love & marriage

The proportion of married people, especially among younger age groups, has been declining for decades. Between 1950 and 2000, the share of women 15-to-24 who were married plummeted to 16 percent, from 42 percent. Among 25-to-34-year-olds, the proportion dropped to 58 percent, from 82 percent

In the spirit of today’s New York Times articles announcing that, for the first time ever, 51 percent of American women are unmarried, this stats page is sort of interesting, since I think a lot of people (myself included) tend to assume that the age at which people get married has been a steady upward curve: it was actually higher in 1890 than for the more than half of the past century.

Year Males Females
1890 26.1 22.0
1960 22.8 20.3
1980 24.7 22.0
2000 26.8 25.1

And it makes paragraphs like the one up top, from the NYT article, seem a bit disingenuous/misleading.

Anyway, more scattered thoughts on the NYT article…

Prof. Stephanie Coontz, author of this book (which has been on my ‘to read’ list forever), comments that “This is yet another of the inexorable signs that there is no going back to a world where we can assume that marriage is the main institution that organizes people’s lives … Most of these women will marry, or have married. But on average, Americans now spend half their adult lives outside marriage.”

It reminded me of a really interesting op-ed Coontz wrote several months back, which points out that, in fact, marriage really hasn’t always been the main institution that organizes people’s lives.

From medieval days until the early 19th century, diaries and letters more often used the word love to refer to neighbors, cousins and fellow church members than to spouses. When honeymoons first gained favor in the 19th century, couples often took along relatives or friends for company. Victorian novels and diaries were as passionate about brother-sister relationships and same-sex friendships as about marital ties … By the early 20th century, though, the sea change in the culture wrought by the industrial economy had loosened social obligations to neighbors and kin, giving rise to the idea that individuals could meet their deepest needs only through romantic love, culminating in marriage. Under the influence of Freudianism, society began to view intense same-sex ties with suspicion and people were urged to reject the emotional claims of friends and relatives who might compete with a spouse for time and affection. The insistence that marriage and parenthood could satisfy all an individual’s needs reached a peak in the cult of “togetherness” among middle-class suburban Americans in the 1950s. Women were told that marriage and motherhood offered them complete fulfillment. Men were encouraged to let their wives take care of their social lives.

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P.S. I’m wondering why Brookings guy William H. Frey has to qualify this statement with “for better or worse:”

“For better or worse, women are less dependent on men or the institution of marriage,” Dr. Frey said.

And, by the by, I wish I would see less of this in trend/analysis journalism:

Emily Zuzik, a 32-year-old musician and model who lives in the East Village of Manhattan, said she was not surprised by the trend.

“A lot of my friends are divorced or single or living alone,” Ms. Zuzik said. “I know a lot of people in their 30s who have roommates.”

Ms. Zuzik has lived with a boyfriend twice, once in California where the couple registered as domestic partners to qualify for his health insurance plan. “I don’t plan to live with anyone else again until I am married,” she said, “and I may opt to keep a place of my own even then.”

I guess anecdotal things like these ad … what? character? balance? … to what might otherwise be a very stats and expert-commentary-based piece, but … well, what’s wrong with a stats-and-expert-commentary-based piece? Should we really care about Ms. Zuzik and her roommate laden friends? Does this actually prove any sort of point or add anything to the article all? I just feel like I see a lot of this lately, and it’s started to annoy me.