The Marriage Recession
Americans are not rejecting marriage. They are deferring it, reconsidering it, and, in growing numbers, simply not getting around to it. The causes are economic. The consequences are cultural and demographic.
On a Tuesday evening in March, in a third-floor walk-up in South Philadelphia, a 34-year-old woman named Vanessa is explaining why she is not married. The explanation takes a while because it does not have a single cause. There is the man she was with for four years who could never quite commit. There is the job that requires her to travel two weeks out of every month. There is the question of whether she can afford a wedding and a down payment on an apartment in the same decade. There is the way her own parents' marriage ended, badly, when she was eleven. And there is the simple fact — she says this without apology — that she has not met anyone she wanted to marry.
"My grandmother was married at 22," Vanessa says. "My mother was married at 26. I'm 34. I'm not opposed to it. It's just — the whole structure of how it's supposed to work doesn't quite map onto my life."
This mismatch between the inherited architecture of marriage and the actual lives Americans are living is the story of American family formation in the early twenty-first century. The marriage rate has been falling for half a century and reached a historic low in 2023. The median age at first marriage has risen to 30.5 for men and 28.6 for women, levels that were unimaginable a generation ago. Among Americans without a college degree, marriage has not merely been deferred; it has, for a significant share of the population, effectively ceased to be a normative life stage.
The political temptation is to moralize this trend — to frame it as cultural decay, a flight from commitment, the fruits of individualism run rampant. This framing is almost entirely wrong. Americans have not stopped wanting lasting relationships or family formation. What has changed is the economic and material ground beneath the institution. The marriage recession is, above all, an economic story. Understanding it requires leaving the culture wars behind.
A Tale of Two Marriage Markets
The sociologist Andrew Cherlin of Johns Hopkins University has spent four decades studying American family formation, and his research offers the most precise account of what has actually happened. The decline of marriage, Cherlin argues, is not uniform. It is bifurcated along class lines in ways that have profound implications for how we understand the trend.
Among Americans with a four-year college degree — roughly the top third of the educational distribution — marriage has not disappeared. It has been deferred. These Americans are marrying later, and a somewhat higher fraction are remaining unmarried than in previous generations, but marriage persists as a normative life stage. The college-educated marry, have children within marriage, and divorce at rates that have been declining since the 1980s.
Among Americans without a four-year degree — roughly the bottom two-thirds — the picture is categorically different. Marriage rates have fallen dramatically. In the 1970s, the marriage rates of college graduates and non-graduates were not very different. Today, the marriage rate for Americans without a degree is roughly 30 percentage points lower than for those with one. Births to unmarried mothers are now more than 60 percent of all births among women without a college degree. The divergence is not a matter of degree. It is a matter of kind. Marriage has not been deferred for this population. It has, to a significant extent, dissolved as an institutional expectation.
The critical question is why. And the answer, in Cherlin's framing and in the broader sociological literature, centers not on cultural attitudes but on economic preconditions.
The Economic Preconditions
Marriage has never been a pure romantic institution. In virtually every human society for which we have records, marriage is a practical arrangement embedded in economic structures — in property, in labor, in the security of children and the elderly. American marriage in the twentieth century was no different. The postwar marriage boom was not simply a product of romance. It was the product of an economic configuration in which a male breadwinner with a high school diploma could expect stable employment at a union wage, enabling the formation of a household.
When that economic configuration collapsed — as deindustrialization destroyed the manufacturing jobs that had underpinned the working-class family formation model, as unions contracted, as the male wage for workers without a college degree fell in real terms from the mid-1970s onward — the material basis for early marriage eroded with it.
The economist David Autor and his colleagues have documented this mechanism in rigorous detail. In communities that experienced concentrated manufacturing job losses — particularly due to Chinese import competition in the 2000s — the share of men who were economically "marriageable" by traditional standards fell sharply, and marriage rates followed. The research identified a specific pathway: when male employment and earnings prospects deteriorate, men become less likely to meet the implicit economic threshold that women, and men themselves, have historically associated with marriage readiness.
This is not a claim about gender relations frozen in amber. It is a claim about real economic psychology. Study after study confirms that both men and women associate marriage with a degree of financial stability — with the ability to afford a home, or at least a stable rental situation; with the sense that a household can meet its obligations. When that stability is absent, marriage is deferred. When it seems permanently out of reach, marriage effectively disappears from the horizon.
The Housing Problem
No account of the marriage recession is complete without grappling with housing. Between 2000 and 2024, median home prices in the United States rose by approximately 175 percent after inflation. In major metropolitan areas — the places where most economic opportunity is concentrated — the increases were larger still. The median home price in the San Francisco Bay Area now exceeds $1.2 million. In Boston, Seattle, and Washington, it exceeds $700,000. In cities that were once affordable — Nashville, Austin, Denver, Boise — prices have reached levels that effectively exclude households earning median incomes from homeownership.
The relationship between homeownership and marriage may seem coincidental, but the research suggests it is causal in both directions. Home purchase has historically been tightly linked to marriage timing — couples marry and then buy, or buy in anticipation of marrying. When homeownership becomes effectively unattainable, it removes one of the key structural markers around which marriage has traditionally been organized.
The rental market offers no simple substitute. Renters in American cities face not only high costs but radical insecurity — lease renewals, evictions, rent increases, landlord decisions that can displace a household with sixty days' notice. This insecurity is fundamentally incompatible with the long-horizon planning that marriage and family formation require. You do not decide to have children when you don't know where you'll be living in two years.
The housing crisis, in this reading, is not merely a housing crisis. It is a family formation crisis. The zoning laws, the permitting processes, the neighborhood opposition to new construction that have restricted housing supply in American cities for fifty years are not only producing unaffordable real estate. They are producing unmarried adults and unchosen childlessness at a scale that will have demographic consequences for generations.
What Men Are Doing
Any honest account of the marriage recession has to engage with the male labor market in particular. The post-industrial economy has been, on balance, better for women than for men — not because it was designed to be, but because the jobs it eliminated were disproportionately male (manufacturing, mining, construction labor) and the jobs it created were disproportionately accessible to women with moderate educational attainment (healthcare, education, administrative services).
The result is a generation of men, concentrated in the lower half of the educational and income distribution, who are less educated than women of the same age, less employed, and earning less — often substantially less — than their fathers did at the same point in their lives. This is not a small population. It is, by most measures, the majority of American men under 35 who do not have a college degree.
The research on how women select marriage partners has remained remarkably stable across time and across cultures: women strongly prefer partners whose economic status is at least as high as their own. This preference is not a cultural artifact to be argued away. It is deeply embedded in the social psychology of partnership, reinforced by a century of data, and responsive to real economic concerns about household stability and child welfare.
When male earnings and employment fall below female earnings and employment for a significant share of the potential marriage population, the marriage market faces an arithmetic problem that no amount of cultural change can fully resolve. There are simply fewer men who meet the implicit economic thresholds that both men and women associate with marriage readiness.
The response among men in this position has been, in many cases, withdrawal. Labor force participation among men without a college degree has been falling for decades. Social engagement, by multiple measures, has contracted. The rise in "deaths of despair" — the drug overdoses, the alcohol-related illnesses, the suicides documented by Anne Case and Angus Deaton — is concentrated in exactly the population of men whose marriage rates have collapsed. The causality runs in multiple directions, but the common underlying factor is economic displacement that has not been addressed.
The Demographic Reckoning
The consequences of the marriage recession are not merely personal. They are demographic and, ultimately, political.
The total fertility rate in the United States has fallen to approximately 1.6 births per woman, well below the replacement level of 2.1. This decline is driven primarily by the collapse of family formation among younger Americans, particularly those without college degrees. The fertility decline is not uniform across the population — college-educated women who marry are still having children at rates close to replacement, though later — but the bottom two-thirds of the population, where marriage has most dramatically contracted, is also where fertility has fallen most sharply.
A society with a total fertility rate of 1.6 and a rapidly aging baby boom generation faces a straightforward arithmetic challenge: the workforce shrinks, the dependency ratio rises, and the social insurance programs built on the assumption of demographic growth become progressively harder to fund. Immigration has historically compensated for native fertility decline, and may continue to do so, but the political sustainability of that compensation is uncertain.
The household formation decline has its own consequences. Single-person households now constitute the largest single category of American household type, surpassing the married-with-children household in 2023 for the first time in recorded American history. Single-person households are less economically efficient, more spatially demanding, and more vulnerable to economic shocks. They are also, on average, less happy — the research on this is extensive and consistent. The marriage recession is producing a population that is, by the standard measures, worse off.
What Policy Could Do
The political conversation about marriage has been dominated, for decades, by cultural conservatives who frame the issue as one of values and by economic progressives who either dismiss marriage as a retrograde institution or treat it as the product of forces too large for policy to touch. Both camps are largely wrong.
The evidence that family structure matters for child outcomes is overwhelming. Children raised by two married parents are, on average, more economically mobile, better educated, healthier, and less likely to enter the criminal justice system than children raised by single parents. This is true even after controlling for income — though income controls are difficult, since marriage itself raises household income. The relationship is complicated and does not support simplistic causal narratives, but dismissing it is ideologically motivated, not empirically defensible.
At the same time, the conservative prescription — exhortation, stigma reduction around marriage, opposition to divorce — has no evidence of effectiveness. You cannot argue people into getting married. What you can do is change the material conditions that make marriage inaccessible.
The policy agenda is not mysterious. Affordable housing — through zoning reform, through public construction, through stronger tenant protections — is the single most powerful family formation intervention available. Wage policy that raises the floor of male earnings: minimum wage increases, sectoral bargaining, investment in the trades and the industries that employ less-educated men. Paid family leave and subsidized child care, which are not primarily about marriage but which reduce the economic penalty of family formation once marriage has occurred. And a social insurance system that does not penalize marriage through benefit cliffs that make formal partnership economically irrational for the poorest households.
None of this is costless. None of it is politically easy. And none of it will return the marriage rate to 1965 levels, nor should it. The goal is not to restore a particular family structure. It is to rebuild the economic conditions under which people who want to form lasting partnerships can do so — under which Vanessa in South Philadelphia does not face a situation in which the whole structure of how it's supposed to work doesn't map onto her life.
That mapping is what we have lost. Rebuilding it is a choice. Not an easy one, and not a fast one. But a choice.
Sofia Torres is a contributing writer at The Auguro covering family, demographics, and social policy.