Census Results: 43% of Americans over 18 are single (marrying, men, child support)
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The divorce rate is 3 times what it used to be a generation ago. As a male you'd have to be stupid or have nothing to loose to risk something like marriage today. You've got a 50/50 shot that your woman will ditch you, take your kids and take half your paycheck for the next 18 years. That is what goes through many guys heads nowadays, and more and more men are catching on to it.
Actually you'd have to be stupid to believe that you have a 50/50 chance of divorcing. Do people even understand what divorce is? It's not some random event that just happens to you. It's something you have a great deal of control in preventing, by choosing the right person, by working hard to keep your marriage alive, and by having the right attitude and expectations of marriage. That's not to say any of that will guarantee your marriage will last. But to think that you have a 50/50 chance just because half of the marriages out there ended is a convenient way for a lot of men to absolve themselves of any potential responsibility.
Maybe women are getting more financially independent of men. They don't have to get or stay married if they don't want to. It would enlightening to see how these statistics differ in geographical areas of the country or compare to women in the workforce.
Marriage is such a hand-me down from older generations. I think people get married with out even thinking if they will like it or not
Not surprising to me. My generation didn't grow up with manners, rules, or morals. We're a self centered generation that wants self gratification and FAST. Which means sex, alchohol, drugs, ipods, apples, as the main source of enjoyment. Most of us don't spend enough time outside of the house and with the opposite sex to have any idea how to talk to the opposite sex or have a real relationship. Notice how one-stand stands and friends-with-benefits and fling relationships have increased while real relationships and long-term ones, have decreased. We haven't been trained to be gentlemen and ladies like previous generations. We have been programmed and stereotyped however by the media to be sex-crazed dogs and cats in heat with no self control and class. We're expected to be idiots. So I can't say I'm surprised most of us are single. We don't want each other. We want the models on the tv screen.
So your parents taught you nothing? There were always pretty people in the media, but it's not real life. I don't recall any specific training to be Miss Manners in the 70s and 80s - the 80s were a time of conspicuous greed, drugs and overconsumption but people still had relationships. No one forces people to be jerks and idiots, sorry.
Maybe women are getting more financially independent of men. They don't have to get or stay married if they don't want to. It would enlightening to see how these statistics differ in geographical areas of the country or compare to women in the workforce.
Marriage is such a hand-me down from older generations. I think people get married with out even thinking if they will like it or not
you mean they have an easier time taking a man's money with less stigma attached
Marriage is such a hand-me down from older generations. I think people get married with out even thinking if they will like it or not
I overheard a girl in our office basically say that in her mind a man and a woman might as well get married as early as possible instead of waiting "too long". She's young too...early 20's. Makes me wonder why some people feel a compulsive need to rush headlong into marriage, but then again, most women have nothing to worry about.
Wrong. There isn't enough information to draw a conclusion. You say this shows women are becoming increasingly picky. But I could just as easily say it shows that men are the ones being picky. And all I have to do to support my claim is cite posts like the one above by NotARedneck. If it's true that, as he claims, more and more men see marriage as a high risk activity, then that would explain why many are still single and why there are so many women who are still single. Maybe they keep meeting these single men who say "no thanks" to getting married.
every time a man fails to marry he misses out on a 1/2 million dollar divorce.
I overheard a girl in our office basically say that in her mind a man and a woman might as well get married as early as possible instead of waiting "too long". She's young too...early 20's. Makes me wonder why some people feel a compulsive need to rush headlong into marriage, but then again, most women have nothing to worry about.
I overheard a girl in our office basically say that in her mind a man and a woman might as well get married as early as possible instead of waiting "too long". She's young too...early 20's. Makes me wonder why some people feel a compulsive need to rush headlong into marriage, but then again, most women have nothing to worry about.
The fear is based on the idea that if you wait too long, you'll miss out. A lot of women tell themselves if they don't marry by 30, the only men that'll be left are the ones no one would want to marry. These same women tell themselves that they need to have kids by a certain age or they'll miss their window of opportunity. When you put this kind of pressure on yourself to find a husband, is it any wonder you marry the wrong person and find yourself divorced years later? The good news is that more and more women are realizing they don't have to live their lives according to someone else's timetable. These women are realizing that it's better to be in your 30s never having been married than to have married the wrong person in your 20s and now have a divorce on your resume and possibly kids to share custody over. And given how slow people are to mature nowadays, I firmly believe it's good to wait til you're in your 30s before marrying. Almost everyone I know who married in their 20s is now divorced, probably because they were too anxious to get married before turning 30.
It's not that statistics lie: they are just misinterpreted by people who won't read past the headline.
The linked article defined "single" in the broadest possible way -- to include people who are in long-term relationships but aren't legally married, divorced people and the widowed. It contains no breakdown by age, so this "43% of Americans" lumps together people of widely disparate situations and ages. As such, this statistic is far too broad to conclude that "men aren't getting married". If anything, the growing life expectancy, the opportunity to delay marriage (which is due, in part, to the growing life expectancy), and the growing willingness of women to cohabit without marriage are the major factors behind this finding.
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As an aside, I find it curious how many people attribute our high divorce rate to people supposedly getting married without getting to know each other first and while being blinded by initial infatuation. If anything, the opposite is true. I haven't been able to find firm statistics on this, but my personal impression, especially as someone who grew up in a different culture, is that Americans usually date for an obscenely long time before getting married -- long, LOOONG past the "honeymoon phase", and many couples spend obscenely long periods of time being engaged without any actual plans of marriage or impediments to making those plans. In fact, it is that tendency to date for 4, 5, 8 years before tying the knot that's more likely to be a factor in the high divorce rate. Why? Because the longer you date someone, the more likely you are to get married out of guilt and laziness, rather than because you really, truly want to do it. In other words, people who date the longest before getting married are the ones who shouldn't be getting married.
Think about it. The longer you date a particular person, the stronger the expectation of eventual marriage becomes. With every passing year, the stakes are higher. With every passing year, it's harder to break out of one's routine. With every passing year, a possible break-up seems less and less like one of those unpleasant but inevitable parts of life and more and more like a milestone that marks the end of a huge chunk of your life and brings you back to square one. With every passing year, the guilt over having strung the other person along (supposedly) grows stronger. And finally, the couple that has been together for a decade gets married because at that point, it's the decent thing to do, plus the more reluctant party figures it's less of a hassle to sign a couple of pieces of paper than to go through the trouble of renting an apartment and hiring movers. It's marriage by adverse possession, not by informed choice. In fact, researchers now think that this is the reason why couples that cohabit before marriage statistically are more likely to divorce -- not because the act of "living in sin" degrades the subsequent marriage, but because cohabiting couples tend to "slide into marriage" (as one of the scientists quoted in the article put it) through simple inertia and complacency.
I do think it is important to get to know one's future spouse well. But truly, you don't need 5, or 8, or 10 years to do it. I would say within a year of beginning to date someone, you should know everything you could possibly know about this person's character, inclinations and habits without actually facing a big crisis together, a true test of character. But alas, those kinds of crises and upheavals generally don't happen until after marriage anyway -- which is why, as loath as most people are to acknowledge it, sheer luck is an important factor in marital happiness.
As an aside, I find it curious how many people attribute our high divorce rate to people supposedly getting married without getting to know each other first and while being blinding by initial infatuation. If anything, the opposite is true. I haven't been able to find firm statistics on this, but my personal impression, especially as someone who grew up in a different culture, is that Americans usually date for an obscenely long time before getting married -- long, LOOONG past the "honeymoon phase", and many couples spend obscenely long periods of time being engaged without any actual plans of marriage or impediments to making those plans. In fact, it is that tendency to date for 4, 5, 8 years before tying the knot that's more likely to be a factor in the high divorce rate. Why? Because the longer you date someone, the more likely you are to get married out of guilt and laziness, rather than because you really, truly want to do it.
Think about it. The longer you date a particular person, the stronger the expectation of eventual marriage becomes. With every passing year, the stakes are higher. With every passing year, it's harder to break out of one's routine. With every passing year, a possible break-up seems less and less like one of those unpleasant but inevitable parts of life and more and more like a milestone that marks the end of a huge chunk of your life and brings you back to square one. With every passing year, the guilt over having strung the other person along (supposedly) grows stronger. And finally, the couple that has been together for a decade gets married because at that point, it's the decent thing to do, plus the more reluctant party figures it's less of a hassle to sign a couple of pieces of paper than to go through the trouble of renting an apartment and hiring movers. It's marriage by adverse possession, not by informed choice. In fact, researchers now think that this is the reason why couples that cohabit before marriage statistically are more likely to divorce -- not because the act of "living in sin" degrades the subsequent marriage, but because cohabiting couples tend to "slide into marriage" (as one of the scientists quoted in the article put it) through simple inertia and complacency.
I have to respectfully disagree. First of all, how well you know someone isn't always a function of how long you've known them. I've seen people who were together for years before getting married and then after they got married and had kids, they realized they had completely different parenting philosophies. It begs the question why they didn't know this before getting married. The answer is that neither person thought to ask. So when some of us say that we think people are rushing into marriage, we don't just mean in terms of time. We also mean in terms of asking the right (and often difficult) questions about your partner. I suspect this is one reason why people go to a minister, priest or some other marriage counselor BEFORE getting married. It's to have a third party force the couple to address the issues they may not have thought of or just avoided asking.
As for people who've been together for years who just "slide" into marriage, I disagree that they're doing it out of some sense of complacency, inertia or guilt. If you've been with someone for 5 years, you're pretty much married. You just haven't made it legal. Some people just don't see being married as that big a deal which is probably why they're not in a rush to get married. Nor do I think the people who are avoiding marriage are doing so to give themselves an easy escape in case things don't work out. If you've been together a long time, own property together, had kids, etc., then you're going to have a hard time splitting no matter what. I guess it depends on how you see marriage. Commitment happens in the mind and heart, not on a document. I heard an interesting argument the other day in the gay marriage debate. One person suggested that we just stop calling it marriage and just call it a civil union. That way, gay and straight couples can have civil unions and if you want to have a marriage, you can go to your church or whatever and have them declare you married. I see what that person was getting at. Marriage is becoming something that more and more people don't really see the point of, especially since there other ways to form the legal contract between people.
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