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Notes -
Marriage rates have been declining because the floor for a successful marriage has risen to the point that it excludes a lot of people and no-fault divorce in an environment of higher financial stakes has done the rest. We got a break from that in the '60s because wages for young men rose dramatically, and gradually petered out over the next 20 years, which is why you don't have any historical data to look back on (the SR tends to confound traditionalists; they only have the one lens to look through).
Before, this was mostly solved by men having all the money and women having none of it with a soft ban on obtaining any of it outside that context (and where soft bans didn't exist the constraint was mostly just called "the reality of non-mechanized work"). This worked OK, but it's a compact that didn't survive automation, specifically the line shaft.
Indeed, which is why young men can't marry now (and you lose a lot of the stability from dual-income being functionally mandatory). And yes, we could simply make it legal for young men to accumulate an attractive surplus, but by the time the effects of that have propagated the young men will be middle-aged.
Not all men had all the money, or even enough of it to get married before most of their youth (and by extension, the youth of the woman pledged to them) had gone by. "May-December romances" weren't about love, it was about men old enough to finally be wealthy enough to marry, often widowers, getting a nubile young bride at long last (because her family decided his wealth/status was good enough to support their social position, and hang the younger man who might want to marry a woman of his own age).
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