do but you should have a reasonable exception.

Though I agree, a certain amount of luck was involved.

I'm glad you're rarely seeing a doctor, but... you're early thirties. Unless you injure yourself, that should be the normal case. It's not the homemade pies :) (Although those are a good thing for very different reasons. Yum. Homemade pie)

I would agree, being in your early 30s you shouldn't see a doctor outside of an injury. Again I don't think the homemade pies are helping, but I think they do in the long-term. Not that I am eating pie but that we know whats into them. We see the pigs being raised, work with our butcher etc... we believe that will aid us as we get older in comparison to eating pre-made ones with who knows what in it.

We could be entirely wrong here, but at least we will be eating well!

Kidding aside, I agree. There's a lot of value in knowing where your food comes from. Not just in terms of health, but also in (for lack of a better word) a spiritual way. You understand your place in the world better.

Congrats on being able to live your life like that.

I'd really like to see some discussion of the numbers because on the surface a declining divorce rate sounds positive, but depending on other trends it might not be.

If these are all true:

1- Unmarried couples with children are more likely to separate than married couples (this is probably true)

2- Couples with less means have become less likely to marry (this is confirmed)

3- Couples with less means are having children at around the same rate that they used to (not sure on this one)

Then it suggests that fewer low income children may grow up in stable two-parent households, which is not progress at all, it means a stable family life is becoming a privilege reserved only for the upper class.

Which would make a certain amount of sense in the context of long-term inflation and stagnant wages, there's a clear trend in the US of middle class privileges slipping away from a growing segment of the population.

We should have seen this coming -- financial hardship has been the #1 cause of divorce for a long time.

Millennials are forced to be more careful, because they're climbing a difficult and important ladder into financial security. Most people I know who aren't looking to marry are just very aware that this is not the right time for them, neither finically nor in relation to achieving their professional goals.

I'm trying to find correlated information on young birth rates. My unprofessional guess is that a hell of a lot less people are getting teen pregnant and then marrying about it, which could lead to a messy divorce down the road (the thought of marrying some of the first people I hooked up with... I was 18 fucks sake...)

I don't know, but anecdotally, it seems like people don't feel they have to get married as much.

As for marrying younger... I met my wife at 14, married at 21, and had our first daughter at 25. We're 34 now and have two girls, and see no reason why we'd ever split. We're happy. I honestly don't think age has nearly as much to do with it as maturity and mindset.

Yes this is correct at least for the US, teen pregnancy rates have been declining http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/29/why-is-the-t...

I think about this from time-to-time. My partner and I know we couldn't afford children now, though she's constantly ..."noticing the clock ticking".

I'd like children some day.

But what makes me snicker is it sounds exactly like the beginning of Idiocracy.

That movie got a heck of a lot right. Still amusingly scary at times.

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/603/

That comic is fake news. I can't find the source, but the Economist made a pretty good graph with good data demonstrating that when you control for certain factors, poor people and people with measured below average IQ definitely are more likely to have children. I saw the graph I'm referring to a couple years ago on the Economist website.

I think you're missing the point of the comic. Yes, it's absolutely possible that you could measure this effect but worrying about it won't help and attempting to "fix" it will almost certainly backfire in hilarious and/or terrifying ways. See China.

In the past, poor classes had more children then rich. Nothing new about it. Which is what comic says.

And because society hasn't collapsed yet, things are fine? Adaptation doesn't take effect that quickly, but it still takes effect. Maybe we will only see brain size decrease in a few thousand years (that is, if you believe in the assumptions).

I would trade President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho for Trump any day. At least Mr Dwayne tried to appoint the smartest people available (the protagonist).

There is even a argument that Idiocracy is a utopia. https://youtu.be/OmZOZjHjT5E

And Federal Reserve officials laugh when people suggest their policies and currency debasement causes declining birth rates. Their inflationary policies and increasing cost to live absolutely affect the ability and willingness of people to have children.

I don’t think 3% inflation is affecting anybody’s willingness to have children. Do you have a source for that?

3% isn't much, but over, say, 20 years of constant 3% inflation, that's 80% inflation total. Now this is just a quick math example and it's not the real situation, but it goes to demonstrate that over time inflation has a large effect. You could argue that over time this huge effect of inflation along with the stagnation of wages makes it so that people can't support previous standards of living, including supporting children. That's just my two cents--I haven't taken a single class on macroeconomics.

Real wages (inflation adjusted) have been stagnant. Nominal wages have gone up at roughly the rate of inflation for the most part since the mid 1970s.

Thanks for correcting me.

On some significantly higher level you might have some aspects correct, there.

That said— I'm Canadian.

Be careful - there is no undo button. A lot of us on the other side encouraging you to have kids can be explained by an old adage..."misery loves company". YMMV.

Speaking as someone with two kids, they're a LOT of work. They have measurably decreased my lifespan (if nothing else, they do that simply from the reduction in sleep quality). I happily tell people not to have kids.

Of course, the ones that should have kids ignore me completely. :)

Heheh.

I don't mind that so much. But I think I've done a good job of convincing myself that there's a certain baseline condition I'd like to be in to start seriously considering it.

We've sadly even waffled enough on getting a dog for,

a) Financial reasons. If we can't take the dog to the office, then we would end up paying the few hundred dollars a month or whatever people charge around here to walk them. (one of my colleagues pays ~$400/month! He must be paid substantially more than I am...)

b) Time. Again, if we can't take it with us then we get a little time after work and some weekends.

c) Space. Living in an apartment feels kind of unfair to the dog. I don't know how some people live in these buildings with a couple of mastiffs or whatever.

Just outlining that felt kind of sad. And if we can't settle on figuring that out yet, then children are further off than I'd like.

having a kid will never come at a convenient time. idiocracy is real.

be doggy grandparents (wife and I prefer this over owning), they are distracting to own and more travel prohibitive than kids.

I hear you, but I think we're different people in that way.

I grew up with dogs— I need a dog. I just can't go for it if I know the situation wouldn't work well for the dog.

Don't get a dog. Honestly, I think having a kid is better than getting a dog. With a kid, there's a pretty good chance that it's going to grow up at some point and be able to use the bathroom on its own (within a few years), feed itself, clean up after itself, and eventually move out of the house.

With a dog, this never happens: you're constantly going to be taking care of it like it's a 2-year-old. You'll have to walk it every day, pick up its hot, steaming shit piles with a thin plastic bag in your hand (or else get huge fines from your HOA/condo), smell its nasty breath, deal with fleas (you have to take it outside for walks remember), hire pet-sitters if you're gone for even one night, etc.

Dogs are an enormous hassle, especially in a city. I have no idea why so many people want them. If you want an animal companion in a city dwelling, get a cat. They don't need to be walked, they don't eat much (compared to large dogs), they can use the bathroom on their own (tip: get a Litter-Robot automated litter box), they don't need to be bathed or groomed, they don't stink, and they don't mind living in an apartment full-time.

Statistically though, married people have more money.

"married women can pay as much as $1 million less than their single counterparts over a lifetime"

"married men between 28 and 30 years old earn around $15,900 more a year in individual income compared to their single counterparts, while married men between 44 and 46 years old make $18,800 more than single men of the same ages"

+ other benefits

https://www.businessinsider.com/how-being-married-makes-you-...

Do married people have more money, or do more financially secure people get married?

It's cheaper to live with someone and split bills than live alone and pay all of the bills by yourself. So yes, married people have more money in general.

That's both a fact and not an answer to the question he's asking. For example, unmarried people can live together and split the bills. The above poster isn't asking if it's cheaper to live together with someone--they're asking if selection bias causes it to look that way. That is, whether or not there's sufficient distinction between single folk, long-term non-married split-the-bills relationships, and marriage.

Many people still are living together and splitting bills without being married, so it's not all that relevant to the question.

It's pretty relevant if married people are more likely to be living together and splitting bills, which is probably the case.

Not only that, but married people have lower costs vs the same two people simply cohabiting.

Lower insurance rates (home, auto)

(usually) lower health insurance rates (family plan rather than two single plans). My company doesn't even charge a premium for putting your non-working spouse on your plan.

(usually) Tax benefits

You don't have to be married to live with someone else. That is why many people get a roommate, you split the bills and save more money.

The second one; marriage isn't free. Even at the courthouse.

When my wife and I married we made a profit on our wedding but we set a reasonable budget for it.

I would love to know how you made a profit on it. (That's not a snarky question at all - I have a child likely to get married next year, and I would genuinely like to know.)

Guests give money to the newly weds in lieu of gifts.

You could make a profit by reduced tax liability.

Get married in a courthouse around the end of the year, before the year of your wedding. The following year, have your ceremony. You extend your Married Filing Jointly status to the previous year you were going to originally take credit for it.

That's my best guess though, and depends on your incomes.

Married people sharing a household retain more of their income (so have more money) than non-married people who are each managing their expenses.

Many bills (like utilities) often have a base component and a variable component, you pay only one base component if you live in the same house.

Rents for two studio apartments are greater than the rents for a single bedroom apartment, two one bedroom apartments go for more than one 2 bedroom apartment. A chunk of that is the shared square footage of bathrooms, kitchen, Etc.

Food costs in bulk are lower than food costs in single serving quantities. It is more cost effective to cook for two than it is to cook for one (save on energy costs and food)

Yes, being married (not having kids), will give you access to more money than you would have if you remain single.

Is there a separate effect for marriage over and above cohabitation?

I don't know. But I would speculate that if such an effect existed it would be tied to a shared financial outcome for the pair vs two unrelated people cohabiting.

There should also be a secondary effect on savings (if they were combined) where the compounding of interest would work more effectively on a larger principle.

Depending on your relative incomes, the difference in your total tax liabilities can be enough to fully fund an IRA; maybe more.

Things like health and car insurance can cost less for a married couple than they do for two individuals, especially if your state doesn't have a domestic partnership law.

Stuff like that can add up surprisingly quickly.

Is it worth it though? A married man may feel the need to provide for his family and make career choices that are detrimental to his family and himself in order to do so.

This is a very narrow view that assumes the man's partner is not contributing.

Does it matter if they are contributing if they'll divorce you after you lose your job or don't out-earn them? Some people's love is very much conditional.

But that doesn't establish whether it's more "competent/conscientious/whatever" people being more likely to marry, vs the marriage itself causing higher market productivity.

Well, either the marriage itself causes more productivity, or there are fewer competent and conscientious people alive in America today.

If you're talking about falling marriage rates, then that's still not true either; the benefits of marriage may fall too (and still would be irrelevant to the point about past correlations between marriage and income).

Question is correlation though. Is it likelier for people who are married (perhaps correlating with more responsible) to hold better positions? Or have higher pressure to make more money and thus act on that?

Also, in US and Canada, there are significant tax benefits to being married.

That’s a common assumption, but for double income earning couples, getting married will frequently increase your tax liability. (In the us at least)

For middle income folks, it's more likely to help than to hurt.

If you're in the bottom 20% or the top 10%, then you're likely to be penalized if you're a dual income family and rewarded if you're a single income family. If you're between those two extremes, it can't hurt and might help.

nice visualization here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/16/upshot/marria...

A cynic could interpret the first bullet point to mean "a married woman gets $1 million from her husband" and "a married man needs to work overtime in order to come up with the million dollars he needs to give to his wife".

Regardless, I don't think your link is evidence that married people have more money. Dual income no kids couples certainly do, but single income double kids families are just... poor.

Another possible explanation is that unmarried people are likely to spend more time and effort pursuing new relationships instead of making money.

I’m a millennial so I’m sympathetic but this is something I’ve heard a lot about anecdotally without a lot of data behind it. Here are two more anecdotes:

My dad graduated in 1976 in the middle of stagflation and had a 12% apr on his first house in the mid 80s.

His dad graduated into the recession that stretched between ww2 and Korea.

I think we’re too quick to look at generations that have accumulated wealth and accuse them of having always had it easy.

The rate was 12% but you completely ignore the average home price and its relation to average income. Housing was tremendously less expensive (even after interest), largely in part to the higher rate.

High rates result in lower prices. Low rates result in higher prices. The rate on its own is really pretty irrelevant.

Exactly.

Most home buyers take out a mortgage. Most people also look at monthly payments as a proxy for affordability. Monthly payments raise when interest rates rise.

Therefore, sellers need to ask for lower prices when rates are high in order to attract buyers. A $150,000 mortgage at 12% interest has monthly payments of $1,543, at 5% interest its $805.

> My dad graduated in 1976 in the middle of stagflation and had a 12% apr on his first house in the mid 80s.

But inflation over the next few years meant that in real terms (the most important terms), that rate was between 6% and -2%(!). Inflation hit 14% in 1980. The ability to refinance also means that he wouldn't have to keep that high interest rate once inflation settled down. So he probably did quite well with that mortgage.

edit: I misread the dates in that sentence, so your Dad probably didn't benefit from the inflation in the early 80s. That said, it is important to consider high mortgage rates in real terms.

>the recession that stretched between ww2 and Korea

I really don't buy that baby boomers had a tough time. I believe that white men in that time in America had perhaps the most prosperous economy and job opportunities in world history.

* except for the ones that were drafted, shipped out to SE Asia and sent home in a box. Or with lifelong physical or mental injuries.

I don't see your point here. 1,789,000 is the total number of US troops serving in the Theatre during the Korean War. There were 74 million males living in the US ~50 million of which were over the age of 18. Even if every single soldier died, which didn't happen, I think we can safely say the booming economy in which these people lived worked out pretty well for the majority.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2010/001.pdf https://www.va.gov/opa/publications/factsheets/fs_americas_w...

Yes, a globalized leviathan murder machine is good for business. But:

- horrible recession between ww2 and Korean War.

- young men faced the draft. A bit of a drag really.

- everybody felt the horrors of war and knowing personal loss.

- the jobs that you speak so fondly of had awful workplace safety, horrible pollution problems, and generally poor working conditions compared to today.

Also there are a lot of things that are a lot cheaper today as a percentage of income, like food, clothing and durable goods.

>everybody felt the horrors of war and knowing personal loss

This is common to nearly every generation in world history. Yes, many Americans died. Yes, it was terrible. Yes, many people genuinely suffered grief.

But if we look at the data honestly, you weren't that likely to die or be in combat if you were an American. They had it comparatively good.

>the jobs that you speak so fondly of had awful workplace safety, horrible pollution problems, and generally poor working conditions compared to today

Today the pollution is worse, and people have worse living conditions instead of working conditions. I know many people who would like to have a high paying, more dangerous job than their current dead-end job that can not support a family, much less one person who wants to live without government assistance. Many people today would gratefully make that trade.

You lost me at “pollution is worse”. So far off the mark.

You are looking at history through rose colored glasses.

Statistics show that in real terms Baby Boomers had it better than any other generation I know of. It's not just an impression. They made huge money in real terms, which is especially amazing given that most of them were not highly educated.

speaking as a millennial there is a big reason Marriage is overtaking divorce.

Health insurance. Most of us dont have jobs that afford us competent healthcare. Seriously, thank the gig economy. Affordable Care Act providers either do not exist in some states or are overpriced/worthless for what they do cover. There are still roughly 25 states that have not expanded medicare either. Getting married is a quick and simple way to either pick up good healthcare from a friend, or get a discount on your own for "being married."

That aligns with traditional marriage vows: “...in good times and bad”.

I suppose the “ok” times are the most precarious as things are not good enough to stay but the couple is also self sufficient enough to leave.

Aye, I have a handful of American friends who have married another friend simply to access/combine one-another's health benefits.

That doesn't seem to happen in Canada...

Wouldnt the divorce rate go higher then? Since its out of convenience/benefits, once one finds a partner, they divorce and remarry.

Only if you think you need to divorce to enter into another relationship. I have friends who live with new partners but are married to someone else altogether; they see the process of getting divorced as an unnecessary and expensive hassle.

Really, how much of our social rituals are thus so encumbered to the primary benefit of bureaucrats and lawyers?

I have no facts, but I'd guess it would not. Financial dependence keeps people in bad marriages - and marrying for health care creates a sort of financial dependence.

In contrast, I have seen Canadians marry Americans; for various perks.

I'm not sure. This is at odds w/ some parts of the article near the end claiming marriage as a status symbol, specifically:

> Fewer people are getting married [...] Many poorer and less educated Americans are opting not to get married at all

Granted the article is not necessarily any more accurate. My pet theory is lack of societal compulsion.

I remember a Howard Stern interview (back in 2005-6?) with Paul McCartney where Howard asked if Paul was making his new wife sign a pre-nup. He wasn't. His response was "A pre-nup for someone who's worth half a billion dollars doesn't make sense. You'll live fine on a quarter billion dollars. It's the guy who's only worth $80k that should be getting a pre-nup."

I definitely put off marriage (I'm on the youngest side of Gen-X) because I saw how my parents' divorce ruined my father's finances and caused a lot of strife.

It's that middle ground; the guy worth $0 doesn't have much to lose, either.

> Most of us dont have jobs that afford us competent healthcare.

Is this true? I hear people say things like this but "most"? Seems too high.

Most might be a bit of an exaggeration but retail & food service industry definitely changed the way they operate just to avoid providing healthcare.

>A June 2016 study determined that 500,000 workers in the retail, hospitality and food service sectors were forced involuntarily into part-time employment as companies sought to circumvent the employer mandate

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/businesses-eliminated-hund...

I really have to wonder why this wasn't accounted for in the ACA. Like what business isn't going to decide if the administrative overhead of having more employees is less than the cost of providing healthcare and act accordingly? Would it have been that hard to require health insurance contributions in proportion to the employee's percentage FTE? Then it would actually be cheaper for businesses to hire full-time and someone working 40hr/wk at multiple jobs gets the same benefit as a salaried employee.

If we want to do something meaningful we would make it so nobody gets insurance from their employer. I don't like my insurance, in a competitive market the insurance I want would only be slightly cheaper - but I don't actually have that option because I would be throwing $1000/month (nobody will tell me the real numbers, but it is in that range) that my employer contributes away.

Those who can only work fast food will never have it easy, but as you point out making them work less hours isn't going to help them.

Seem correct. I know my health care would have doubled this year from $800/mo to $1544/mo so I found another plan at the same price as the old one but it covers much less.

I guess I see stuff like this:

> The percentage of people with health insurance coverage for all or part of 2016 was 91.2 percent, higher than the rate in 2015 (90.9 percent).

And I wonder if, while still very important, people take debates like healthcare and needlessly inflate the numbers to overemphasize the problem's impact.

I think it's true. Even a lot of tech companies won't cover you 100% if you have a family. For a family of 4, you're looking at $2,000 a month. Often the employer will pay half of that.

With the rise of contracting in IT, I think more and more people have crappy insurance. I didn't realize how bad it would be when I started contracting last year. The agency I was at only gave it after 90 days and it was $450 a month for a pretty high deductible ($3000) plan as a single person with no dependents. I ended up going back to full time and a major reason was the healthcare.

Maybe.

I've just been looking at the UK stats and the divorce rate for <35s has dropped like a stone. It was fairly steady up until the early 90s then has plummeted to a quarter of that level.

In contrast, the rate for 35+ peaked in the early 90s then has dropped by a quarter.

This can't be explained by healthcare as marriage has very little effect on that in the UK. Could still be financial, of course, and could also be job security related though probably more related to housing than healthcare. But that's just speculation on my part.

Have to say, I don't think I've ever looked at the divorce stats before (never had a reason) but they're fascinating. For example, the number for men petitioning for divorces has remained pretty constant since the Divorce Reform Act in 1971. The number of women petitioning, though, ballooned through the 80s and 90s and has now dropped back to about the level in 1971. No idea why but interesting nonetheless.

As a fledgling entrepreneur, health insurance is one of the major pros of marriage for me. One of my Amazon seller colleagues was recently diagnosed with cancer and he's still in his 20s. It's heartbreaking.

I would only believe this if people were also not getting divorced because they didn't want to lose access to health care. If you have any statistics on this, that'd be interesting.

Otherwise, you're simply saying there's a force exerting pressure to get married. Yet the data shows that this force is far less effective than whatever forces existed 50 years ago. People are not getting married _more_ than baby boomers, they're getting married _less_. And then they're divorcing at lower rates after that.

Two things I would have liked to see: 1) is this just the U.S.? The Baby Boom happened in many nations, as did an increase in divorce at about the same time, how do their divorce rates compare? 2) couldn't one say equally well "the Baby Boom-fueled divorce explosion continues to recede"? This might not be about Millenials at all, but rather about the Baby Boom generation.

It might be because people are getting married and having children later. I find that most people that I know that had parents that got divorced, it happened when their kids were in their mid to late teens. People now getting married at older ages and having kids later might get divorced now outside the 45 year old window.

Or you could take a more cynical view:

Women that marry in their late 20s and have kids in their 30s aren't really thrilled with their dating prospects when they're fast approaching 40 and have a kid.

Men that marry in their late 20s and have kids in their 30s don't like the idea of living in a crappy apartment, driving a 15yo Civic and eating rice and beans well into their 50s because they're getting bent over for child support.

If you get married and feel you've made the wrong choice later in life you have more motivation to "make it work" because your ability to "do better" is worse.

50yr ago it wasn't uncommon for people to get married in their early 20s and be divorced (with or without kids, usually with) by 30. Millennials may just have skipped that phase.

Edit: Never mind that last paragraph, it is contradicted by one of the graphs.

The graph on the page directly disagrees with that last sentence. 18-34 age range was bouncing around 11-13 percent divorce rate. Not much has changed at all in that age range.

> Women that marry in their late 20s and have kids in their 30s don't really have great dating prospects when they're fast approaching 40 and have a kid.

Is there any need to gender that statement? It seems just as true of men as of women. With the possible exception of differing child-support rates in the sexes (for which I have not bothered to gather any data), probably even the same is true of:

> Men that marry in their late 20s and have kids in their 30s don't like the idea of living in a crappy apartment, driving a 15yo Civic and eating rice and beans well into their 50s because they're getting bent over for child support.

> Is there any need to gender that statement? It seems just as true of men as of women.

There is quite a stark contrast between the sexes on desirability at various ages:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/15/style/dating-apps-online-...

Men typically don't take custody (IIRC, they often don't even ask). So he assumed the children would stay with the woman, and be a drag on her dating life, while the man would pay child support. It doesn't have to be this way, but it usually is.

Child support payments are not the cause of women's financial woes after divorce, but you can absolutely look at the same general sentence: "Women that marry in their late 20s and have kids in their 30s don't like the idea of living in a crappy apartment, driving a 15yo Civic and eating rice and beans well into their 50s because they're getting bent over for" being women who had kids, often put their careers on the back burner, often were not aware of financial decision-making within the marriage, & got divorced without the ability to make as much money.

Yeah, it's complicated; you can see one paper here [1] that quantifies the post-divorce earnings gap. It is improving. Anyhow, divorce is a ludicrously bad economic decision for many women. Don't know if that's a factor in the changing rate.

[1] https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/files/iser_working_papers/2008-... A more recent book: https://press.princeton.edu/titles/7519.html There's a chapter on divorce & child support. Gets pretty mathy. An interesting survey from UBS (the numbers are buried) about female abdication of financial decision-making responsibility in marriages: https://www.ubs.com/content/dam/WealthManagementAmericas/doc...

> often put their careers on the back burner, often were not aware of financial decision-making within the marriage, & got divorced without the ability to make as much money.

It's interesting how some paint this picture of mothers who decided to be homemakers as women who are just too dumb to care the correct amount about climbing the career lader.

Apparently raising a good, quality child/person isn't a respectable ambition and should instead be avoided in pursuit of the rat race know as a career... gotta love this mass damnation of mother/fatherhood!

I think that's really unkind. It's not dumb. It is an economic decision in an economic system that does not reward caretakers.

A fault confessed is half redressed. After all, what you call "really unkind" isn't my opinion, it's yours.

What did I say that was unkind?

Maybe you're mad about the term "abdication of decision-making". It's a term of art. What's unkind about it?

Maybe you think it's unkind to say a woman is putting career on the back burner. But that's often accurate and a very conscious decision.

I think you don't like looking at the results of these decisions. That doesn't make the decisions themselves bad, or the people making them stupid, and describing those decisions accurately is not unkind. You are mad at the wrong people.

When I'm talking about these things I'm looking at my own bank account, as a woman who is hanging back in career so she can stay home with her kid a bit. It's just patronizing to pretend somehow magically I'm going to make more money because of this, or that when I'm 40+ I'll magically be able to jump into another tech job at an even higher pay grade. Like all the people we're talking about, I'm making decisions in an economic system that is not going to economically reward me for caretaking. I'm doing it anyway, trying to balance the present time with children with the necessity of supporting myself financially for another 50+ years given my family's longevity. I stand by everything I said.

Or a more positive view: more mature people are better able to identify partnerships that can endure. Or people who are older are more fixed and less likely to grow away from their partners. Or more time affords more opportunity to de-risk potential partners so social sorting has more time to “work”. Etc etc etc. “just so”

"Many poorer and less educated Americans are opting not to get married at all. . . . Marriage is becoming a more durable, but far more exclusive, institution."

How is it exclusive if it is by choice?

I think they are referring to people excluding potential partners due to their lack of money or education. But I agree, their writing insinuates the institution itself is discriminating.

I doubt that is it.

Two poor people can be really hurt by the way marriage is set up. Benefits get weird. The income might put them over the threshold for receiving benefits. And if the marriage goes badly - for example, if a spouse winds up being abusive, develops a drinking problem, and things of that sort - the poor person is stuck in the marriage simply for not being able to afford a divorce.

It isn't just that, but marriage costs time and money. It varies by state and county - and the services the courthouse offers varies as well. If you cannot afford the initial fees, the entire institution is off-limits.

It's not entirely by choice. Getting married can have a significant impact on the benefits you are eligible to receive. Anecdotally, I knew a woman who lived with her boyfriend and children in section 8 housing through benefits she received for being low income. The boyfriend worked, but his income was not counted as household income because they weren't married. They eventually got married, and between his income and hers, their income was high enough to disqualify they for the section 8 benefits.

I don't know how common of a situation that is, but it is very possible to impact your public benefits with marriage.

I think this is quite common. Public benefits are a strange thing and have really odd loopholes at times.

For example: I had a friend that lived with her boyfriend and they had a child. The state wanted to take child support from his check to give to her for the child even though they lived at the same address.

I worked with a woman that kept below a certain amount of hours per week while working. This was simply because working any more meant that her benefits were cut so much she couldn't survive. The cut was more than the money she earned from working.

I'm guessing I've known a few people that weren't married for similar reasons as well, I just cannot think of a concrete example.

Yes, this is a very real problem. I’m close to someone who has to actively turn down freelance work past a certain point because they will no longer qualify for Medicaid and still be far short of affording an ACA plan. Obviously the “solution” is to get a lot more work all at once to get out of that financial gap, but it’s hard to do.

Definitely is difficult and I personally think it is ridiculous to expect. The better solution would be to rework laws so that folks working come out ahead. I imagine this would include having benefits reduce more slowly than small income gains. If anything, the benefit losses should mirror the gains as it makes no sense to punish making $50 more with a $100 loss.

Across the whole spectrum of income, you'll find people using loopholes.

not being able to afford things is not a "choice"

Not sure if it's really millennials.

There was an article in the New York Times in 2014 stating that the divorce rate peaked in the 1980's and was at a near record low.

That was well before any Millennials were born.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/upshot/the-divorce-surge-...

Take a step back. Focus your attention on the 2nd graph and look at the 18-34 age range line. This is and always has been low. There is literally a 1%-2% drop. So you can't actually "blame" millennials on the US divorce rate plummeting, let alone by 8%. The article is also already admitting that the rate is dropping for ALL age groups ranges (read - people that are NOT millennials) for the past 10-15 years.

So if you look at that graph and look at the title of the article, you should realize that the overall trend is dropping, and it's not because of millennials. If anything that is an anecdotal feeling and the writer of this article is suggesting that as the reason, which is again, not backed up by the data.

Edit: take out the yell words ;)

After having looked at that graph I too was confused by the assertion that millennials are driving down divorce rates.

It appears that the divorce rates for 18-34 year olds has been flat, the changes are happening in other age brackets.

By this and other accounts, millennials appear to be a reaction to the excesses of the baby boomers. For example, millennials are more prudish than their parents,[1] more likely to identify as conservative than their parents were at the same age.[2]

[1] http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-millennials-...

[2] https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/07/health/millennials-conservati...

Since millennials are marrying and having kids later, how do we know they won't get divorced later too?

If people are getting married later, maybe they are just getting divorced later? I wonder what the change is for divorce after X amount of years of marriage.

Another thing millennials are killing?

But think of those poor divorce lawyers! How will they get their millions if millenials won't divorce?

I'm less worried about the divorce lawyers than I am music. The Mountain Goats won't be as relatable to people if no one remembers what divorce is.

I'd expect millennials to have more mutual, non-contested divorces based on the advertising trends I'm seeing and anecdotal evidence. So lawyers are still getting paid but not nearly as much!

The bottom of the article says that they are also getting married less.

Basically, back when the Baby Boomers were young it was a major source of shame to have sex outside of marriage for a lot of people, so they got married early and then discovered that it wasn't a good match. Lucky for them the divorce option was available at least.

These days kids are much more free to experiment before they tie the knot and aren't forced into bad marriages as much. General availability of contraception also helps I suspect.

The downside is that when they do have kids outside of marriage it's a worse situation as the families are less stable without the institution holding them together.

So the ideal situation seems to be for kids to have lots of sexual partners using effective contraception before they settle down and get married to the partner they are most compatible with and then have kids. A policy that seems sensible from one angle, but sinful as hell from another.

> The downside is that when they do have kids outside of marriage it's a worse situation as the families are less stable without the institution holding them together.

Do you have any data backing up this assertion?

I don't, but it is at the bottom of the article so maybe the author can back it up?

I think what I was responding to was the implied causal connection between the lack of an "institution" of marriage causing instability in cohabitating adults.

The article and linked research don't make that assertion.

Marriage as an institution: - There is stigma attached to divorce. Not as much as their used to be but it's definitely more "jaw dropping" than breaking up with someone you're simply "dating" - Aside from common law marriage there are more financial impacts to divorce - Divorce requires social and/or legal rituals in order to dissolve the union. Regular dating just requires "I'm breaking up with you" and moving out if living together. It's much less formal.

These are just off the top of my head. Marriage as an institution definitely does raise the bar relative to dating in how stressful mentally and financially dissolution of a relationship is.

I found a few articles that back up that assertion.

There are a few interesting points in this one:

https://www.brookings.edu/research/cohabiting-parents-differ...

Cohabitating adults are less likely to stay together in every country where it's measured.

In the US, college educated non-married parents are 2.5x more likely to split before their first-born turns 12.

Wasn’t it just the sensible thing to do back when the definition of what people today think of as a “sin” was invented? Imagine if safe, reliable, widely-available contraception was around when they were first formulating it, I bet the rules would have been way different.

I guess we could extend the metaphor perpetually - if there was no biological clock or aging at all, the rules might be completely different again.

The Romans sure as heck didn't think it was sinful - they'd throw a pig's bladder on and go to town. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexuality_in_ancient_Rome

That sort of behavior tends to get selected out over time.

Generally when women feel like they have the option to do so, they tend to delay marriage and have fewer children.

This is good for personal comfort, but less good for societal survival. The Roman situation the sibling commenter mentioned is relevant, as is a comparative analysis of birthrates worldwide.

> The downside is that when they do have kids outside of marriage it's a worse situation as the families are less stable without the institution holding them together.

There's an unstated major premise here - that any "two parents cohabitating" family, even an unhappy one, is better than a single-parent or separated-parents family.

Is that true?

Why not just Google for it? According to this study, an unhappy 2-parent family has about the same negative effect as being in a single parent family.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2930824/

Of course, other studies may differ so this shouldn't be taken as conclusive.

More generally, I don't like to take any observational studies based on cohort data like this to be useful for attributing any sort of causes.

Whenever you've got people self-selecting into treatment populations, you need to be extremely careful about causality. For example, let's say that you've got a positive association between delinquent behavior and divorce, and that it seems to be stronger when the custodial parent stays single than it is when the custodial parent remarries. One story is that an unstable family situation causes delinquent behavior. Another equally plausible one is that difficult-to-rear kids stress their parents out, which causes them to divorce, and makes it harder for them to remarry.

It is possible to at least poke at these kinds of tangles, but you've got to be extremely diligent and careful about it. More careful than I think is possible in the "giant scattershot regression model" genre of observational study.

When I asked, "Is that true?", I meant it as a rhetorical question. I doubt anyone actually knows the answer. There's an idea, which I got from Green & Gerber's textbook on field experimentation, that some questions are just fundamentally unanswerable.

I don't actually have an answer, but I wonder if it's something in the middle...

No, two unhappy parents cohabitation (married or not) is not ideal. No, a single parent is not ideal. But, a single parent who bounces in and out of relationships every few years is worse than either of the above.

That instability is worse for the child than the other options.

Just a thought, nothing to back it up one way or the other.

I somehow recall that was already proven as not worse in studies of children from divorced households (might have been largely equitable custody) vs nondiviorced that the answer is no even without extremes like domestic violence being involved. There are extra expenses and difficulties involved in separate situations technically but the alternative may be worse. Two separate remarried families wouldn't even suffer from the resource loss and lack of support structure assuming both have healthier relationships.

The rhetoric seems to be spread more from a mix of traditionalism and insecurity about being dumped or stuck in an unhappy marriage than solid facts.

It's easier to get divorced if you already own two houses, and can afford to pay alimony with your big fat salary

Edit: s/married/divorced

And you’ve technically been “divorced” (entered into cohabitation with a serious partner for some years and broke up) 1 or 2 times before making it official with the government.

you mean divorced?

"Plummet' == 8%? Seems like the title is exaggerating a bit egregiously.

Actually beyond that it's a pretty awful study. The graph is showing rates levelling off for all groups. It makes sense for people that are old to have been divorced. The actual rate of divorce for people that are 18-34 right now isn't going to be known until they are 55-70. The data is already showing that they will have a lower rate that today's 55-70, but again, to blame the divorce rate drop on the 18-34 age range when it's across the board, is kinda ridiculous. If you look at the graph of the 18-34 chart going back to 1980 it's pretty much bouncing up and down from 11-13 percent consistently.

An 8% change in any behavior on a sample size as large as the country is huge.

But that’s 8% off of 26% though which is a lot

Once upon a time, you were only able to have a stable relationship if you were married. A stable relationship being distinguished as being emotional rather than purely physical or economic or very short-term (one-night stands).

That all changed around the 1960s when it became common for people to live together even if unmarried leading to fewer recorded marriages. Many unmarried people can and have maintained stable relationships for decades.

Obviously, if there are less official marriages occurring, the number of divorces will also fall. That's purely a semantic distinction, and actually quite meaningless.

A better study would be to find the ratio between the total number of stable relationships (married or not being irrelevant) and the number of those which breakup.

What is the number of stable relationships? How many of those are breaking down? What is the ratio of the breakdowns to those which remain stable? Does that ratio agree or not with the current divorce-ratio?

We're not getting divorced as much because we haven't had a lot of time to be married. I know it accounts for that in the article but it just seems silly to declare us better at marriage when we've barely had time to know whether we should get a divorce (I'm on the older side of millennials too).

I’m not sure if the data here supports the conclusions at all. It looks like the divorce rate for millennials is roughly constant, albeit much lower than for older adults. So if more millennials are getting married and boomers are beginning to die off that would explain this trend nicely.

This may have something to do with the fact that many millennials view long term partnership as only slightly (if at all) inferior to marriage. Those likely to divorce now just stay as boyfriend and girlfriend. May still have kids, etc.

I wonder how much cost plays in, I mean, my fiancée and I are adult middle class millennials and we’ve been saving for two years to have a wedding, and we’re planning a relatively cheap one.

Fights about finances are known to be one of the top causes of divorce.

The wedding industry is a giant racket. It's so hard not to get ripped off when trying to plan for a wedding.

The real racket isn't in ripping people off for services, but that everyone needs these services. Weddings used to be relatively private affairs. Costs were far less. Churches provided services to parishioners and associated gatherings were at family houses. Today we are expected to purchase everything.

Take wedding dresses. They were not always white. Brides bought expensive dresses, but they would expect to use them for many years to come. Even Kings and Queens would use their wedding clothes many times. The recent switch to white made them single-use garments. That freed them to become very expensive and elaborate.

That and there is a huge marketing effort aimed at girls of all ages telling them what a "dream wedding" should look like, and it's not a bunch of lawn chairs in your back yard and a potluck. They're also constantly reminded that the wedding is their day, nobody else should be telling them what it should look like.

The one good thing is that when people get divorced and remarried the second wedding is almost always a much smaller and more intimate affair. Nothing breaks the spell like living through planning and executing a "dream wedding".

> They're also constantly reminded that the wedding is their day, nobody else should be telling them what it should look like.

There is a special kind of (evil) genius in the advertising "Your wedding is your day, so let us tell you what you truly want, and don't let anyone else disagree." (It reminds me of the old "Distrust unsolicited advice. Except this time.")

> The real racket isn't in ripping people off for services, but that everyone needs these services. Weddings used to be relatively private affairs. Costs were far less. Churches provided services to parishioners and associated gatherings were at family houses. Today we are expected to purchase everything.

I disagree that everyone needs these services, only that, as you say, many people expect to provide (or that their marrying friends will provide) these services. Weddings still can be private affairs, and associated gatherings can still be at family houses. (The bit about churches is outside an individual's control, I agree.) As yters commented (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18068728), some people's weddings are still quite affordable.

https://www.theknot.com/content/military-wedding-ceremony-an...

I've been to a couple of these. The costs are basically nil and you get some perks (honor guards with swords, flyovers etc) that trump any fancy destination wedding.

One secret to getting lower prices is occasionally fibbing about the purpose or just not mentioning it. Tell the baker you need a beautiful... anniversary cake, or retirement cake, and stick the plastic people on top yourself. Immediately cheaper! Same with flowers -- you need a bouquet for... something else. Ok, not sure what. Renting a reception hall for a retirement party is cheaper than renting the same space for a wedding.

Of course, some people enjoy the ritual of the cake tasting and decoration decisions and etc.

Wedding receptions have become an aspirational good. Like all other aspirational goods, people will climb as far up the ladder as they can manage.

> we’ve been saving for two years to have a wedding, and we’re planning a relatively cheap one

The second part here is in conflict with the first part...

An upper middle-class wedding on the coasts at any venue goes for a minimum of 30k. A really cheap wedding is just having in your back yard with a keg, but I don't think the OP is talking about that. A nice wedding with all your college buddies, looking at 100k.

I had a cousin who had a wedding costing 250K+.

There are only two good reasons to do that:

- You earn your living based on social connections to rich people, making the wedding a business expense.

- $250,000 was pocket change that you happened to have on hand.

If you had to save money in order to pay $250K for your wedding, that was a large and obvious mistake.

Well, my uncle / her dad paid for it. Her dad is very wealthy (likely close to $10M USD net worth.) The sad thing: she got divorced 3 years later.

I assume you people are all in the heart of San Francisco or something, but that is still legit insane.

[edit] Also, I don't think you can still call a wedding "upper-middle class" if it's 6 digits. Holy moly. I'm shook

An Indian wedding in Southern California can easily cost $120k+ given the number of attendees, the sizes of the venues required, the food, the white horse...

That's a good idea. Kegs are about $160/170 if you get the good stuff.

Yeah, I dunno about that. I'm in the middle of planning a wedding at a nice theater [1], catered, open bar, with a band, for 150 people, and even if we run 50% over our current expected costs we'll be under $30K. New England if that matters.

[1] https://www.pinterest.com/palacetheater/royal-weddings-at-th...

what's cheap? 70k?

Idk, most of the more memorable I have attended were maybe a few grand. Mostly for the venue and bar, with friends and family helping out. The impersonal 100k affairs are embarrasing to attend pesrsonally. I have friends still eatig ramen, living in debt, and fighting bitterly over finances thanks to a 'dream wedding' that a majority of their actual friends couldn't even afford to attend. To call it depressing is to undersell the effect in my eyes.

NO, 70k is not cheap! 2k is cheap.

The point of a wedding is to publicly (and legally) commit yourselves to each other - to tell yourselves, and everybody else, that you are now off limits for everyone except each other. Everything else is fluff, and the fluff disappears.

I've been married for 28 years. Much of the fluff is gone. The wedding cake is long gone. The developer lost our honeymoon pictures (28 years ago was still in the era of film cameras). The building we got married in has been torn down. I lost my wedding ring. But our marriage is still here.

$3900 is our max target, but we could buy a second car for that.

My parents got married in a friend's house and they had the reception in the backyard with friends playing music. I think the wedding cost like $100 or something. Unclear why modern weddings have to be so expensive. Mine definitely was overpriced.

Weddings became a market to manipulate just like any other. From the rings to the honeymoon, everything has been commoditized, including an entire industry that perpetuates the 'ideal' (magazines, pinterest, etc.).

What used to be private, family-only affairs has now morphed into a 'need' to invite 200 or so people you don't know and feed them so they give you gifts.

From https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2501480

"we find evidence that marriage duration is inversely associated with spending on the engagement ring and wedding ceremony"

My theory is large expense is a sign of lack of family and social network involvement. Without a strong support network, marriages will run into problems.

My wife and I had an amazing wedding for $5000. Certainly that isn’t necessarily an easy amount to save for everyone, but a wedding is one (or so) day(s) in a lifetime. Don’t spend much on it. Use your savings for longer term and more impactful things (down payment on a house or car, college education, retirement, etc)

"Controlling for a number of demographic and relationship characteristics, we find evidence that marriage duration is inversely associated with spending on the engagement ring and wedding ceremony."

https://www.cnn.com/2014/10/13/living/wedding-expenses-study...

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2501480

My advice?

Don't have a relatively cheap wedding. Have a _cheap_ wedding.

(Do not waste two years of your life making money that you blow on 6 hours of rituals.)

Our wedding cost less than $1000 (near Philadelphia, so HCOL area), and is described by friends as "beautiful" and "one of my all-time favorites."

How did you pull that off?

The court house needed $70 for the license. A friend did the ceremony (One benefit of Freedom of religion in the US is there are religions with one belief: people should be married. They will ordain anyone who shared that belief to be a priest to perform marriages for $20, and then help you get certified to perform a marriage in whatever state you want to perform a marriage in). You need two witnesses, and they are traditionally not paid. In short, you need 5 people and $70, and 1 of those 5 needs to do something special that might cost money (but he can do for more friends)

Everything not in the above list is optional. Grandma's backyard is free, or pay for something more if you want. You can invite just the 5, or 10,000 people. You can serve food or not. You can have rain plans or get wet. You can have live music, a dj, a friend with a ipod, or no music. You can have special fancy outfits or whatever you came out of the barn with. You can have photos or not. You can have a nice honeymoon or not.

I set my budget. I stayed within my budget. I didn't have some things most people do. I did some things that most people do not. I spent more on the honeymoon than the wedding and I'm glad I did. Your values and budget will be different, that is your choice.

BTW, for parents I suggest you give a set amount several months in advance and tell the couple "whatever is leftover is for the honeymoon - have you thought about eloping?"

First, the "cheating!"

  - family and friends helped us with food prep and photography
  - in-laws donated food and some drinks
  - family friend made us a cake and other baked goods
  - borrowed chairs from workplace
  - in-laws provided a venue for the after party (their house!)

Now, the expenses

  - #1 expense was the officiant
  - rented a park pavilion on a hillside overlooking a lake ($125)
  - alcohol and drinks
  - flowers (low cost) and decorations (local party store)
  - some homemade decorations
  - custom table gifts

We got lucky on the weather (that's my superpower) - a perfect, dry 80F day. The wedding ceremony was under a tree with chairs for the immediate family, and only lasted about 5 minutes. The reception was in a nearby pavilion with additional tables and chairs added.

We didn't have alcohol at the park - we migrated to my in-laws for that.

Any downsides?

  - I wouldn't have minded having someone with DJ experience there to keep things on schedule, and get people dancing
  - Along with the above, I would've liked to move to the after-party a little sooner. Drinks help people loosen up ;)

Not the person you asked but I can chime in.

I'm absolutely amazed when people ask this question. Parties are very often held for much less than $1000. When I hold a party I usually spend around $300 and I provide plenty of food and booze that I have plenty of leftovers.

Ever been to a graduation party? retirement party? christening? baby shower? anniversary? birthday party? Those all likely cost ~$1,000 or less.

A wedding doesn't have to be fancy or expensive to be 1) a wedding or 2) enjoyable. It's merely a party! You can do anything! The wedding industrial complex wants you to believe that if you don't spring for the silk chair covers (or whatever) it doesn't "count," but that's just them trying to sell you something.

Venue: Plenty of free or non expensive cost ones. Backyards, friend's houses, park pavilions, VFW, masonic lodge, etc.

Food: Sky's the limit here! It can be costly but it doesn't have to be costly, plenty of low cost options. Plenty or restaurants have a catering menu, if you enjoy cooking you can "cater" it yourself, you can have a cookout, etc.

Music: iPod with good speakers is fine.

Photography: Is this really necessary in an age where everyone has a high-res camera in their pockets? I have friends who didn't even look at their wedding pictures.

When I got married the "ceremony" was signing some papers at city hall and we forgot to take a picture, oh well. After the ceremony we celebrated by ourselves at a local watering hole (would have invited friends to join us if everyone wasn't at work). The party we held to celebrate was the following weekend. It was just a normal party at our house, pretty much the same as any other party at our house. We had a big enough apartment at the time, but we could have used a friend's house if we didn't. We ordered four take home party pizzas, made some side salads, and made a box cake (I prefer box cake to homemade). Nobody, including us, dressed up. We didn't spend the whole day fussing about the color of flower arrangements or something equally entirely inconsequential. The focus was on us and our relationship rather than focusing on putting on a show.

We could afford to spend $10,000 or whatever on a wedding if we wanted to but the wedding we did have is one we could actually enjoy, I absolutely can't stand people gawking at me and my husband hates dressing up with a fiery passion. And it left us enough money to put 20% down on a house and then buy all new high quality furniture. And we enjoy those purchases every single day.

For an example of a wedding that was affordable (besides the wedding dress and musical guest), Mark Zuckerberg And Priscilla Chan: https://www.forbes.com/sites/helaineolen/2012/05/21/mark-zuc...

Well, I didn't get married until I was 30, which according to statistics is the average age of divorce in the US. Getting married later seems to be key here.

Isn't a millennial getting married today only 18 years old? A career established person might have been born in 1980 or earlier.

People born in 1980 are considered millennials.

Millennials are late 20s maybe even early 30s as upper bound. (My generation). We all get grouped and I see milenials between 22-32. That’s my intuitive feel for it anyway. I don’t know the actual society study on it. I know a lot in my circles getting married now too. Albeit it feels way later then our parents (many had kids when 19-21).

Millenials are, depending on definition, everyone up to the 1980 cohort. So millenials include mid-to-late-30s.

Millennials were born in the 80s and 90s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennials#Date_and_age_range...

Anyone born between 1981 and 1996 (ages 22 to 37 in 2018) is considered a Millennial according to Pew Research.

So...the free, modern, more liberal youth have more stable marriages and by proxy families than older conservatives who practiced traditional, more restrictive, family values (well really, they were actually religious values).

The 2nd graph shows that the article is complete BS.

How? It shows divorce rates have fallen over the last ten years for all age groups except the oldest.

Downvoting because you didn't back that up. I think moreso the article's content is complete BS whereas that graph is probably based on actual factual data - which actually does not align with the content of the article at all.

Exactly my point, which I thought was obvious enough I didn't elaborate.

Yes, it is hard to get divorced if you don't get married in the first place(or, later in life). I'm curious whether the age-controlled divorce rate is higher or lower for millenials.

That was my first thought too. Divorce is predicated on getting married to begin with.

I wonder if it was possible to track people who cohabit for a certain number of years and then separate, if the numbers would line up more closely with the boomer divorce rate.

Millennials I know that are now in their 30s have already been “married” in name 1 or 2 times. We just don’t make it official like previous generations did because of cultural pressures.

I didnt understand why couples would get married if they were clashing while dating.

Now that I'm in my late 20s, Ive seen everything to cause people to get married. Now I understand the divorce rate.

Don't worry, if getting married didn't resolve their clashes they will have a kid or two. That should help. /s

The article explicitly addresses your concern.

I'm a millennial and I got divorced a couple years ago.

A good friend of mine is getting divorced soon as well.

Another old friend recently divorced.

My current relationship has outlasted almost everyone I know. We're not married. I have no explanation for any of it.

It's because you don't take it for granted, so you probably work harder at it.

There was a couple once that would get together every Thursday or something and see if they wanted to continue another week. I think they did this for like 45 years.

The bottom of the article says that non-married couples with kids are less stable than married couples with kids. It implies that couples that would have gotten divorced are instead not getting married in the first place, which creates more situations where a single mother is raising children with no support from the father.

do that in a state like California, and you are considered married, regardless of a piece of paper being signed or not.

According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common-law_marriage_in_the_Uni..., particularly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common-law_marriage_in_the_Uni...), California explicitly doesn't allow common-law marriages (to which you seem implicitly to be referring); and, anyway, it seems that a common-law marriage must be explicitly consented to, rather than being a state that develops involuntarily (based on a skim of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common-law_marriage_in_the_Uni... ; for example, of Colorado, "The elements of a common-law marriage are, with respect to both spouses: (1) holding themselves out as husband and wife; (2) consenting to the marriage; (3) cohabitation; and (4) having the reputation in the community as being married").

there's a lawyer filing a case soon for a woman that lived with her fiance for over 10 years...never married, and they had a quid pro quo sexual relationship...she paid most bills, no rent though, and lived/appeared as if married to him everywhere, but were not in fact married. The lawyer pursuing it says this type of case is almost always ruled in favor of 'common law' marriage. She got shafted by him for another woman and was left out in the cold w/out any money after having spent a considerable amount of her own time and money w/this POS. Now she's suing and will win half the increase of the house he owns and they lived in. I'll let you know of the disposition of the case.

So yes, he/she consented to common law marriage.

This is from a lawyer. Are you a lawyer by chance?

> This is from a lawyer. Are you a lawyer by chance?

I am not, and my legal source on this matter is Wikipedia, so, well, there you go.

However, I do note that there is a difference between a lawyer making an argument, and the content of that argument being established law. If the case is decided in the woman's favour (and if it is in a California jurisdiction!), then obviously I am wrong; but, until then, I don't think that it is so clear that I am.

Great, I'm glad you're open to listening. I will update you on the disposition if you bother to read this thread a few months from now.

They met two out of four of the tests for common law marriage. So what are you saying? We should be surprised that cohabitating couples who have a reputation of being married are common law married?

Maybe you didn't read what I said, since I am in agreement with you.

Pack it in everyone, this guy's anecdote invalidates the country's data.

I never said that. I strongly advise you to not imply meaning where there is none.

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