The percentage of high school seniors who expect to get married one day has declined from 80 percent in 1993 to 67 percent in 2023.
Nearly one-third of high school seniors say they will never get married.
That number astounds me.
For boys, the numbers have been flat:
76 percent of boys surveyed in 1993 wanted to get married, and 74 percent said as much in 2023.
The shift has been significant for girls:
The percentage of girls wanting marriage dropped from 83 percent to 61 percent.
This makes more sense to me.
If you’re a young woman in high school, looking at the boys around you and seeing many of them spending significant portions of their day staring at screens filled with violent video games, mixed martial arts, and pornography, then perhaps your hopes for marriage are understandably slipping.
When you learn that The Joe Rogan Experience is the most popular podcast in America today for young men, you might start to wonder if it’s worth committing your life to a man.
When you see your classmates more concerned about their marijuana consumption than their acquisition of knowledge and skills, you might start to wonder if being alone makes more sense.
When you see the gap between high school and college graduation rates widening between men and women, perhaps you wonder if a man can even contribute adequately to a household in the future.
When you see the gender gap between men and women in the recent Presidential election and and realize that significantly more men voted for Trump — a man who was once a good friend — and perhaps the best friend — of pedophile Jeffrey Epsein who took great pleasure in walking into the dressing rooms at beauty pagents he once owned to stare at naked contestants and was found liable of sexual abuse by a jury of his peers and who believes he can grab women’s genitals without repurcussions and recently arranged for a sweetheart deal for Epstein’s former pedophile conspirator and who was instrumental in the revseraal of Roe versus Wade, maybe you start to wonder if the opposite sex has any appeal.
Of course, what a young person thinks in high school and what they actually do later on in life are two very different things.
I remember a lot of rebels in high school who are decidedly less rebellious today.
Also, for every sexist, misogynist, porn-addicted man in the world lacking ambition and a work ethic and obsessed with the stupidity of video games and bullying politicians, there are also some truly great men in this country, worthy of partnership, companionship, and the love of another person in the form of lifelong commitment to marriage.
Many of my male friends would fit this category.
But perhaps there are fewer of these men today?
Or maybe the terrible men are simply louder and prouder today, so they are distorting things?
Either way, when 61 percent of young women want to be married someday, and 74 percent of young men hope for the same, the result, if these preferences become reality, will be a lot of men looking for love and not finding it.
Of course, my entire framing of this issue has been heteronormative. Include enough people who are gay, bisexual, or pansexual, and the like, and perhaps these numbers will work out for everyone, even if a lot of young men aren’t looking so appealing these days.
As I tell my son, Charlie, quite often:
I don’t think you’ll need to try very hard to look pretty great compared to the men of your generation, which is both good and bad news.
I hope I’m ridiculously incorrect and stupidly obtuse in this assumption.
