Marriage Rates Plummet–Projection of Never-Married Rates to 2017

In the early 2000′s, 30-34 y/o never-married white women (NMWW) had a ~34% chance of marrying within the next 5 years. This level was cut in half by 2007, to ~17%. Only 1 in 6 30-34 y/o white women had never married in 2000 but this level will likely double to 1 in 3 by 2017, a stunning increase. The 35-39 y/o NMWW cohort will nearly double from 11% in 2000 to ~20% by 2017. Younger cohorts are also marrying less frequently and risk missing out on their most attractive years to find a husband.

This post is an extension of the epic post by Dalrock, More grim news for carousellers hoping to jump at the last minute, that showed a slight increase in American NMWW up to 2007 and then a steeper slope from 2007 to 2012. Here’s the plot from his site and pay special attention to the difference in slope before and after 2007 for the top two lines.

He focuses on white women and since I’m using his data compilation as my source I’ll do the same. In addition to just looking at the percentages of NMWW, Dalrock pointed out that by comparing the never-married percent of a cohort 5 years later and 5 years older that you could see how things have changed. The commenter, Paul Murray, calculated what % of those NMWW got married in the intervening 5 years. And the results are stunning. Here is Paul Murray’s unsmoothed graph.

In the figure below, I show the 5-year marriage rates for NMWW from 20-39 y/o. The data was a bit choppy so I smoothed the 2000-2006 rates by simply doing a 3-year average centered at the year shown. However, the raw data shows the same basic trend as you can see in Paul’s link above.

Rate of marriage within 5 years for never-married white women. These were calculated by taking the never-married % five years later and dividing by the % in the year shown, then subtracted from 1.0. 2000-2006 consist of three year averages to smooth the data while 2007 is simply the 2007 data since it’s the last available. 25-29 y/o labels shown while 20-24 y/o are not to avoid clutter. Update: The 35-39 y/o rate is calculated from data that comes from smaller samples and has higher uncertainty and thus jumps around more so the 2007 point is likely lower than the true rate. The younger cohorts have larger samples (more of them were unmarried) and provide more reliable info.

The most striking things to notice are the 30-34 and 35-39 y/o cohorts. The 30-34 y/o cohort declined from about 1/3 in 2000 getting married by 2005 to 1/6 of the NMWW in 2007 getting married by 2012. Even more shocking is the 35-39 y/o 2007 cohort dropping to nearly zero. It should be realized that these older cohorts are smaller subsamples and so there is likely large uncertainty in the values. Thus it is my opinion that the 2007 35-39 y/o 0.9% value is likely lower than the true value. It’s also possible that the 30-34 y/o 16.8% value is aberrantly low but it seems much more plausible since it continues the trend of the previous years. In this post I will assume the 16.8% is accurate but that the 0.9% is too low.

While less striking, the 20-24 and 25-29 y/o marry-within-5-years rates were virtually identical in both their values and their decline. In the early 2000′s they were in the mid to high 40′s but then decline to the mid to high 30′s by 2007, just 5 years later.

To give you an idea of the effect of this, let’s look at what happens when you have two successive rates of 47% vs two successive rates of 37%. In the first case, that means 53% didn’t marry, and so you have 53%*53% = 28% of the original group not married after 10 years. However, in the 2nd case you have 63%*63% = 40% not married after ten years, a number that’s 43% larger–and that’s a lot of spinsters or voluntarily-single women, and the attendant men that stay single as a result as well.

It will be very interesting to see the 2013 data come out and see if the trends continue or reverse. For now, we’ll content ourselves with making some reasonable assumptions in order to project what might happen over the next 5 years. The 20-24 and 25-29 y/o rates are declining by about 2% each year so I just decrease the projected rates by this amount for the 2008-2012 5-year marriage rates, taking them into the mid-20′s by 2012.

Continuing the steep decline for the 30-34 y/o cohort would have taken it to zero by 2010 and I don’t think this reflects reality so I choose a 1%/year decline, under the assumption that some of the younger procrastinators will get it together and marry in their 30′s and so this rate won’t decline as fast as the younger cohorts’. I also adopt this value for the 35-39 y/o cohort and choose 10% as the 2008 value, in line with the lower smoothed values from the early 2000′s (I think the 0.9% in 2007 was just an outlier).

The 20-24 and 25-29 y/o cohort’s rate was decreased at roughly the same trend of 2% per year while the two older cohorts were decreased at 1%, and the 35-39 y/o value was set at 10% in 2008 as a conservative assumption. 2008-2012 are projections, not measured data.

Now comes the interesting and possibly tragic part. I apply those 5-year marriage rates to the appropriate cohort to calculate the never-married % 5 years later. Under the assumed marriage rates, the 30-34 and 35-39 y/o never-married rates are projected to double by 2017 in comparison to 2000. The 25-29 y/o rate rises by 70% and the 40-44 y/o rate by 66%.

A sanity check and another way to project the next 5 years is to simply hypothesize that the same slope that existed in the never-married levels from 2007 to 2012 will continue from 2012 to 2017. Of course, this is just a guess and there may be a marriage surge in the next few years that obliterates this assumption but let’s see what happens. The results below are similar (thought slightly lower) to what happened above when using the projected declining marriage rates.

The above gives more of a worst-case scenario of what might happen. Let’s look at a more optimistic scenario and assume that 5-year marriage rates will not decline but rather just hold steady for 2008-2012. I set the 5-year rate for the 2008-2012 cohorts to be what it was in 2007, except for the 35-39 y/o cohort that will show up as the 40-44 y/o cohort 5 years later which I set at 10%. So the marriage rates assumed are 37.8%, 35.6%, 16.8% and 10%, respectively for the 20-24, 25-29, 30-34 and 35-39 y/o cohorts that show up five years later as the 25-29, 30-34, 35-39 and 40-44 y/o cohorts in the graph below.

Assuming a constant marriage rate for the years 2013-2017. This was set as the 2007 value for 20-34 y/o but set at 10% for the 35-39 y/o cohort since it seems like the 0.9% value of 2007 was likely a low outlier. 2013-2017 are projections.

Here we see that the never-married %’s still rise a lot by 2017 but not quite as much as in the two previous scenarios. The 25-29 y/o never-married % is ~50% instead of high 50′s. The 30-34 y/o % is 30% instead of mid 30′s. These results are different because instead of assuming 2% decline in the marriage rate I am assuming 0% decline. The 35-39 y/o % is about 20% and the 40-44% is 14%, not too different than when I assumed a 1% decline rate per year.

Once again, I’ll point out that these are merely projections but they use reasonable assumptions of marriage rates that either continue the decline of recent years or break the trend to stay flat. Of course, one could be highly optimistic and hypothesize that marriage rates will rise in the next few years and get less dire never-married results.

I believe that most of this phenomenon is due to some women in their early and mid 20′s consciously postponing marriage in order to pursue education, work and fun, as the safe and wealthy environment allows them to do and as they have been indoctrinated by the feminist alpha mares (either directly or through their indoctrinated parents). There are likely some men who are also postponing this but a recent survey showed more young men wanted to get married than young women so it seems to be driven more by women than men. Then once women are out of their peak years of attractiveness, say in their 30′s or 40′s, those men who are still or newly single find such women less attractive than they were in their 20′s and the men’s sexual/marriage value has likely risen somewhat or even a lot in comparison to the women of their same age. Also, some men have probably become jaded after being ignored when younger.

Another possible factor is that the 5-year marriage rates for the 2006 and 2007 cohorts dropped a lot because of the Great Recession that occurred during some of the five years after these dates when whatever marrying they had happened. Things are a bit better now so it is possible that there will be a bit of a rebound. However, things are not so much better either so perhaps the “optimistic” flat scenario I came up with will be closest to reality.

If you want to marry and have kids, get married while in your 20′s. If you happen to be older you can still marry but you better stop being so picky and be open to men that are 10 or more years older (and yes, you might be able to find a man your age or younger but the odds say be open to older men). If you don’t want to marry and have kids then it doesn’t matter–carry on with your regularly-scheduled programming.

I’m not really sure what to say since it seems that many of the women you would like to marry are not interested in doing so while in their early 20′s and so the math just doesn’t work for all men. But, nonetheless, up your value as much as possible, learn game, and look in places where marriage-minded women frequent. Going to college and not getting a useless degree will likely help your odds. Since we see that a majority of women will still eventually marry there are a lot of women out there–just less than there could be.

Why get married? By not getting married you avoid some of life’s greatest hurdles like responsibility and commitment. Most churches no longer teach that marriage is the ultimate goal of male and female partners. Schools emphasize alternate lifestyles such as homosexuality and life partners (shacking up).

Marriage as it was known 50 years ago is a thing of the past.

A great book to read about the impact of demographics on society is "America Alone" by Mark Steyn.

The malaise we are suffering economically is a result of the disastrous policies of obama and our aging population. For those that aren't thinking, our population is aging because we have better health care and we are not having babies.

My wife went to law school with a bunch of women and most only had 1 child, or none. When they've had some wine they will admit they regret they didn't have any, or more than one.

A lot of it has to do with career. They make it pretty difficult to have a family and work. I think we would have more woman getting married if they had a more family friendly work situation. Nope as a conservative, I would not want them giving more freebies to woman, but this is one of the reasons why woman are not getting married and having children. For example, if you are a teacher and you and your husband decide to have a baby and take a year or two off, good luck getting another teaching job. It is way to risky to take any time off from work for taking care of a baby. Obviously I am talking more about having families then strictly getting married because many single woman seem to have babies, but most of those are in the either very poor or very rich.

I'm a bit old school: women don't belong in MOST work situations, where the "breadwinner" earns the income, and the woman is the PRIME guidance for the children, as Nature intended. Modern-day, women have been FORCED to work because the TAX BURDEN is so great that a single income becomes VERY hard to sustain a reasonable standard of living.

Couple this with the encouragement of women to be "independent", thinking somehow this will make them "whole", is a fallacy and solely intended to destroy a nuclear family, as evindenced by the new term "single mother", where we used to use terms such as "divorcee, slut, tramp, easy-lay, etc."

There is a train of thought that says it is the lib’s that are in decline due to the birth rate and that we might even duck the bullet of being a minority party (immigration)because of it.

This is actually accepted by quite a number of thinkers on the right.

The liberals have the demographic advantage in the short term, but it will shift the other way in the second half of this century.

We won't live to see it however and if they get total power alot of permanent damage can be done.

You are correct on all counts. It is awful how much money is given to taxes, health care, retirement, Social Security, etc. You pretty much have a very small amount left no matter how much you make. That is why I laugh so hard at those dummies who want 15 dollars an hour working at McDonald’s. They will be LUCKY to break even than what they receive now after all the HIGHER deductions are taken out.

My wife went to law school with a bunch of women and most only had 1 child, or none. When they've had some wine they will admit they regret they didn't have any, or more than one.

And those career women who did have one child? A lot of them likely had a child with mental and emotional deficits (e.g. autism) -- due to having delayed childbearing until they were past the optimal age.

At some point, women are going to realize that their feminist fantasy indoctrination is not the way life really works -- at least not the Sex and the City scenario of women having "fun" + career, and waiting until their mid-30s to try to find a decent man to settle down with and have children.

I think we would have more woman getting married if they had a more family friendly work situation.”

Don’t necessarily agree. Women of my generation worked full-time and often in supervisory or management positions, kept the house, did the laundry and ironing, cooked breakfast and dinner, packed lunches, made a lot of clothes for everyone, had babies and were good mothers. Of course we had our babies when we were young, had more energy and were more flexible and less demanding, unlike women today.

We had unpaid maternity leave when the boss decided it was time and returned six weeks after the baby was born.

Not sure exactly what it means by women having it all. I don’t think I missed out on anything in my career, with my spouse or with my children. I can guarantee you I never sat around in the evening reading, watching TV or having a leisurely glass of wine. But by having children when you’re in your early or mid 20’s, you have a whole lot of life left after they are grown and gone.

The liberals have the demographic advantage in the short term, but it will shift the other way in the second half of this century.

Liberals are importing their replacement voters, in the form of masses of government-dependent illegal immigrants ... they aren't legal voters now, but they will be soon.

A big part of it is that women can get as much from a paycheck from the government either through disability (PTSD is a big one), or from having a child and being a single mom. Getting off the dole often results in a loss of benefits, plus (to many others), the loss of freedom that comes from getting your own check, vs relying on your husband to provide.

It’s not even break even that’s the deal, there is a premium being put on getting your crazy check because it means not having someone else in your life telling you what to do, etc.

It’s a terribly lonely way to go. I wish, as a man, that I knew the answer but the answer doesn’t seem to be “ask them to marry you”. So I’m stumped.

really sick and tired of these "scientific" surveys and studies all blaming white women for not marrying...

I blame the wimpy white men this country has produced so many of....easier to j**k *ff to an inanimate picture than to actually go out and woo a girl....

the playboy philosophy...you don't really need a female to have sex, you just need to have a picture of one....

pathetic....

I could find 10 nice, willing, attractive and available females right just at my workplace who would love to find a nice guy and settle down....but they're not boobistic....

and why is it women have to “stop being so picky” but nothing about men being so “picky”....honestly, men think the playboy centerfolds are regular girls....while in actuality, its puffed up pastry....

I could find 10 nice, willing, attractive and available females right just at my workplace who would love to find a nice guy and settle down....but they're not boobistic....

It doesn't matter what they look like, they are all family court and child support liabilities.

Women don't give a damn about the injustice being done to men in the family courts.

As a result more and more men don't give a damn if women end up as old cat ladys.

Some did have some problems. Also, they tend to pamper their "perfect" children.

I'm not so sure. I live in a liberal city. One thing I've noticed is no matter how many rational arguments you make they refuse to see the truth threw their emotional self-righteous fog.

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