“Ready for the marriage apocalypse?” challenges CNN. “Young couples shun marriage over divorce fears,” booms the Telegraph.
Headlines like these give the impression that marriage has all but died among millennials – but this isn’t the whole picture.
It is true that marriage among young people in the UK is on the decline. In 2012, just 14% of brides and 8% of grooms were under 25, compared with 76% and 61% in the late 1960s, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
And it’s not just that people are marrying older: a 2014 report by the Marriage Foundation, a think tank that promotes marriage, found nearly half of today’s 20 year-olds in the UK will never marry.
It’s a similar story in much of Europe, where researchers say the economic crisis has had an adverse impact on marriage rates, along with huge cultural changes.
In most developed countries, these include the expansion of education, more labour market opportunities (especially for women), changes in social norms and attitudes (such as a greater acceptance of cohabitation), and delayed motherhood (planning to have children is a common reason for people to get married), according to Man Yee Kan, associate professor of sociology at the University of Oxford.
In addition, campaigns to make space for mothers’ names on marriage certificates and for civil partnerships to be open to opposite-sex couples show that the patriarchal associations of marriage jar with many young people’s values.
At a time when a housing crisis is prompting many to cohabit out of necessity, the astronomical cost and demands of a wedding is also a factor.
Bucking the trend
But many young people are still hell bent on getting married and intend to remain so for life. Some even marry while at university. Like people of all ages, young people receive inheritance and pension benefits, which unmarried partners – even those with children – don’t qualify for. Continue reading
Sources
- The Guardian, from an article by Natalie Gil, a journalist who works on Guardian Students.
- Image: Our Wedding Journal