Posted on 10/27/2013 8:03:20 AM PDT by Kip Russell
Here's a fascinating chart that probably comports with what you're seeing in real life.
The age at which people are first getting married is soaring. (Via John Podhoretz).
The jump in the last decade is particularly notable.
There are various theories for why people are getting married later, but one notion has to do with cultural attitudes towards marriage, and the growing perception that marriage is a "capstone" of life achievements, rather than a cornerstone.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
I turned 23 in 1967. By then I had had an honorable discharge from the USN for two years, I had a graduation certificate from the USN electronics school which was 38 weeks of intensive study. I had a job earning $110. a week which was easily more money than $1100. a week is now in real terms. I was driving a new car which I bought for myself. I was actually living with my parents but I was helping support them, not vice versa. Was I considered a success? No, in my area I was considered a failure because I did not already have a wife and at least one child. It may have been different in some places but the attitude where I lived was that any male who was still single after his 22nd birthday, unless he was enrolled in higher education, was worthless and no account, one woman where I worked actually asked me what was wrong with me that I was 23 years old and not married. I finally married just after turning 28 and by then everyone was dumbstruck because they had decided I would never marry.
Free milk and a cow.
It is huge, but heavily clustered in a few cultural groups.
It’s actually widespread across all cultural groups, with some of them having spikes high enough to make the others look better.
Agree
Oscar Wilde
Recent data graph:
http://img683.imageshack.us/img683/928/birthsunmarried.png
Comments about recent trends:
https://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/2010/12/30/share-of-births-to-unmarried-mothers-by-race-1990-2010/
The engagement ring.
The Wedding Ring.
And the suffer-ring.
The key is to marry when you are both young and don’t have much — build a life together and not these “parallel tracks” that I see for so many of the younger couples. Essentially, this is saying that there is little trust of the marriage surviving over the long haul, so always be prepared to split.
Would like to see this same chart with the ages people started living together before they married - how many actually did get married that lived together? That’s a phenomenon that was pretty rare pre-1970’s (unless people who were doing it were under the radar and not talking about it).
Figures that's how a homo would feel about marriage.
Those are very funny !
Yes, and that puts it in the proper perspective. Of course, it could mean to burn with passion / lust than to burn in fire? I think fire.
Another reason: The intense pressure to have the fairy tale grand Fortune 500 wedding and put your parents out thousands of dollars ...only to divorce two years later.
Seen it over and over. My own daughter feels she can’t marry yet, for one, because WE are not financially ready to cover her wedding . . . or at least the type of wedding she thinks she needs to have.
Kids nowadays have talked themselves into believing that conditions must all be right BEFORE they get married. We got married BEFORE conditions were right. They still aren’t right. We just experience it together.
Part of me regrets marrying so young ...but we’ve grown up together ..and we continue to reap the rewards of being together over 25 years.
Notice how, through til the 1960’s, the spread between the male and female age was about 2.5 to 3.5 years, then it narrows to under 1.5?
Up until the 1960’s, it was the norm for the wife to stay home. Now, they both need to be in the labor force, and preferably both need to be college graduates in order to sustain a middle-class standard of living. This means having to delay marriage until after college and after some time to be established in a career.
A Jewish friend said to me thusly,
“Weddings are so expensive because they have to make two people happy & fulfilled: the bride and the bride’s mother.”
;^)
In the 70s I rented an apartment for $425 per month when you could earn around $7.00 to $8.00 per hour painting. Today the painters job may fetch $15 to $20 per hour, but the same apartment rents for $3500 per month. Hard to make that rent without a way more lucrative job.
Boy I am not seeing this in my neck of the woods. The Christian homeschool crowd is marrying in their 18 to 26 years and popping out babies. Lots of babies.
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