Why Are Young Women Rejecting Marriage? The Reason Matters

Is the next generation of romantic comedy viewers … boys?

Two recent surveys suggest that it’s younger men, not women, who are more focused on getting married and having children.

Seventy-four percent of 12th-grade boys say they will likely choose to get married, according to a November Pew Research Center analysis. In contrast, only about 6 out of 10 senior girls feel the same way.

Meanwhile, when young adults aged 18-29 were asked what they viewed as most important for having a successful life, men ranked getting married and having children higher than their female peers did in a September NBC News Decision Desk poll.

That disparity became even more stark when looking at women who voted for Kamala Harris compared to men who voted for Donald Trump. Among men who voted for Trump, having children was seen as the top indicator of success, while getting married was considered the fourth most important (out of 13 options).

Young women who voted for Harris had decidedly different priorities: They saw getting married as the 11th most important and having children as the 12th most important indicator of success. Harris’ young female supporters, instead, prioritized fulfilling careers, financial success, and emotional stability.

What is going on? Can we expect to see TLC launch a “Say Yes to the Tux” series? Will groomzillas become the new norm?

Whatever the reasons, it’s clear there’s a major cultural shift. In 1993, 83% of 12th-grade girls thought they’d be likely to choose marriage, as did 76% of 12th-grade boys. In other words, about 4 out of 5 12th-grade women planned to get married in 1993, and now only 3 out of 5 do.

If those 12th-grade girls are accurate Cassandras, it could have massive ramifications. Already, the U.S. marriage and birth rates are in significant decline—and it’s married women who are most likely to have children. The U.S. birth rate is currently 1.6 children per woman, a historic low and one that portends a declining population for our nation, which will bring economic and societal challenges.

But are these young women off base to be dubious about marriage?

I always wanted to get married—and yet I also always wanted a happy marriage, and to be with a husband I shared religious and moral values with and respected.

I ultimately didn’t marry until I was 37. If you had asked me during large chunks of my young adult years if I thought I was likely to choose marriage, I’m not sure how I would have answered.

As Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown notes, the survey wording suggests that “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.”

When I was younger, I often felt like I was in some cruel numbers game that no amount of hopeful swipes on any dating app could necessarily overcome, just based on the stats. After all, a 2024 survey from Barna Group and Pure Desire Ministries found that 75% of Christian men viewed pornography. I noticed at church that it often seemed young women outnumbered the young men attending. (Although interestingly, new research suggests that men are now going to church more than women.)

I was open to dating and marrying a man who didn’t have a college degree, as the number of women with college degrees rapidly outpaced the number of men among millennials. But at least in my experience, I didn’t encounter a lot of men who had forgone college but had steady careers in say, construction or plumbing, and who also possessed a love of reading or podcasts or trivia.

And like many women, I was deeply uneasy over the manosphere surge. I completely agree that feminism is highly problematic, and that boys and men often receive unfair treatment in our modern culture. I had no issue with men who raised those flags. At the same time, I could not condone—or stomach—a man who would listen to some of the openly misogynistic blowhards who thrived in the ugly manosphere subculture. The answer to today’s unfair treatment of men is not to degrade and trash women.

So perhaps some of those 12^th-grade girls are thinking along similar lines. Maybe they would prefer marriage—but not at any price, to any man.

Or perhaps they are thinking along entirely different lines. If the NBC News poll is accurate, maybe this isn’t about a scarcity of good men—but about a true values shift, where women no longer see marriage and children as critical to a fulfilling life.

That’s a shame—because there’s plenty of research that suggests women are ultimately likelier to be happy if they are married with children. Among married women with children, 19% were very happy, while among single women without children, only 10% were, according to an August Institute for Family Studies report. That same analysis also found that 47% of married moms found life enjoyable, compared to 34% of single, childless women.

Another study, the 2022 General Social Survey, also showed that marriage and children were correlated with happiness. Among women who were married with kids, 40% were very happy and 47% were pretty happy (87% total). Among unmarried women without children, 22% were very happy and 54% were pretty happy (76% total).

Of course, these numbers do demonstrate that some single childless women are happy. (I certainly had plenty of joy in my own single years.) Conservatives will only look foolish if they argue that happiness is incompatible with singlehood.

But what the data does show is women are more likely to be happy as married moms. That’s the message we should be giving to anxious young women—even as we simultaneously encourage marriage-minded young men to be the best men they can be.

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