I saw this USAToday opinion piece on Valentine’s Day, and meant to blog about it at the time, but didn’t get around to it. But it’s still interesting, I think, even if the author’s attempt to compare dating and iPods was a little forced:
It’s no secret that, when it comes to love, today’s twentysomethings aren’t settling down. The median age at first marriage is 25 for women and 27 for men, but among the college-educated, it’s higher. Among urban twentysomethings, people sporting wedding rings seem rarer than young people walking around without iPod cords dangling down their necks. About a third of men and a quarter of women ages 30-34 have never tied the knot….
[W]e live in a culture of infinite choice. … with 40 million singles using online dating sites, you could date someone new every night for the rest of your life. … Too much choice makes people less likely to commit. In a famous study, business professor Sheena Iyengar and social psychologist Mark Lepper had two displays of jams set up in a grocery store. One had six varieties, the other 24. The larger display lured more tasters, but people were 10 times as likely to buy jam from the smaller one.
I know most of my friends in New Zealand (pop.: 4 million) got married in their 20s … also, when I lived in Manhattan in 2002-’03, I never joined a running club, in part because I couldn’t choose between all the different Manhattan clubs. It was much easier to choose when I lived in Astoria and Manchester, N.H.
Universal marriage is/was a relatively new phenomenon. It used to be, in NZ at least, that wealthy women, who didn’t have to marry for finanicail security, sometimes chose not to, and poor men who tended to have farming, mustering, outdoorsy sort of jobs, did not marry (no choice because they were out in the ‘wilds’ with no women??)
Men tended to marry down in social class and women to marry up – Your granmother was an exception, marrying a poor minister….
Mum
I don’t think the increasing # of choices is what’s keeping people single.
I mean, is dating really SOOOO much fun that we are rejecting relationships so that we can have dinner every night a week and tell a new person about our younger brother and college experiences seven nights a week? Doubtful.
There just isn’t as much of a push to pair off early on. Not as many people going to church socials, community dances, whatever.
Plus, then there is the complete acceptance now of premarital sex, so two horny 22-year-olds who have been dating for a year don’t have to get married in order to take advantage of their longing. They can date for another few years first and live together without anyone complaining. They can watch their love dissolve after two years and then, instead of sticking it out (like they might try to in a marriage), go their separate ways by 25.
But I don’t think it has anything to do with people rejecting relationships because they MIGHT find a date on the internet.
Anyone else got theories?
Well, I’ve foresworn Internet dating … and I do actually have fun dating! Not that I haven’t had my share of bad experiences…
I am sure there are multiple explanations. But it does seem like people in small towns get married way earlier than people in big cities. Also, you hear about people being afraid to “settle” — i.e., that there could be someone bright and shiny and new, right around the corner.
Mum, do you think this had anything with the m/f ratio in New Zealand? I don’t know what it was … but in the U.S. it seems like every rural area has more men, while the cities have more women.
Let’s not forget that in decades past, a strong economic incentive existed to get married, especially for women– it was just easier to advance economically as part of a couple or family unit, rather than alone. A man couldn’t run a farm alone as easily as he could with children to help harvest; a man couldn’t survive working a 14-hour factory shift as easily without a wife at home to keep up the house; a woman was pretty much confined to poverty without a male breadwinner, particularly if she had children.
Today people can survive quite well alone for most of their lives, so you have the luxury of not feeling the financial pinch of being single as much as prior generations.
I’ve been saying the same things for at least eight years and that it all boils down to too much choice. But has anybody splashed my words all over the paper? No…. đ
I think the concept of “not settling” is misunderstood. I think what it basically means is that people should not settle for marrying someone they don’t love, because sooner or later it’ll fall apart. Marriage is something to take seriously; you’re with that person an awful lot, and swearing to stand by them in sickness and health, so you really have to care about them.
Look at our parents – they got married early on, and a lot of them got divorced.
The concept of choice might be true of people in their early 20s who are afraid to get married because they don’t know if the person they are with is the right person forever. I think that can be confusing. But once you’ve been out there a few years, you get a good idea of who will make you happy and who won’t.
People are all different and aren’t attracted to 10,000 other people, so the idea of choices on the internet really doesn’t fly. There may be a lot of PEOPLE on the internet dating sites, but they aren’t necessarily matches for any one individual. I have never heard anyone say, “Boy, there are dozens of people I could marry on the internet!” Even having to advertise yourself for all the world to see is no fun.
But I’m a girl. It may be different for you guys – maybe there are lots of women out there for you.
Yes, but look at our grandparents– they got married even earlier on, and a lot of them stayed married for 40 years. Only when we made divorce easy, with no-fault laws, did the divorce rate really start to skyrocket. (Or maybe it was just the advent of mass media, when people started seeing how common divorce could be. I dunno.)
I think the divorce rate (which is actually declining, it’s back down to what it was in the early ’70s) has a lot to do with women having their own careers etc. Women initiate about two-thirds of all divorces in the U.S.
Caren, maybe it is different for guys. In NYC I think the m/f ratio is in our favor, and guys are mostly the ones who still ask for dates.
When I broke up with S. last spring I did post ads and Match and Nerve and answered some Craigslist personals. But I basically think that’s a lousy way to meet people … and actually, I never did meet anyone off those sites, although I have previously. You just can’t tell enough about someone from their profile to tell if you’ll have any chemistry with them. Better to meet people in bars and clubs, imho.
(But maybe I am just a terrible personal ad-writer and -responder — I hardly got any nibbles to the emails I sent. That’s sorta a humiliating thing for a professional writer (well, reporter) to admit, but I guess personals are sorta their own little genre.)
>>>You just canât tell enough about someone from their profile to tell if youâll have any chemistry with them.
I think that’s true, and I’ve heard a lot of people say it, and it probably has little to do with your writing skills. That’s why I think the argument about their being all these “choices” doesn’t fly.
Sure, occasionally people do find love on the net, but it’s not as if it happens constantly. Most of the people I know who have done internet dating have ended up meeting someone in person, even when they weren’t trying, and ending up in a relationship. I’ve known people who were on internet dating sites for over a year and then met someone through friends and ended up with them. Those people certainly are not going to break it off so they can go back into bars and onto the net!!
I think there probably was more societal pressure on both genders to get married and have kids during our grandparents’ time, too. There’s even less incentive for men to get married right now than there is for women. When our grandparents were young, the expectation was that a guy would find a nice girl and get married and have a lot of kids. So there was pressure on the guy as well as the girl.
>>>Thatâs why I think the argument about their being all these âchoicesâ doesnât fly.
Hmm. Yeah, re-reading the USA Today piece — I think you’re right, the point that we have lots of choices because of online dating sites is weak. But still, there is a larger point to be made, that we have lots of choices ’cause we live in huge cosmpolitian city where it’s possible to go out every single night of the week. (Have you ever tried dating and meeting people in New Hampshire?)
(Have you ever tried dating and meeting people in New Hampshire?)
No. But I don’t think the lack of choices would make it any easier to settle down. There might not be any choices at all – that certainly wouldn’t make it easier!
Everyone in N.H. seemed to get married by their mid-20s. Maybe that is partially because people who are career-focused leave the state for the big cities. But it also seems like more of my friends in New Zealand (total pop.: 4 million) have also settled down. It’s NYC where most everyone is single.
[…] Barry Schwartz, author of the Paradox of Choice, explains in a five-minute video how “greater freedom and more choices often make us feel worse.” It’s interesting, I thought, and goes to that post on dating I had earlier … too many choices “produces paralysis, rather than liberation,” Schwartz argues. […]