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The marriage rate is down to like 47%. For young adults, even worse.
The relationship formation rate is down globally. Money quote:
"Its the women" is the standard interpretation. Its just usually couched as them being 'victims' of social forces they are helpless to effect.
Are you spending much time around people who are ages 20-29? They're the ones reporting the most problems
The simplest piece of data to support my "50% of men are invisible" is the fact that, SURPRISE, about 60% of young men are single compared to 34% of women. 44% of Gen Z men reported zero, zip, nada romantic experience..
So who, then, are the women dating in this situation?
Stop sending so many women to college. They absorb a ton of debt. They choose majors that don't pay as much. They take longer to pay down their debt., and it causes them a lot of distress. They 'burn' 4 or more years of their fertility for this.
And, of course, they come out the other side with massively inflated standards for a mate. The irony for women is that going to college tends to reduce their appeal as mates (not a given, but they tend to make choices that lead there) while making their expectations for a mate go higher.
Do this by making it harder to get student loans in general, going back to before the 1993 Student Loan Reform Act.
See if that moves the needle.
(And to be clear, yes, a lot fewer men should attend college too, by my estimation)
If even that is too much to stomach, I'd say you're not serious about addressing any of this.
I'm not fighting for this position because I desperately want/need it to be true. I wish it weren't. I'm compelled to defend it because I can't find any single supportable argument that points elsewhere.
Add on, of course, the recent revelations that white males have been systemiatically excluded from many, many opportunities.
All of this would of course combine to produce the large amount of Male Gen Z Angst and anger we're seeing bubble up.
It’s a lottery. The data shows that girl bosses tend to find great mates. Elizabeth Holmes got married because she’s still kind of hot and went to Stanford. And married to a rich kid. It still vastly boost mate value as a signal if you can back up the signal (Steve Jobs wife went to Stanford MBA).
Beneath the high end though and bringing debt to a relationship it’s probably a bad thing. And just getting a nursing degree for a second solid income if needed and being cute is a better plan.
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Still not going to work, because now the "34-37 year old male, tall, in good shape, earning a high income" (1) doesn't want to marry just yet because there's so much out there to achieve both in professional life and in personal life having fun (2) ugh, why tie myself down to some dull 20 year old who can't even earn her own living and will be a leech dependent on me instead of a partner?
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How does this square with the fact that there's an almost 20 point marriage gap in favor of college educated women? College educated women are worse mates and have higher expectations, but are much more likely to be married? Most of the decline in marriage rates over the last 50 years has been among non-college educated women. Non-college-educated women have seen marriage rates decline from 79% to 52% while college educated women have seen marriage rates decline from 78% to 71%. Empirically, college helps women get married.
That Dataset actually only goes up to the 1990ish birth cohort. Check Page 43 of the PDF
Any shifts that emerged in the past 10-15 years are probably not reflected here.
And the last 10-15 years are when the most drastic shifts have happened.
I haven't found as much reliable data that is more recent, but...
The longer a student is in college — the least likely they are to get married, study says
Study Here
If they find their partner while in college, this is likely true.
Of course, I'd believe that many non-college educated women are just shacking up with guys and not marrying them too (and popping out the occasional kid), whereas I'd guess college-educated women are just single and childless.
Sure. It's asking about whether someone was married by age 45 so it is necessarily limited to people who are age 45 or older (birth year 1980 or earlier).
I'm curious about the precise claim here. For ~40 years between 1985 and the present the fraction of college educated women married by age 45 looks pretty stable around 71% (+/- a couple percent) while the fraction of non-college educated women married by 45 underwent a steady collapse from around 71% to 52%. Is the claim that in 10-20 years, when the current cohort is 45, these numbers will have reversed? There will have been a climb in the fraction of non-college educated women who are married? A decline in the fraction of college educated women who are married? Did going to college become a net-negative for women's marriage prospects just in the last 10-15 years?
The less likely they are to be married in the 25-34 age range. If people are unlikely to get married while in college then being in college means delaying marriage, potentially out of this age window.
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Yeah, actually. Most of my younger coworkers are actively dating and/or getting married.
Maybe I am in a very unusual bubble, but I actually don't think so.
As a practical matter, how do you propose to do this? We don't "send" women to college, they choose to go.
If your solution is "Campaign on social reform that encourages fewer women to go to college and more women to get married young and have children," okay, I don't object to that in principle, but if churches are failing to sell that message, how will you?
If your solution is "Don't let them go to college," well, no, I'm not going to jump on board the "Make women property again" Jimbus.
Okay, I'll buy that. I doubt it will actually reduce the number of women who want to go to college. It might reduce the number of women who go to college for Afro-Queer Anti-Colonialism Studies.
I'm in the 20-29 age cohort and it's a wasteland for a lot of men. When I used to go to church every single guy in the young adult group was either married or completely single (at this ratio was something like 10:1). And this was a Catholic Church where people are supposed to getting married early. At work it is similar, although in my family things seem to be better (my sister and all my female cousins have long-term boyfriends who are certainly not chad, although my sister's boyfriend is 6' 4").
I tend to agree with you that many of the put "women back in a box" solutions are pretty unworkable. Although stable, happy marriage might be far preferable on long time horizons, dating an average person as another average person is much less exciting than freedom and independence. I see this in myself with dating: why would I go out to a bar or another coffee date, when reading/exercising/friend activities are so much more exciting and less stressful. It's probably even worse for young women, who are constantly bombarded with attention and opportunities.
I don't find the political speculation to be particularly useful, but perhaps we can glean some personal self-improvement type stuff from all of this. I think both men and women could be better about selecting for traits that actually would matter in a marriage. Stability, kindness, physical fitness, etc., rather than raw sex appeal or charisma. That kind of selection is something that you as an individual can control (and advise your friends about). For men I think this means desexualizing your brain (no more porn and masturbation), and under no circumstances simping. Seeing women as human beings like you not only helps you to evaluate them more accurately, but also makes them more attracted to you. For women, I think I would recommend something similar: stop consuming fantasy romance slop.
We need Everett True to get you bashful young men sorted out 😁
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Well, the way to solve this problem is for society to award social status to people who make the sacrifice of getting and staying married. That's how things work in religious subcultures. Yes, it creates hardship in certain cases, but it works.
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Also society mandating that college degrees include passing tests that include engineering level calculus and physics.
Better still: abolish degrees; keep the tests.
What is the value add of requiring that someone spends 4 years in a building? Whatever it is, it cannot be worth it.
In a sane world, a GED would be worth more than a high school diploma, because you actually have to know something to pass the standardized GED test, whereas you can graduate from some high schools without knowing how to read.
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I think you're in the bubble of "people who are generally social and talk about their personal lives."
Which an increasing number of young folks just... don't.
And its not an issue unique to the U.S.
If they can 'afford' to. And if they can't get student loans as easily, fewer of them will be able to afford to, unless parents pay the way.
I'm really just trying to make adjustments on the margins here. If 10% fewer women end up going to college, and the marriage rate bumps up about 5%, I think that's a sign of improvement.
Look, I keep saying, I'm trying to push for 'moderate' changes now, because the Zoomers are probably not going to be as patient.
If you want to salvage the current 'equality' of the sexes under the law, you have to address this now. If literally any solution that inconveniences or upsets women is a nonstarter then it's not getting solved until we hit an actual crisis point.
Yes. But the precondition seems to be true and as South Korea shows, any crisis point is far off.
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