Ambivalence About Marriage Grows—Among Girls

High school boys are now more enthusiastic about marriage than their female peers are. The news—from a Pew Research Center analysis of University of Michigan polling data—has been greeted with some alarm by conservatives.

“Something has gone terribly wrong,” commented Turning Point USA spokesperson Andrew Kolvet, in one representative example. 

But has it?

Let’s look a little closer at what the data actually show. It’s decidedly not that teen girls are rejecting the idea of marriage in larger numbers, nor that new hordes of teen boys have suddenly been bitten by a marriage bug.

Pew’s analysis—which compares data from the 1993 and 2023 “Monitoring the Future” surveys—involves 12th graders asked to choose whether they’re likely to eventually marry. Survey respondents can say they’re likely to get married, likely not to get married, or that they have no idea.

In 1993, only 5 percent of the surveyed 12th graders said they were unlikely to get married, and 80 percent said they were likely to marry. In 2023, 9 percent said they were not likely to marry, and 67 percent said they were.

The “unlikely to marry” group only went up by four percentage points.

The big slump in the “likely to get married” group isn’t driven by people saying they’re likely not to get married but by a big increase in people saying they have no idea. The “no idea” group went from 16 percent in 1993 to 24 percent in 2023.

And the rise of the “no idea” position seems to be driven by girls. Boys in the 2023 survey were about as likely as those in 1993 to say they want to get married (74 percent vs. 76 percent). But the share of girls saying they want to get married went from 83 percent to 61 percent.

That’s a huge drop, indeed. But remember, the group of respondents saying they’re unlikely to marry only increased by four percentage points. That means most of the 22 percentage point drop in girls saying they want to marry reflects a rise in girls saying “no idea,” not girls saying certainly not or probably not.

Enter: Everyone’s Pet Peeves

The real story here seems to be that high school girls are feeling more marriage ambivalence. That’s interesting, certainly—but without more data, we can’t really say what explains it. Which means that, of course, everyone is writing their preferred cultural narrative all over this.

For some, it’s obvious that feminism has lured women into hating marriage. For others, something something abortion access. For another group, the data reflect the fact that social media have “exposed” men as unappealing, since “men no longer hide their misogyny behind closed doors.” And on and on and on.

The comment that I suspect comes closest to the truth: “Women just have options now.” 

Many teen girls saying “no idea” will still, eventually, marry. But if recent generational trends hold, fewer will than in previous generations. The marriages that do exist will be more stable, but marriage rates will be down overall (a trend that will be more pronounced among lower-income and less-educated women than their better-paid and more-educated counterparts, contrary to so much online hand-wringing about feminist girlbosses being the ruin of everything). The bottom line is that 12th graders saying what they think they will do “in the long run” (that’s how the question was worded) doesn’t actually tell us much about what they will do. Nonetheless, shifts in perceptions on this question can still tell us something.

I reject the idea that the perception shift stems from the internet and men somehow showing themselves to be more misogynistic, or just generally less appealing, because of it. (This is yet another example of people today reaching for tech as the explanation for everything.) I don’t recall, as a teen in the 1990s and a young adult in the early 2000s, the young men around me or in pop culture seeming particularly enlightened, overall.

I also reject the idea that abortion access has anything to do with how enthusiastically high school girls view the prospect of marriage, though I do almost admire how a certain strain of progressive these days will find a way to shoehorn any cultural debate into a referendum on reproductive rights.

As for feminism being to blame…well, yeah, sort of—though not in the insidious way that some conservative commenters imagine. There’s no shadowy cabal of pink leg hair–sporting man haters with CEO jobs and 18 cats tricking ladies into going against their best interests. But decades of feminism have made it practically possible—legally, economically, professionally—for a woman to live without a husband or long-term male partner, and reduced the social stigma around doing so, too.

It doesn’t seem like any great mystery why, when given an option that previously either wasn’t available or would have marked one as a social pariah, some percentage of girls and young women are going to at least consider taking that path. Any time previously unavailable or difficult options are rendered more accessible, some percentage of people will at least imagine the possibility.

Beyond Culture Warring

I also think we should be careful about writing too much bourgeois culture-war sentiment onto any of this.

Sure, for some high school girls, uncertainty or ambivalence around marriage may come down to worries that men or the institution of marriage will hold them back professionally, curb their freedom to do what they want, tie them to some 1950s housewife role, tie them to a constraining sex life, etc. In other words, it may come down to worries about men or monogamy or traditional gender norms in some way.

But others might express uncertainty about whether they’ll marry—to someone identifying as a man, a woman, or anything else—not because they reject monogamy or long-term partnerships but because they just don’t view the legal and/or religious institution of marriage as all that important. Maybe they envision themselves with a spouse in all but name.

Others might want marriage—with all its legal trappings—just as much as their predecessors, but look at the world around them and assess, rightly or wrongly, that it just may not be in the cards for them.

For many, it might come down not to desire but to practicality. A picket-fence existence where marriage comes first, then kids, then lifelong bliss might sound great in theory. But maybe they’re extremely online and inundated with pro-divorce manifestos, tales of how women can’t find a good man, and commentary about declining marriage rates. Maybe they grew up in a culture where most married couples around them got divorced. Maybe they grew up in a culture where parents tended not to marry in the first place, and dads tended not to stick around, or not to pull their weight financially when they did stay.

With rates of single motherhood having risen massively since the mid–20th century, you’ve got more children having grown up without a positive marriage model before them. And, perhaps, more girls than ever who grow up thinking that marriage is not a necessary component of a good life, or not within reach, or a bad bargain for women. That to me seems fundamentally different than the idea that people are rejecting marriage because they don’t like the rhetoric coming from podcast bros or some guy on social media, even if uncertainty about marriage or men underlies both explanations.

In the end, I don’t think we can tell a pat story about these new data, just as there’s no simplistic, good/bad narrative that works when explaining declining marriage rates.

On the one hand, we have wide swaths of people for whom poor economic prospects, mass incarceration, opioid addiction, or other social ills have made marriage less feasible or appealing. We have these broad social and economic trends that have divorced marriage from child-rearing. We have a situation where stable families and marriages are becoming increasingly class-segregated. That all seems bad!

But we also live in a world where women are more empowered to leave bad marriages or to never marry in the first place. We have a society where women are much more free to pursue whatever professional or artistic ambitions they please. We have a society where birth control has helped people avoid unplanned pregnancies that, in decades prior, may have all but necessitated entering into ill-advised marriages. And one in which everyone, including women, has not only more options when it comes to life choices but also the ability to thrive whether married or not, partnered or not, a parent or not. We’ve opened up more ways for humans to flourish, and that is a good thing.

Disentangling the good from the bad of declining marriage rates, declining desire for marriage, or increasing uncertainty about marriage is a much more complicated project than partisan or culture-war narratives will allow for, but also a much more compelling one. There’s a lot going on here. For now, let’s just be wary of anyone trying to turn these data into a referendum on why they prove their pet issue right.

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