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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30391 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023

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The article itself attempts to explain the discrepancy as follows:

(1) Women are more gay now (which I take leave to doubt) (2) Older men, younger women (which is my position) (3) Women are choosier (again, that well may be; if there are more men than women, then women have a greater choice. But if there are more men than women, then of course there will be some men who aren't getting dates).

Even seasoned researchers struggle to fully account for the relationship gap between young women and men: If single young men outnumber single young women nearly two to one, then who are all the young women dating?

Some of them are dating each other. One-fifth of Generation Z identifies as queer, and research suggests bisexual women make up a large share of the young-adult queer community.

Young women are also dating and marrying slightly older men, carrying on a tradition that stretches back more than a century. The average age at first marriage is around 30 for men, 28 for women, according to census figures.

The thing is, there are seemingly as many women saying they can't get a man who wants to commit as there are men complaining they can't get a date. It does seem to be that older women aren't finding men in their age range (and by "older", I mean 30+) and while that may be 'unrealistic expectations' and standards set way too high, I think it's also that those men are chasing - and winning - the younger women.

This study is a bit all over the place, as it is covering decades so it jumps around from 2000s to 2010s, but the key changes seem to be:

(1) Dating has declined, though this may be due to changes in terminology and what people regard as "dating" (2) Cohabitation has increased (3) Marriage rates have decreased (4) While divorce rates are down, so are remarriage rates

Differences in dating by age are not always straightforward to interpret. For instance, compared to teens and those in their early twenties, dating is less common among young adults ages 24 to 32, at about 23 percent in 2007–2008, but this difference is largely due to the fact that men and women in this age range more often live with a romantic partner or are married (discussed below). Among those who are dating, however, both teens and young adults (ages 24 to 32) characterize their relationships as serious, though perhaps in different ways. In 2014–2015, nearly three-quarters (74 percent) of adolescents who were currently dating described their relationship as serious. Similarly, a large majority of young adults’ dating relationships are serious: In 2007–2008, of young adults ages 24 to 32 in dating relationships, 70 percent reported dating exclusively or being engaged.

So I think cohabitation has largely replaced marriage, and my own view has long been that if you aren't married within a couple of years of 'getting serious' then it's never going to happen, a view that seems to be borne out as below, and women should stop being surprised that "my partner of seven/ten/fifteen years just left me for a younger woman!" because yeah, he was getting free milk all those years and now has traded in the old cow for a younger heifer:

Cohabiting unions can end in one of two ways: Partners can either break up or transition into marriage. The share of cohabitations that transition to marriage has declined over the past 30 years. Research shows that two-fifths (42 percent) of women who were cohabiting in the mid- to late-1980s married their first cohabiting partner within five years of moving in together, compared to only about one-fifth (22 percent) of women who cohabited at some point from 2006 to 2013.24 Most cohabiting couples who marry will do so within three years of the start of the cohabitation.

At the same time, the share of cohabitations ending in dissolution has remained essentially unchanged. Research finds that 35 percent of cohabitations formed during 1983–1988 and 36 percent of those formed in 2006–2013 ended in separation within five years.

These simultaneous trends reflect the fact that couples are maintaining cohabiting unions longer. The overall duration of cohabiting unions has been steadily rising. In the mid-1980s, for example, first cohabitations lasted an average of 12 months, and this rose to about 18 months for cohabitations formed between 2006 and 2013.

Many people who cohabit and then break up go on to form another cohabiting union with a new partner. Forming these second, third, and higher cohabiting unions with different partners is termed serial cohabitation.

Serial cohabitation has become more common over time. Among women born from 1960 to 1964 who first cohabited during young adulthood, about 60 percent entered a second cohabiting union within 12 years of the end of their first cohabitation. For women born 20 years later (1980–1984), 73 percent had entered a new cohabiting union within 12 years of their first cohabitation dissolution. Furthermore, the time elapsed between the end of one cohabitation and the start of another has decreased for more recent cohorts. Among women who had two or more cohabitations, those born from 1980 to 1984 entered into a second cohabiting union just 26 months, on average, after the end of their first cohabitation, whereas women born in 1960 to 1964 took an average of 47 months to enter such a union.

Age of first marriage has also gone up, and I think that's in part down to the acceptability of cohabitation and the view that "you shouldn't just rush into marriage, live together first to find out if you're compatible". In the 70s women got married at 21 because 'living in sin' was frowned upon, nowadays that would be considered too soon and too young and you should live together first. Of course, if you do live together, you're less likely to get married. Another reason would be that women are no longer as economically dependent upon men; historically it was marriage or poverty, but now women can be self-supporting by work.

After steadily increasing for the past several decades, the age at first marriage has reached a historic high. The median age at first marriage in 2018 was 29.8 for men and 27.8 for women, compared to a median age of 23.2 for men and 20.8 for women in 1970.

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