“Millennial” has become a buzzword. Advertising teams are pooling their resources to learn what millennials want to buy. Newspapers and magazines are reporting on how millennials eat, sleep, and relate to one another. As millennials reach marriageable age, enough data is coming out to reveal the millennial strategy towards marriage.
Most people in the United States will eventually get married. However, each generation features a slowly increasing percentage of the population that will never get married. The millennials are no exception. In fact, the decline in marriage rates in this generation may be even sharper than in previous generations.
There are many reasons for cultural changes like fluctuations in marriage rates. The recent economic recession is a big factor in millennial marriage decline. For many young adults, marriage dropped lower on the list of priorities during the recession. Holding a steady job that could pay the bills became a much more immediate and tangible concern. The economy is now fully in recovery, but marriage rates among young adults have been slow to catch up. Perhaps they may never reach pre-recession rates, given that the decline began before the recession hit.
Marriage rates aren’t decreasing at identical rates, however. Younger millennials are significantly less likely to marry than people in their 20s of previous generations. This decline also applied to the adults of Generation X, who were somewhat more likely to marry after the age of 36.
Further decline in marriage rates doesn’t seem likely, given current projections. Available data suggests that only 69.3% of women born in the United States will be married by age 40.
The millennial generation’s rate of interracial marriage is sky high compared to rates for previous generations, perhaps because the millennials grew up in a cultural environment that embraced racial equality to an unprecedented degree.
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