Marriage Rates Plummet–Projection of Never-Married Rates to 2017

In the early 2000′s, 30-34 y/o never-married white women (NMWW) had a ~34% chance of marrying within the next 5 years. This level was cut in half by 2007, to ~17%. Only 1 in 6 30-34 y/o white women had never married in 2000 but this level will likely double to 1 in 3 by 2017, a stunning increase. The 35-39 y/o NMWW cohort will nearly double from 11% in 2000 to ~20% by 2017. Younger cohorts are also marrying less frequently and risk missing out on their most attractive years to find a husband.

This post is an extension of the epic post by Dalrock, More grim news for carousellers hoping to jump at the last minute, that showed a slight increase in American NMWW up to 2007 and then a steeper slope from 2007 to 2012. Here’s the plot from his site and pay special attention to the difference in slope before and after 2007 for the top two lines.

He focuses on white women and since I’m using his data compilation as my source I’ll do the same. In addition to just looking at the percentages of NMWW, Dalrock pointed out that by comparing the never-married percent of a cohort 5 years later and 5 years older that you could see how things have changed. The commenter, Paul Murray, calculated what % of those NMWW got married in the intervening 5 years. And the results are stunning. Here is Paul Murray’s unsmoothed graph.

In the figure below, I show the 5-year marriage rates for NMWW from 20-39 y/o. The data was a bit choppy so I smoothed the 2000-2006 rates by simply doing a 3-year average centered at the year shown. However, the raw data shows the same basic trend as you can see in Paul’s link above.

Rate of marriage within 5 years for never-married white women. These were calculated by taking the never-married % five years later and dividing by the % in the year shown, then subtracted from 1.0. 2000-2006 consist of three year averages to smooth the data while 2007 is simply the 2007 data since it’s the last available. 25-29 y/o labels shown while 20-24 y/o are not to avoid clutter. Update: The 35-39 y/o rate is calculated from data that comes from smaller samples and has higher uncertainty and thus jumps around more so the 2007 point is likely lower than the true rate. The younger cohorts have larger samples (more of them were unmarried) and provide more reliable info.

The most striking things to notice are the 30-34 and 35-39 y/o cohorts. The 30-34 y/o cohort declined from about 1/3 in 2000 getting married by 2005 to 1/6 of the NMWW in 2007 getting married by 2012. Even more shocking is the 35-39 y/o 2007 cohort dropping to nearly zero. It should be realized that these older cohorts are smaller subsamples and so there is likely large uncertainty in the values. Thus it is my opinion that the 2007 35-39 y/o 0.9% value is likely lower than the true value. It’s also possible that the 30-34 y/o 16.8% value is aberrantly low but it seems much more plausible since it continues the trend of the previous years. In this post I will assume the 16.8% is accurate but that the 0.9% is too low.

While less striking, the 20-24 and 25-29 y/o marry-within-5-years rates were virtually identical in both their values and their decline. In the early 2000′s they were in the mid to high 40′s but then decline to the mid to high 30′s by 2007, just 5 years later.

To give you an idea of the effect of this, let’s look at what happens when you have two successive rates of 47% vs two successive rates of 37%. In the first case, that means 53% didn’t marry, and so you have 53%*53% = 28% of the original group not married after 10 years. However, in the 2nd case you have 63%*63% = 40% not married after ten years, a number that’s 43% larger–and that’s a lot of spinsters or voluntarily-single women, and the attendant men that stay single as a result as well.

It will be very interesting to see the 2013 data come out and see if the trends continue or reverse. For now, we’ll content ourselves with making some reasonable assumptions in order to project what might happen over the next 5 years. The 20-24 and 25-29 y/o rates are declining by about 2% each year so I just decrease the projected rates by this amount for the 2008-2012 5-year marriage rates, taking them into the mid-20′s by 2012.

Continuing the steep decline for the 30-34 y/o cohort would have taken it to zero by 2010 and I don’t think this reflects reality so I choose a 1%/year decline, under the assumption that some of the younger procrastinators will get it together and marry in their 30′s and so this rate won’t decline as fast as the younger cohorts’. I also adopt this value for the 35-39 y/o cohort and choose 10% as the 2008 value, in line with the lower smoothed values from the early 2000′s (I think the 0.9% in 2007 was just an outlier).

Now comes the interesting and possibly tragic part. I apply those 5-year marriage rates to the appropriate cohort to calculate the never-married % 5 years later. Under the assumed marriage rates, the 30-34 and 35-39 y/o never-married rates are projected to double by 2017 in comparison to 2000. The 25-29 y/o rate rises by 70% and the 40-44 y/o rate by 66%.

A sanity check and another way to project the next 5 years is to simply hypothesize that the same slope that existed in the never-married levels from 2007 to 2012 will continue from 2012 to 2017. Of course, this is just a guess and there may be a marriage surge in the next few years that obliterates this assumption but let’s see what happens. The results below are similar (thought slightly lower) to what happened above when using the projected declining marriage rates.

The above gives more of a worst-case scenario of what might happen. Let’s look at a more optimistic scenario and assume that 5-year marriage rates will not decline but rather just hold steady for 2008-2012. I set the 5-year rate for the 2008-2012 cohorts to be what it was in 2007, except for the 35-39 y/o cohort that will show up as the 40-44 y/o cohort 5 years later which I set at 10%. So the marriage rates assumed are 37.8%, 35.6%, 16.8% and 10%, respectively for the 20-24, 25-29, 30-34 and 35-39 y/o cohorts that show up five years later as the 25-29, 30-34, 35-39 and 40-44 y/o cohorts in the graph below.

Here we see that the never-married %’s still rise a lot by 2017 but not quite as much as in the two previous scenarios. The 25-29 y/o never-married % is ~50% instead of high 50′s. The 30-34 y/o % is 30% instead of mid 30′s. These results are different because instead of assuming 2% decline in the marriage rate I am assuming 0% decline. The 35-39 y/o % is about 20% and the 40-44% is 14%, not too different than when I assumed a 1% decline rate per year.

Once again, I’ll point out that these are merely projections but they use reasonable assumptions of marriage rates that either continue the decline of recent years or break the trend to stay flat. Of course, one could be highly optimistic and hypothesize that marriage rates will rise in the next few years and get less dire never-married results.

I believe that most of this phenomenon is due to some women in their early and mid 20′s consciously postponing marriage in order to pursue education, work and fun, as the safe and wealthy environment allows them to do and as they have been indoctrinated by the feminist alpha mares (either directly or through their indoctrinated parents). There are likely some men who are also postponing this but a recent survey showed more young men wanted to get married than young women so it seems to be driven more by women than men. Then once women are out of their peak years of attractiveness, say in their 30′s or 40′s, those men who are still or newly single find such women less attractive than they were in their 20′s and the men’s sexual/marriage value has likely risen somewhat or even a lot in comparison to the women of their same age. Also, some men have probably become jaded after being ignored when younger.

Another possible factor is that the 5-year marriage rates for the 2006 and 2007 cohorts dropped a lot because of the Great Recession that occurred during some of the five years after these dates when whatever marrying they had happened. Things are a bit better now so it is possible that there will be a bit of a rebound. However, things are not so much better either so perhaps the “optimistic” flat scenario I came up with will be closest to reality.

If you want to marry and have kids, get married while in your 20′s. If you happen to be older you can still marry but you better stop being so picky and be open to men that are 10 or more years older (and yes, you might be able to find a man your age or younger but the odds say be open to older men). If you don’t want to marry and have kids then it doesn’t matter–carry on with your regularly-scheduled programming.

I’m not really sure what to say since it seems that many of the women you would like to marry are not interested in doing so while in their early 20′s and so the math just doesn’t work for all men. But, nonetheless, up your value as much as possible, learn game, and look in places where marriage-minded women frequent. Going to college and not getting a useless degree will likely help your odds. Since we see that a majority of women will still eventually marry there are a lot of women out there–just less than there could be.

pardon me, but just WHEN do men and husbands take any responsibility for NOT having more children?....just when....

Great question!

There is no doubt that along with women living some fantasy "I can have it all when ever I want lifestyle" men are becoming just as infantile with their Peter Pan attitudes. I look first at women because it is women who are the driving force in socialization. Men tend to be driven by physical urges whereas women used to be driven by stability and safety. It seems as the "nanny state" takes on more of the masculine role of providing stability and safety that the roles which built a healthy society are breaking down.

Because these roles are breaking down we are seeing lower birth rates. You will see what this means by looking at Japan, Italy, Greece, and France.

and why is it women have to “stop being so picky” but nothing about men being so “picky”....honestly, men think the playboy centerfolds are regular girls....while in actuality, its puffed up pastry...

I think if you look around you might be surprised to find that the girls that have a sense of humor and smile tend to have a lot of boyfriends.

Guess I’m just too old fashioned. Not sure how/why marriage, the roles of men and women, and the need for both mothers and fathers got so distorted. There just doesn’t seem to be any “ours” any more.

I am fortunate in that I live on a cul de sac with only 14 houses. Thirteen of the homes are occupied by families with adults in their late 30’s or early 40’s, all the guy have stable jobs, all have at least 2 children. All the women have degrees and could work outside the home but all think raising their children is more important. None have a great deal of money but are so wealthy in so many other ways. Just a real unique situation and, unfortunately, the exception rather than the rule.

I live in a liberal city. One thing I've noticed is no matter how many rational arguments you make they refuse to see the truth threw their emotional self-righteous fog.

True, but I've seen signs of light glimmering through the fog recently.

One sign that there might be a sea-change coming in the thinking of so-called educated women came a couple weeks ago ... when I heard an NPR commentator talking about taking her impaired child to a special therapy class.

She said she "couldn't help but notice" that most of the other moms bringing their tots to this class were "older career women," like herself.

This got her thinking that maybe, just maybe, there could be a correlation between being an "older mom," and having an impaired child. She allowed that her experience was anecdotal, and also reasoned that her location (urban NYC) was likely to produce a lopsided proportion of such cases.

However when this NPR person did a little more research, she found that the phenomenon did not appear to be confined to hip, urban areas, but was a nationwide trend.

One NPR commentator doesn't make a trend; however I think this insight is going to spread like wildfire amongst older career women. Their desire to have children will be very dampened once these women begin to realize that their chances of having that "perfect" child (as you put it) are significantly diminished after about age 34.

Great Point!

My wife and I joke about how "having children is for the young". We have 2 boys and when they were young, and especially during their teenage years, they wore us out. Thank the Lord all turned out okay, but these 40 somethings are going to be in their 60's when their children are still in college.

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