A large part of marriage is permanence, or at least it used to be. An indissoluble bond that keeps husband and wife together through thick and thin, in sickness and in health. Traditionally, this was understood as good not only for them, but for their children too, and that’s why it became and remains a fundamental human institution, regardless of the tinkering we’re engaged in with it.
An overlooked aspect of marriage and its traditional indissolubility – at least in my opinion – is the socially-binding effect it has beyond the family, extending out into the community. Sure, it’s not the only setting in which people create kids, but it is the setting intended to provide permanence for raising those kids. That also has the effect of, even today, keeping couples together in roughly stable constellations as they raise their children together in a broader community. Absent moves and the like, which are usually infrequent events, you’re saddled with the same people for much of your children’s youth.
These things are on my mind because we hosted friends over the Christmas break with whom we’d holidayed some years earlier, with a number of other couples. My wife and I, along with our Christmas visitors, were the only married couples on that occasion, while the other couples were at varying stages of commitment and dating. To cut a long story short, a great time was had by all.
Three years later, all of those other couples have broken up, the two halves no longer speaking to one another or hanging around anymore in each case. Suffice to say, a reunion isn’t on the cards anytime soon, which was saddening to us survivors as we sat around discussing it.
What’s the point of this open-ended recollection? The Wall Street Journal ran an article in recent days asking the question, What Happens When a Whole Generation Never Grows Up? “As American 30-somethings increasingly bypass the traditional milestones of adulthood, economists are warning that what seemed like a lag may in fact be a permanent state of arrested development,” the article’s byline read.
That’s a point that’s being made with increasing regularity, including by some prophetic Irish voices. Milestones like marriage, having children, homebuying are increasingly either taking place later or not at all. Whatever the reasons for that, and there are undoubtedly many, that’s the reality.
That article brought to the fore some research by American demographer Lyman Stone, which projected that one-in-three of today’s young adults will never marry, “a record share” as it’s been put. An American projection to be sure, but one that’s likely not dissimilar from the Irish forecast. After all, CSO data reveals that Ireland’s single population has grown in every age cohort over the past decade. That’s going to have a diminishing effect on birthrates both now and into the future.
“It is striking that just 20% of 25-year-old women and 23% of 25-year-old men have ever married today. These are close to the lowest levels ever observed for marriage rates. Many commentators will blame these declines on the increased delay in marriage. While there’s some truth to this, the situation is extreme at higher ages, too. As the figure below shows, ever-married shares today are at historic lows for 35-year-old and 45-year-old men and women. For instance, only about 60% of 35-year-old men are ever-married today, down from 90% in 1980. This trend also suggests that a growing share of Americans will not get married before their healthiest years are long past them.”
Stone, who’s a Research Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies and Chief Information Officer of the population research firm Demographic Intelligence and so well placed to discuss such things, adds towards the end that: “The decline in marriage at age 25 may now be subsiding, but the effects of past delays will continue into older ages. This means that plausibly, one-third of men and women who turn 45 in 2050 (those who are about 18 or 19 today) will not have married.”
“This will have dramatic consequences for American society. It points to long-term fertility declines being hard to prevent, since marriage is a major factor shaping fertility behavior. These trends may also result in a whole slew of adverse outcomes as people age, including increased loneliness and isolation. The benefits of marriage for individuals and society are considerable, and thus the costs of falling marriage are, too.”
People sometimes wonder what the big deal is with this particular topic. If people don’t want to get married, or want to get married later, or don’t want to have kids, or want to have kids later, let them, they say.
Well, no one is going to be strongarmed into any of these commitments anytime soon – nor should they be – but I do feel that if we’re going to prize individual choice above all else in society, as we have been doing for some time now, we should at least be aware of the consequences. That discussion is often overshadowed by consideration of the immediate benefits of whatever choice someone is looking to make now.
It means, as I’ve written previously, developing a society in which, if you cut against the grain and choose to have kids in your 20s, you have in some ways an uphill battle ahead of you, making it a still less-appealing option for many. It means that you’ll likely have to figure out which friend you’re going to keep socialising with if a couple you’re fond of breaks up painfully, as they often do, or figure out how to alternate seeing them effectively.
It means acknowledging that, despite living through a “loneliness epidemic” as we are, people are set to get lonelier still as they forego families, or struggle to form them because we’ve fostered a society that isn’t good at encouraging that. We’ve seen some shocking consequences of that endemic loneliness on our very own isle in recent years, as people died alone and lay undiscovered for grotesque lengths of time, being without any close contacts to check on them as they were.
There is obviously more to this situation that marriage, but in many ways marriage is at the heart of it. Many of us don’t want to, or are afraid to, commit to one another for whatever reason. It wasn’t always this way, and so we have the world we have. However, it is this way now, and so we’ll have the world we’ll have.