New generations are increasingly opting out of getting into committed dotted and signed relationships that God approves of in favour of being alone forever. Because when you’re consummating the marriage, God is shuffling through that paperwork to make sure it’s all above board.

Using data from the National Survey of Family Growth Allen Downey updated a paper he wrote back in 2015. The breakdown is that men and women born in the 80s and 90s were steadily marrying later than previous generations.

At age 24 84% of women born in the 90s remain unmarried. Compare this to their cohorts in the 1940s when that number of unmarried women would be around 20%. As you can see from the graph below, each successive generation is falling off the marriage charts.

Downey takes to things from this, “Women in each successive cohort are getting married later, and a larger fraction are never getting married at all.”

For women born in the 80s marriage has pretty much levelled off at this point, and for those in the 90s its to early to tell when things will begin panning out. Although Downey goes into his methodology and predictions on his site.

Men follow a similiar pattern although less extreme, and all seem to consolidate around the age of 45.

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“At age 23, the fraction of men who have never married has increased from 66% for men born in the 50s to 88% for men born in the 90s.” Downey points out.

You can look further into the data on Downeys blog.

Marriage peaked in the 1980s with a record number of marriages when 2.5 million people got married. Since then there’s been a drop off. Over the last century the number of marriages has halved, and that’s counting people that double dip and get married more than once as well.

It isn’t just America either, globally marriages are down, independent of things like GDP and wealth. Also with opening the doors to gay marriage there is a larger pool of marriage participants, however this hasn’t made a noticeable bump.

So what’s causing it? Is marriage just old fashioned? Is the feminist movement finally getting women to not fall for the scam of settling down instead settling down for the scam of a career? Is mounting debt to blame? Or is it a cultural trend toward independence and reliance on ones self?

I know for a fact that my mate doesn’t want to tie the knot with his girlfriend of 6 (9 he’s corrected me) years because he’s a lazy stubborn (he corrects again) piece of crap terrified of being looked at for the entire wedding day, but apart from that I’ve got no real solid answer at this time, and neither does anyone else.

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