Perhaps you’ve heard: Young people aren’t dating anymore. News media and social media are awash in commentary about the decline in youth romance. It’s visible in the corporate data, with dating-app engagement taking a hit. And it’s visible in the survey data, where the share of 12th graders who say they’ve dated has fallen from about 85 percent in the 1980s to less than 50 percent in the early 2020s, with the decline particularly steep in the past few years.
Naturally, young people’s habits are catnip to news commentators. But although I consider the story of declining youth romance important, I don’t find it particularly mysterious. In my essay on the anti-social century, I reported that young people have retreated from all manner of physical-world relationships, whether because of smartphones, over-parenting, or a combination of factors. Compared with previous generations of teens, they have fewer friends, spend significantly less time with the friends they do have, attend fewer parties, and spend much more time alone. Romantic relationships theoretically imply a certain physicality; so it’s easy to imagine that the collapse of physical-world socializing for young people would involve the decline of romance.
Adults have a way of projecting their anxieties and realities onto their children. In the case of romance, the fixation on young people masks a deeper—and, to me, far more mysterious—phenomenon: What is happening to adult relationships?
American adults are significantly less likely to be married or to live with a partner than they used to be. The national marriage rate is hovering near its all-time low, while the share of women under 65 who aren’t living with a partner has grown steadily since the 1980s. The past decade seems to be the only period since at least the 1970s when women under 35 were more likely to live with their parents than with a spouse.
People’s lives are diverse, and so are their wants and desires and circumstances. It’s hard, and perhaps impossible, to identify a tiny number of factors that explain hundreds of millions of people’s decisions to couple up, split apart, or remain single. But according to Lyman Stone, a researcher at the Institute for Family Studies, the most important reason marriage and coupling are declining in the U.S. is actually quite straightforward: Many young men are falling behind economically.
A marriage or romantic partnership can be many things: friendship, love, sex, someone to gossip with, someone to remind you to take out the trash. But, practically speaking, Stone told me, marriage is also insurance. Women have historically relied on men to act as insurance policies—against the threat of violence, the risk of poverty. To some, this might sound like an old-fashioned, even reactionary, description of marriage, but its logic still applies. “Men’s odds of being in a relationship today are still highly correlated with their income,” Stone said. “Women do not typically invest in long-term relationships with men who have nothing to contribute economically.” In the past few decades, young and especially less educated men’s income has stagnated, even as women have charged into the workforce and seen their college-graduation rates soar. For single non-college-educated men, average inflation-adjusted earnings at age 45 have fallen by nearly 25 percent in the past half century, while for the country as a whole, average real earnings have more than doubled. As a result, “a lot of young men today just don’t look like what women have come to think of as ‘marriage material,’” he said.
In January, the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch published an analysis of the “relationship recession” that lent strong support to Stone’s theory. Contrary to the idea that declining fertility in the U.S. is mostly about happily childless DINKs (dual-income, no-kid couples), “the drop in relationship formation is steepest among the poorest,” he observed. I asked Burn-Murdoch to share his analysis of Current Population Survey data so that I could take a closer look. What I found is that, in the past 40 years, coupling has declined more than twice as fast among Americans without a college degree, compared with college graduates. This represents a dramatic historic inversion. In 1980, Americans ages 25 to 34 without a bachelor’s degree were more likely than college graduates to get married; today, it’s flipped, and the education gap in coupling is widening every year. Marriage produces wealth by pooling two people’s income, but, conversely, wealth also produces marriage.
Contraception technology might also play a role. Before cheap birth control became widespread in the 1970s, sexual activity was generally yoked to commitment: It was a cultural norm for a man to marry a girl if he’d gotten her pregnant, and single parenthood was uncommon. But as the (married!) economists George Akerlof and Janet Yellen observed in a famous 1996 paper, contraception helped disentangle sex and marriage. Couples could sleep together without any implicit promise to stay together. Ultimately, Akerlof and Yellen posit, the availability of contraception, which gave women the tools to control the number and the timing of their kids, decimated the tradition of shotgun marriages, and therefore contributed to an increase in children born to low-income single parents.
The theory that the relationship recession is driven by young men falling behind seems to hold up in the U.S. But what about around the world? Rates of coupling are declining throughout Europe, as well. In England and Wales, the marriage rate for people under 30 has declined by more than 50 percent since 1990.
And it’s not just Europe. The gender researcher Alice Evans has shown that coupling is down just about everywhere. In Iran, annual marriages plummeted by 40 percent in 10 years. Some Islamic authorities blame Western values and social media for the shift. They might have a point. When women are exposed to more Western media, Evans argues, their life expectations expand. Fitted with TikTok and Instagram and other windows into Western culture, young women around the world can seek the independence of a career over the codependency (or, worse, the outright loss of freedom) that might come with marriage in their own country. Social media, a woman veterinarian in Tehran told the Financial Times, also glamorizes the single life “by showing how unmarried people lead carefree and successful lives … People keep comparing their partners to mostly fake idols on social platforms.”
According to Evans, several trends are driving this global decline in coupling. Smartphones and social media may have narrowed many young people’s lives, pinning them to their couches and bedrooms. But they’ve also opened women’s minds to the possibility of professional and personal development. When men fail to support their dreams, relationships fail to flourish, and the sexes drift apart.
If I had to sum up this big messy story in a sentence, it would be this: Coupling is declining around the world, as women’s expectations rise and lower-income men’s fortunes fall; this combination is subverting the traditional role of straight marriage, in which men are seen as necessary for the economic insurance of their family.
So why does all this matter? Two of the more urgent sociological narratives of this moment are declining fertility and rising unhappiness. The relationship recession makes contact with both. First, marriage and fertility are tightly interconnected. Unsurprisingly, one of the strongest predictors of declining fertility around the world is declining coupling rates, as Burn-Murdoch has written. Second, marriage is strongly associated with happiness. According to General Social Survey data, Americans’ self-described life satisfaction has been decreasing for decades. In a 2023 analysis of the GSS data, the University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman concluded that marriage was more correlated with this measure of happiness than any other variable he considered, including income. (As Stone would rush to point out here, marriage itself is correlated with income.)
The social crisis of our time is not just that Americans are more socially isolated than ever, but also that social isolation is rising alongside romantic isolation, as the economic and cultural trajectories of men and women move in opposite directions. And, perhaps most troubling, the Americans with the least financial wealth also seem to have the least “social wealth,” so to speak. It is the poor, who might especially need the support of friends and partners, who have the fewest close friends and the fewest long-term partners. Money might not buy happiness, but it can buy the things that buy happiness.
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