Alright ladies and gents, grab a cup of coffee or tea for this week's article because this is one of the few times where I try to put my intelligence cap on and try to tackle a question being asked of me.
One of my loyal readers wanted me to tackle the question of why marriages are on the decline in the United States. A great question, and even better because this is Odyssey. I don't even have to make this into an essay, I can go on a tangent like this one and I won't even get marked off points for it. Anyway, I think I have an idea for the possible answers to this question, but to make it easier to read, I'll put it in listicle format so people can just skip to the points.
1. Delaying marriage in life.
https://unsplash.com/photos/4ptfb2wMP4M
Essentially, our quality of life is getting better and better each passing year, so the decline in marriage could be that people, both men and women, are delaying it because our timeline is a little bit longer now than it was 10 years ago. My research found that the average woman getting married in the U.S. was around 35 years old, and the average man getting married was around 38 years old. People are still getting married way earlier than this, but this doesn't account for divorces either, which leads to the next point.
2. Men are starting to date less frequently, but not by choice.
https://unsplash.com/photos/XL-hPDNeZvs
There are still men out there that are dating tons out there, but there's a lot more that isn't, and it can be attributed to some factors. The introduction to online dating not too many years ago has caused a strange phenomenon, especially in women. With the number of options given to an individual on online dating, it has caused "the paradox of choice" to happen in the dating world. I read that women find about 80% of the men they meet unattractive. That means out of 5 men, only 1 of them a woman might have attractive - that's wild. Want to know another crazy statistic? Women also initiate close to 80% of all divorces, another crazy one. With all this in mind, men have to work harder in the dating world than women to succeed, so women actually have the upper hand in this instance.
3. No Return On Investment (ROI).
https://unsplash.com/photos/9bXKsMvgZtQ
I didn't think about this last one, but the no ROI thing kind of comes into play as well. I read on a source that men are less likely to marry due to the fact of cheap access to sex (online pornography), but I don't think that's the reason why. Marriage kind of works like a business relationship - in ways it brings in more money. The fact that men and women are starting to figure out how to survive by themselves could be a reason for a decline. If we go back to the access of sex, even though there are more options out there, more millennials are having less sex than the last generation, approximately two sexual partners less than generation X (10 to 8).
If we all boil it down, the marriage rate has fallen due to a certain number of factors; it's not just one. I am just curious as to figure out which is the main culprit for it.
