Is Marriage Really on Its Way Out?

Truth #2: The negative-seeming trends aren’t all for negative reasons!

If you read the news, you will see all sorts of speculative (and depressing) reasons for why marriage rates have reduced. As a 2021 article in The Hill put it, those reasons include “declining religious adherence to marriage, public disenchantment with marriage, and more recently, unstable jobs and strained finances…”

And yes, again, I’m not saying that those things aren’t real. They are.

But let’s zoom out and look at the bigger picture. According to the Census Bureau, the marriage rate declined almost 9% from 2011 to 2021. Yes, that is a lot in a short time. But during that same period, the divorce rate declined by 29%! Yes, you read that right!

One reason that might help explain both trends may simply be that more people are waiting longer to get married, with the average age of marriage rising to age 30 for men and 28 for women. Here’s how that might work for each:

The divorce rate. People who get married older find that their relative maturity is protective. In a landmark 2011 analysis, Harvard-trained economist and researcher Dana Rotz quantified that fully 60% of the decline in the divorce rate since 1980 was due to the simple, protective factor of people getting married at older ages. She hasn’t updated that analysis recently, but it seems likely that this factor continues to matter.

The marriage rate. I haven’t seen an analysis on this, so this is speculative. But from what I can tell, some of this is probably pure math. The marriage rate is the number of marriages per 1,000 women each year. So doing a very simplistic analysis, think of the universe of people in the prime ages of 25-31, and pretend that they are “not available for marriage” until they hit the average age of marriage (I told you this was simplistic). As the age of marriage has risen, the population of those ages 25-31 who are “not yet available” has grown relative to that group as a whole, and those who are “available to be married” has shrunk. So there is simply a smaller universe of people in that group who are already at the average marriage age and thus available to tie the knot than there were ten years ago. Obviously, this math is ridiculously simple and will not be a real accounting for the decline in the marriage rate, but the concept is likely to be a meaningful part of it.