Over at The New Ledger, Ben Domenech takes on Conor over whether the rising generation has the right stuff when it comes to getting on with adulthood. Specifically, we’re given to ask, what’s with delaying marriage? Is it the product of capitalism gone wild? Is it simple procrastination? Narcissism? All of the above?
These are interesting questions, but I can’t help but think that their whole analytical frame is somewhat suspect. In the paradigm cases, the marriage delays we’re talking about mean staying single through all of one’s twenties and getting married somewhere in one’s thirties. Anecdotal evidence, as far as I can tell, suggests that marriage delays really wind up meaning a late-twenties ceremony and not an early-twenties one. There is, of course, a significant long tail of women delaying marriage deep into their thirties or even forties, but Sex in the City, as we all know, is so ’90s relative to the Apatow Era, even adjusting for gender differences.
So I ask you: Is our hand-wringing over marriage delays and cultural adulthood retardant really the product of a silly pop decade analysis that views one’s teens and one’s twenties and one’s thirties as the same kind of developmental stages that started to emerge with the Boomers? Political decade analysis we owe to the Boomers, too — and why, if not the uncoincidental way in which the decades of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have tracked with the sequential stages of growing up Boomer? To be sure, a broad cultural shift toward delaying marriage twenty years would mean real changes — and not for the better, for some basic biological reasons I could go on about later. But I think those kinds of extreme delays are rare and getting rarer. For Boomers, marriage pejoratively meant arresting your personal development at an early age; for our present-day hipsters, yupsters, grups, etc., marriage aspirationally means something more like achieving full maturity before you’re too old to enjoy it. It’s hard for me to see how a shift in the marriage mean from early to late twenties or early thirties raises ominous questions or worrisome implications. Actually, stabilizing the timing of marriage somewhere in that zone would actually make for a real success in the fight against the relativist proposition that there’s no common-sense judgment we can generally agree on about when it’s good to start a family.
July 17th, 2009 | 8:39 am
I think people are scared of divorce and want to wait until they’re really, really sure.
July 17th, 2009 | 8:47 am
Right — but they DON’T want to wait until they’re no longer at least passably young and good-looking. Despite the big business of cosmetics, confections, and elective surgery catering to the somewhat older generations, people in our cohort are pretty depressed by the idea of marrying as old squares pretending to still have it.
July 17th, 2009 | 9:05 am
Marriage age isn’t really the proper thing to worry about for conservatives; they should be worrying about the proportion of people who do get married and stay married. After all, demographic historians have shown us that in 18c New England, the average marriage age for men was something like 27, meaning half of men were older than that when they first married (due to things like money, the fact that men outnumbered women significantly in the colonies, etc.). Ben’s chart indicates this point; he talks about the increasing average age of marriage since the 1950s but that was an all-time low. Average marriage ages in the early 20c were closer to those of today. So, I wouldn’t worry about the age at which people are marrying but the fact that for many marriage (as we’ve known it for a long time) might not be all that central to their life plans.
July 17th, 2009 | 10:00 am
What’s with delaying marriage?
1. eternal adolescence
2. a distaste for divorce, given the experiences of our parents
3. ever greater comforts
4. the availability of sex
5. credentialism
Spengler, as always, is worth a look:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/KG14Dj05.html
July 17th, 2009 | 3:11 pm
Jonathan, Good list–and it points to the Lockeanization of marriage–more calculation, consent, and “rational control” than ever.
July 17th, 2009 | 4:27 pm
[...] James Poulos responds: So I ask you: Is our hand-wringing over marriage delays and cultural adulthood retardant really the product of a silly pop decade analysis that views one’s teens and one’s twenties and one’s thirties as the same kind of developmental stages that started to emerge with the Boomers? Political decade analysis we owe to the Boomers, too — and why, if not the uncoincidental way in which the decades of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have tracked with the sequential stages of growing up Boomer? To be sure, a broad cultural shift toward delaying marriage twenty years would mean real changes — and not for the better, for some basic biological reasons I could go on about later. But I think those kinds of extreme delays are rare and getting rarer. For Boomers, marriage pejoratively meant arresting your personal development at an early age; for our present-day hipsters, yupsters, grups, etc., marriage aspirationally means something more like achieving full maturity before you’re too old to enjoy it. It’s hard for me to see how a shift in the marriage mean from early to late twenties or early thirties raises ominous questions or worrisome implications. Actually, stabilizing the timing of marriage somewhere in that zone would actually make for a real success in the fight against the relativist proposition that there’s no common-sense judgment we can generally agree on about when it’s good to start a family. [...]
July 17th, 2009 | 7:14 pm
Raising children requires a fair amount of energy, which tends to decline as time goes by, plus there’s an increased risk of birth defects over age 40 so if children are desired you’d better get to it sooner rather than later.
July 19th, 2009 | 10:18 pm
[...] strictly on the basis of the willing consent of both individuals, that can be dissolved at will. As Lawler points out in the comments at First Things, this is a Lockean foundation to be sure, but one that has been fused with the [...]
July 20th, 2009 | 12:51 am
As a youngster thinking about getting married within the year, I can tell you that among my peers I am definitely in the minority. I am going into my senior year of college and while there is a handful of couples that are seriously discussing marriage, it is not on the radar for the vast majority. Many express a disdain of the prospect of ever marrying and a surprisingly large number express a disdain for children and the thought of having their own. This could be due to a lack of maturity, but I think is largely due to the dominance of the so-called “hook up” culture on campus. Relationships are highly sexual and fleeting. Jonathan sums it up quite well. Why get married and take on marriage’s burdens when you are sexually gratified and upwardly mobile?
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