The Perils of Forsaking All Others for Self

Why are so many Americans waiting so long to get married?

One-third of young adults will likely never marry, according to recent research. Lyman Stone, a research fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, analyzed the data and came to some important conclusions.

The Knot, a wedding website, ran a study finding that the average age of men and women getting married is now 32 and 30 respectively. The Pew Research Center found that 25 percent of adults over the age of 40 have never been married.

In contrast, in 1967, Stone writes, about 85% of 25-year-old women were married, as were 75% of 25-year-old men. Those rates have dramatically dropped to just 20% of 25-year-old women and 23% of 25-year-old men.

Young adults are not just delaying marriage–they are avoiding it all together.

Why is this so? Katy Faust, president and founder of Them Before Us, writes in a recent issue of World magazine that many young Americans may be putting marriage off because they have no idea of what a functional marriage looks like in the first place.

She states, “My husband and I came of age during the no-fault divorce epidemic, where we have a front-row seat to the dissolution of our parents’ unions. But many kids today never knew their parents as being married at all. Their mother and father may instead have been a revolving door of partners or live-ins or opted for the single-mother-or-father-by-choice route. … Many children don’t even know what wholeness looks like. And we scratch our heads at why the next generation is failing to have children, get married, or even have sex.”

Because they have no idea of what marriage looks like–the merging and modeling of self-sacrifice of two imperfect human beings into one unit–they instead engage in a fruitless quest for self-fulfillment–whether it be via career, having children outside of marriage, or waiting for the absolutely “perfect” person to come along.

The problem of personal happiness outside of marriage is most acute, as many surveys have pointed out, among lower-income and less-educated populations, which do not have the personal resources to, at the very least, “wallpaper” over the problem of personal unhappiness through ample financial resources or a good career.

But even among those who have a good career and ample financial resources, the wait for the “perfect partner” often remains exactly that—a waiting game that may never end.

The result, as Stone writes, is “a whole slew of adverse outcomes as people age, including increased loneliness and isolation.”  

As Jim Daly, president and CEO of Focus on the Family, writes in his book, “Marriage Done Right,” “[Marriage] is a sacred union of a man and woman that confers myriad benefits on the spouses, their children, and society at large—benefits that cannot be replicated by any other relationship.”

That is the beauty and wholeness of marriage that young adults are missing. If we are going to become a culture that values marriage once again, those of us who are married must model that beauty and wholeness daily to younger generations so they can view marriage as something to aspire to rather than run from.

As Katy Faust concludes and I concur, “We must both ‘show’ and ‘tell’ our children that marriage is not a drudgery. We also need to ‘show’ the broken kids in our children’s orbit what ‘intact’ looks like. Even though our own families were complicated, Ryan (her husband) and I each had nearby examples of simple, devoted marriages that we aspired to pattern ours after. Those couples prayed us to the altar and supported us on the other side.”

If we, as couples and a society, can replicate what Katy and her husband Ryan experienced, we can bring about both personal and societal restoration through forsaking all others for our spouse, rather than for our selves, and marriage will flourish once again in our society, rather than wither away.

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