Why worry that 17-year-old girls don’t want to wed?
This story originally appeared on Jill.substack.com, a newsletter from journalist, lawyer and author Jill Filipovic.
High schoolers, and especially high school girls, are less likely than ever to say that they want to get married someday, according to new research from Pew Research Center.
In 1993, 80 percent of high school seniors said they’d like to marry, while 5 percent said they didn’t plan on marrying, and 16 percent said they weren’t sure.
Now, 67 percent say they want to marry—still two-thirds of them—while 9 percent say no to marriage and almost a quarter say they’re unsure:
What’s grabbed headlines, though, is that the decline has been fueled almost entirely by high school girls.
While boys have stayed fairly stable in how many of them say they want to marry, girls have gone from overwhelmingly wanting marriage to being even less likely than boys to want to wed:
Conservative groups and writers have met this new survey with some panic. If 12th graders don’t want to get married, I guess the logic goes, then they won’t get married, and America’s declining rates of marriage and childbearing will continue and will eventually destroy society. To them, this new survey indicates a broader social shift away from marriage and childbearing, which is bad, because in their view, the nuclear family is the good and necessary backbone of any moral and functional culture.
But actually, it’s great that far fewer high school girls are even thinking about marriage.
It’s telling that the girls who no longer say marriage is on their minds largely aren’t saying that they don’t want to get married; instead, they’re saying that they have no idea. And good! These are girls who are 16, 17 and 18. The average age of first marriage for American women is now nearly 29, with women who graduate from college marrying even later. Marriage, for the vast majority of high school girls, is many years away—if it happens at all. At 17, they should be thinking about their friends, the guy or girl they like, what they’re getting up to this weekend, how they’re going to complete their homework when they also have a big soccer game, and what happens after graduation. Thinking about marriage is a distraction at best.
Conservatives are right, though, that this does signal a cultural shift. One of the biggest changes American feminists wrought was the end of marriage as almost entirely compulsory for women in nearly every corner of the nation.
In 1949, nearly 80 percent of households were headed by married couples, which is a wild statistic when you think about it: It means that marriages had to happen quite young, that very few young people lived alone. And indeed that’s exactly what happened.
Marriage rates now are lower because, yes, a higher number of people are staying unmarried for their entire lives, but also because people are marrying later and spending many more years living independently.
In the early 1950s, the average woman was barely out of high school when she married, and a great many were marrying as teenagers. The teen birthrate peaked in the U.S. in this same period. And people were dying earlier, too.
In 1949, life expectancy at birth was 65 for men and 70 for women; now it’s nearly 76 for men and 81 for women, meaning that Americans have added more than a decade on average to our lives. We may be marrying and reproducing later, and pushing back a whole series of other markers once indicative of adulthood, but adult life is also literally a lot longer.
Most importantly, when it comes to being seen as adults, living a socially acceptable life, and finding a sense of purpose, women simply have many other options now.
Teenage boys have been telling researchers that they want to marry at roughly the same rates for the last 20-plus years. Most of them say they want to marry someday; some of them don’t; many say they just aren’t thinking about it. And there has been absolutely zero moral panic over the fact that until recently, more girls than boys wanted to marry. Which suggests to me that this is less about concern over young peoples’ marital aspirations and more about concern that women are not doing what is presumed to be their duty: civilizing men by marrying them, and then dedicating their lives to their husbands and children.
… Women see fewer costs to single life than ever before—which means that marriage actually has to compete on the merits.
It is interesting to ask why we’ve seen such shifts from girls but not boys, and I think the answer is pretty obvious: Life has changed much more for girls and women than it has for boys and men.
This has been overwhelmingly good for girls and women, who now have many more opportunities for education, work and independence. But because men and boys have not changed as much or as quickly, there is a misalignment here. Most people are still heterosexual and do pair up with members of the opposite sex. But women living in a more-feminist world don’t need men the way women in earlier eras did—for financial security, for social acceptance.
Outside of some conservative religious communities, American women generally have the option of financial self-sufficiency, and can remain unmarried and members in good standing of their communities. Women living in large cities can generally find dynamic friend groups of other single women well into their 30s, 40s, 50s and beyond—it certainly gets harder as more people pair up, but the days of the one single post-menopausal woman being consigned to the role of Old Maid are long gone. In other words, women see fewer costs to single life than ever before—which means that marriage actually has to compete on the merits.
For most women, this means that men have to compete on the merits. And this seems to be where the trouble lies.
Of course, there are men who are wonderful and would make for excellent partners; there are literally millions and millions of them. But men have also not changed as rapidly as women have. Men remain more conservative than women, and this is especially pronounced among young people.
In the last elections, when Democrats won big, we still saw stunning gender gaps between young men and young women.
In Virginia, 58 percent of men ages 18-29 voted for Democrat Abigail Spanberger; for women in the same age cohort, it was 82 percent. Young men, it should be said, were the most liberal of the male voters; male support for Spanberger went down as men aged up, and the same was true for female voters. But younger women are way more liberal: More liberal than older women, and much more liberal than men their same age.
The same dynamic of an extraordinary gender gap between the youngest male voters and the youngest female ones held true in New Jersey and New York, too.
Political gender gaps are not a new dynamic. What is new, though, is an American political climate in which how one votes isn’t just about policy but about a broader identity, including views on gender roles. The MAGA movement has been a virulently misogynist one, fueled by pundits and podcasters who opine about taking away women’s voting rights, and is put into practice by politicians who gleefully take away our reproductive rights. Casting a vote for a Republican does not just mean that you have a particular belief about a muscular foreign policy in the face of Communism or that you want your tax burden lowered; it means voting to support people who want to see women knocked down a few pegs, who are happy to physically imperil us and strip us of opportunities in order to give men an unearned leg up.
I think it’s awfully hard for a woman to be happily married to man who stands in favor of all of that. And now that women don’t have to be married to men for either money or social acceptance, it doesn’t strike me as totally surprising that a lot of women would prefer to be single than to marry a lot of the men out there.
Most women still want to get married. A lot of them can’t find a man worth marrying.
I am, perhaps in spite of all evidence, a hetero-optimist. Men really have gotten much better over the last few decades: They are on average more involved fathers, more politically liberal, more feminist, more emotionally functional. This has been good for women and children, but it’s been really good for men. Seeing one’s only utility as breadwinning is a pretty sad way to live. A culture that expects men to be emotionally connected to their partners and children, and to put in the day-to-day work of forging that connection, is a culture in which men are going to have deeper and more meaningful relationships and live happier (and often longer) lives.
The many men who are politically conservative and treat their wives and children in ways that were far rarer a generation or two ago are married to women whose careers they support. They are engaged in childcare and childrearing to a degree that their grandfathers could barely have imagined. (JD Vance, for example, is a terrible person with terrible views, but he is not exactly a traditional patriarch with a cowed, stay-at-home wife who does all of the childcare).
But women still do much more of the childrearing. We do much more around the house. And there is an enormous subset of men who continue to believe that it’s simply a woman’s job to take on most or all of the domestic labor, even if those same men aren’t exactly doing the traditional male thing of bringing home enough bacon for everyone.
Among young men, is a sizable number who have had their brains rotted by YouTube, manosphere influencers, ubiquitous porn and have spent far less time in person with human females than generations before them—young men who can disappear into phones and video games and find “friends” in Discord chatrooms. For young men, the algorithms largely move in one direction, and it’s toward misogyny. It actually takes some effort and intervention to not get swept that way.
Most women still want to get married. A lot of them can’t find a man worth marrying—and judging by a lot of men out there, it’s not because they’re being too picky. There is simply a badly imbalanced dating pool: Lots of financially independent and emotionally competent women, and certainly many financially independent and emotionally competent men, too—but fewer. And lots of teenage girls see the boys around them and I would bet that they wonder if these guys are ever going to grow out of their teenage misogyny.
There are all kinds of reasons why marriage has declined, and these reasons are both material and cultural. But they aren’t stemming from teenage girls. If anything, the teenage girls who increasingly say they aren’t thinking about marriage are the smart ones. They shouldn’t be thinking about marriage at 17—that’s not the basis for a good marriage or a good life. And they are lucky to be growing up in a culture where they can marry for love and out of desire, rather than for money or social acceptance and out of necessity.
The truth is that at the height of American marriage rates, a lot of marriages were really miserable and some were horribly abusive. Marriage is not a guarantee of happiness, and it is certainly more misery-inducing when it’s economically forced or socially coerced.
I got married in my mid-30s but felt virtually no pressure to do so; most of my close friends weren’t married at the time, either. And while I was very happy to get married, I also felt some measure of grief for my single life, which was really, really fun—not so much the dating part of it, but the friendships and the freedom. Marriage has offered new layers of richness and growth. But I’m not sad that I didn’t meet my husband at 20. I don’t think our marriage would be nearly as good. I actually don’t think we’d be married at all. I didn’t marry in my 30s because I failed to prioritize it in my 20s. I married in my 30s because that’s when I finally met a person I actually wanted to marry who wanted to marry me too—when the benefits of marrying that particular person outweighed the benefits to staying single or being partnered or unmarried. I also didn’t spend my teenage years thinking about marriage, beyond the usual doodling crushes’ names in the margins of my notebooks.
The teenage girls who are thinking about their weekends instead of their weddings? They’re doing something right.
