Are Marriage Rates Declining?

In 2019, a report by the United Nations (UN Women) called “Families in a Changing World” reported that more and more people are choosing to live single lives, and marriage all through the world is declining.

In it, the increasing agency women worldwide are slowly starting to exhibit cited as a decisive contributor to the decline in the rate of marriages and a rise in the average age of a woman entering marriage for the first time and a decline in the birth rates.

Due to demographic changes, the continuously increasing access women and girls’ ability to be educated and, in turn, employed in fields in which they can be more financially able to support themselves. UN Woman also reports that girls’ wages increase ten to twenty percent for every additional year of primary school education they receive.

Along with all the changes in legal reform and ideas and norms in many societies, more and more women are becoming aware of and exercising their choices regarding having children and whether marriage is something they want and, if so, at what point in their lives.

Estimates from the Pew Research Center indicate that roughly 25 percent of today’s young American adults will choose not to marry.  That means that one out of every four Americans that are fifty years of age will be living their lives as a single person, never having married. We cannot even begin to try and predict the type of impact this change in what has played such a major role in our lives will have. It is not something people have even attempted to predict. We can only surmise how people who grow up where it is increasingly more common to live independently will view the institution of marriage further.

For now, shifts in so many factors in our lives are most definitely impacting us and contributing to us rethinking whether or not we still want to say “I DO” or if maybe we can find happiness and fulfillment and choose to say “I DON’T” instead.