Young women are losing faith in marriage. This is the takeaway from a dramatic new Pew poll showing that in the past 30 years, the share of 12th grade girls who say they are most likely to “choose to get married” one day has dropped more than 20 percentage points, from 83% in 1993 to 61% in 2023. Meanwhile the share of young men who hope to get married has remained steady, at around 75%.
Other polls show similar findings. The Survey Center on American Life recently found that a majority of single women (55%) think that single women are happier than married women (they’re really not—more on that in a moment), whereas a majority (68%) of single men take the opposite view.
There is no debating that women’s confidence in and devotion to marriage is falling. But there is robust debate about whether that’s a bad thing, and what’s causing it. Theories about young women’s declining interest in wedlock typically fall into two camps. The problem is either 1) the boys, or 2) the (feminist) girls.
Proponents in the first camp, usually feminists, suggest women still value marriage; they just can’t find enough marriageable men. Writing for The New York Times in 2023, Anna Louie Sussman said the “state of men today” is too dispiriting for women: too many men are drug-addled, unemployed or underemployed, socially inept, and emotionally unavailable. Women who take this view make much of the fact that men are attending and graduating from college at lower rates than women, not working as much as they used to, and many are addicted to porn and often seem unable or unwilling to “engage in a conversation and maintain a normal human relationship.”
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