Why Are Marriage Rates Down?
This topic is a tricky one from many aspects. That’s ok, tricky topics are more interesting to muse about. In 1960 72% of United States adults were married. Roughly half of adults in the U.S. are married today. That is, it seems, a huge drop.
I start with the assumption that most adults would like to be in a loving long term ‘marriage’ of some sort. Gays have screamed bloody murder about not having had in the past the right to marry the adult of their choice. Now they have it amidst a time when marriage rates for straight people is declining precipitously. This adds another complexity to the question. Will the gay marriage divorce rate match the current divorce rate for straight marriages? Currently 40-50-% of straight marriages end in divorce. More time needs pass to compare this rate with the divorce rate of gay marriages. Even the terminologies used are unique. We seldom use the terms heterosexual marriages and homosexual marriages, but instead use straight and gay marriages as the terms. Everything about marriage is complex and confusing.
In religious services, in one form or another, marriage is often referred to as “let no man put asunder what God has put together”. It’s kind of strange that God would only have a 50% batting average here. Divorce has long since been considered a sin against God’s will. Odd, it seems that God’s will would never be denied. The Catholic Church took the strongest stand against divorce, yet catholics divorce at about the same rate as Protestants. I wonder what percent of scripture followers of various religions actually follow everything in their scripture? I haven’t seen Christians stoning anyone ever. They used to. No-one ever gets burned at the stake or quartered in a public place either. They used to. Strange again how religious behavior changes, except religious scriptures, all written by humans, never change. Perhaps that is why there are fewer and fewer people actively participating via attendance to religious services.
It seems marriage and religion are closely entwined. But my understanding is that priests and ministers will perform marriage ceremonies as long as one spouse is of the right religion. Whether a priest or minister is allowed to marry atheists seems clouded when I tried to research it.
Remember when chaperones were required during dating? Of course you don’t, that was even before my time. But that sexual activities could be dictated by church rules has always been around. Just 3% of Americans dating today wait until marriage to have sex. The connection between church members and actual behavior seems to be, for most, a matter of convenience for most church members. Perhaps the inability of religions to change their scriptures with changing times is the biggest reason members keep drifting away. This is a real dilemma for all religions. There are plenty enough scriptural absurdities in all ancient scriptures to create suspicion for the members. For any religion to officially admit some of their scripture is outdated opens the door to question the rest of the scripture.
Still, when couples fall in love and want to live their lives together it seems marriage is the appropriate status for that. In somewhat dated data about half of married couples today lived together as a couple before they married. If it is legal to live together without getting married, then marriage takes a big hit since there are legal consequences to getting married and a lot this legal consequence involves money. However, over a three year period 40% of co-habituating couples got married.
Clearly religion has been a complicating factor regarding marriage. However, with religion becoming a declining force regarding marriage, the monetary factors play a bigger and bigger role.
One of the complicating monetary factors is the rapid and extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, thereby leaving the middle class and lower economic class financially weakened. Raising a family when making less than $15 an hour is a difficult task. Even if both work at such a low hourly rate, job security is also way down these days. It is calculated that the average young person today will have over 30 different jobs in their lifetime.
On top of the financial implications of marriage, this whole question of love as an enduring state is being questioned. People’s values and priorities often change over their lifetime, including sexual habits and priorities. To the extent this latter statement is true, how can a couple realistically predict what their relationship will be down the road a few decades? Thus, we have two modern dilemmas affecting marriage rates in out country. First, suppose we fall out of love and are not compatible anymore, and second, if we can barely afford a family today, who is to say we will be able to afford it down the road?
Even more difficult, since love and sex are not driven by logically defined facts—but by feelings, and since economic security is no longer the norm, why is it a surprise that young people are balking about marriage? When actual sex before marriage was a sin, there was a unique reward for getting married, only for many to find out the reward was not sustainable. “This is it? The same old, same old ad nauseam?” Studies have shown that those for whom sexual encounters come easy have the weakest orgasms, while woe to those who never really achieve orgasms. And how weird is it that an increase in dietary restrictions happened at the same time sexual variations and pornography copycats got hygienically sloppier and unsanitary with their sex? Marriage and sex have become less and less related over the years. The frequency of sex in marriage has also declined over the years. Couples living together report having sex 146 times per year. It used to be
much higher. Married couples make love 98 times per year. This is also a decline. Single folks are having sex the least at 49 times a year. Of course all this varies depending on the couple. Four percent of the respondents to the survey claim to have sex daily. Is this good or obsessive? Among the 23 percent of adults - or nearly 1 in 4 - who spent the year in a celibate state, a much larger than expected number of them were 20-something men. Experts who study Americans' bedroom habits say there are a number of factors driving the Great American Sex Drought (which doesn’t exist if we count masturbation and pornography orgasms). Age is one of them: The 60-and-older demographic climbed from 18 percent of the population in 1996 to 26 percent in 2018, according to the survey.The share reporting no sex has consistently hovered around 50 percent, and because that age group is growing relative to everyone else, it has the net effect of reducing the overall population's likelihood of having sex. But changes at the other end of the age spectrum may be playing an even bigger role. The portion of Americans 18 to 29 reporting no sex in the past year more than doubled between 2008 and 2018, to 23 percent. This reduction in sex among 18-29 year olds is puzzling. That is also when sexual desires are usually at their peak. It may alter what is defined as sex. Is watching porn and reaching a climax sex? It probably is. So perhaps both marriage and actual sex with a partner is declining. The further I go with all this the more confusing it gets.
- In 2011–2013, among unmarried 15–19-year-olds, 44% of females and 49% of males have had sexual intercourse. These levels have remained steady since 2002. The proportion of young people having sexual intercourse before age 15 has declined in recent years. In 2011–2013, about 13% of never-married females aged 15–19 and 18% of never-married males in that age-group had had sex before age 15, compared with 19% and 21%, respectively, in 1995.
- Adolescent sexual activity may include behaviors other than vaginal intercourse. In 2007–2010, about half of adolescents aged 15–19 reported ever having oral sex with an opposite-sex partner and about one in 10 reported ever having anal sex with an opposite-sex partner.
- Sixty-one percent of pregnancies among 15–19-year-olds in 2013 ended in births, while 24% ended in abortions and the rest in miscarriages.
Between google, artificial intelligence, smart phones, chat rooms, artificial sex, pornography, and various mental gymnastic exercises, what will happen to actual human interactions? Even today, few people know anything much about their neighbors. Neighborhood gossip hardly exists.
Already more and more people meet their mate via computer date rooms. That may be good, but actual marriages still dwindle in number. The problem which exists here is that even so, the love between two people only exists at a given point in time. There is no reason to believe that a given couple will not change over time until they are no longer a good match sexually or with their priorities and values.
Studies show that children can be raised successfully by single parents. The debate here seems unsettled yet as to the percentage of successes with two parents vs one parent.
What about two people who simply decide to live together to save money? I can’t find any stats here but certainly given the current economic situation in the U. S. this must be happening to some degree. For many it would simply be a question of whether to get a 2nd job or find someone in the same economic strait and share living quarters together.
Perhaps there is a trend now that not only makes orgasmal sex independent of a partner but even friendship with a real touchable person less necessary. The friends many have today are those with whom contact is almost all those on their tweet list—inputs which are frequent, but rarely in person or any insight in depth. A few years ago I was on my way coming out of a forest preserve and walking down the street to my car when I spotted a party being held in a large yard—maybe 20 or more people. All but one person was on their cell phone talking to someone not at the party. We all have seen couples go out to dinner and one talk on their cell phone to someone not there the entire time. Why did they bother to go out to dinner together? We all have had conversations interrupted repeatedly by someone constantly answering their cell phone, sometimes a call from a family member which is their 25th call of the day. We have all been on a phone with someone who who gets a call from their adult offspring which was their tenth call of the day and they feel a need to take the call and you wait. None of the many changes are inherently good or bad but do represent change in human interaction. The newer interactions are more shallow.
The point here is that real live people are becoming less and less necessary for friends or sex. Does anyone really know the long term consequences of all this?
'New research found that our memory capacity, ability to process data, and general intelligence improves significantly when our smartphone is completely out of sight — in a bag or another room altogether. Think that turning it on silent, face down, will remedy the problem? Nope. The mere sight of the phone diminishes your cognitive resources.
Here’s another disturbing stat: This tally seems to increase daily, but by one study’s count, the typical smartphone user interacts with their phone around 85 times per day. And this often includes middle-of-the-night checks for work emails and new “likes.”
We’re so obsessed that there’s now a word to describe a fear of being without your phone: “Nomophobia.”
Some studies have shown that all this interaction via cyberspace input does not make the person more contented. Increased contentment is the real goal of humans everywhere. It can be very elusive.
This type of long term heavy use of cyberspace comes at a price. Studies link it to hand, neck, and back issues, anxiety, depression, disrupted sleep, diminished attention span, antisocial behavior, decreased empathy — the list goes on. I am most interested in the decline of empathy.
- In 2011–2013, among unmarried 15–19-year-olds, 44% of females and 49% of males had had sexual intercourse.2 These levels have remained steady since 2002.
- The proportion of young people having sexual intercourse before age 15 has declined in recent years. In 2011–2013, about 13% of never-married females aged 15–19 and 18% of never-married males in that age-group had had sex before age 15, compared with 19% and 21%, respectively, in 1995.
- Adolescent sexual activity may include behaviors other than vaginal intercourse. In 2007–2010, about half of adolescents aged 15–19 reported ever having oral sex with an opposite-sex partner and about one in 10 reported ever having anal sex with an opposite-sex partner.7
- Sixty-one percent of pregnancies among 15–19-year-olds in 2013 ended in births, while 24% ended in abortions and the rest in miscarriages.
Are we really that far away from having our own sex chamber in which we select the picture of who we wish to have sex, and what kind of sex, then attach electrodes in appropriate parts of our body, tilt back, wait for a strong orgasm, then check the record log to see if we have beaten our record level of orgasm.
I kind of knew writing a musing on marriage would not generate solid facts about marriage, love, sex, and human interactions. Stats do not generate facts, they are descriptive information. It has made me shy a bit away from saying informational overload is doing us in. Perhaps the better term is mis-informational overload. When there is too much on our plate to understand and most of it shallow, then I guess we end up with feelings, not facts. Stats on this topic have nothing to do with normalcy. There is no factual basis for someone whose life does not match the stats on this topic to feel they need change or are abnormal.
I enjoy writing musings, but there is so much information available on endless topics that such a hobby is overwhelming. I would not like to even take a stab on what percent of the time I ever reach a correct conclusion with any of it. At my stage of life, exactly what is the point of all this reading, analyzing, and musing? Maybe it is just my peculiar way of retaining some sanity. Others might say it is just my way of proving insanity. In the end, we are all dead. No one gets out of ‘this world’ alive.
P.S. I have a well established effective method of birth control and marriage avoidance: my personality.
