The wait of our unions
Romance is a sure thing for many couples this Valentine’s Day. But marriage isn’t.
“Couples seem to cohabitate for a longer time before getting married now,” said Dr. Jane Koresko, a licensed marriage and family therapist who works in South Union Township.
The local numbers back Koresko up. According to the American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, 69.2 percent of men and 60.4 percent of women aged 20-34 in Washington County had never been married as of 2014. In Fayette County, 70.8 percent of men and 58.3 percent of women aged 20-34 had never been married, and in Greene County, 72.2 percent of men and 49.6 percent of women in the same age range hadn’t yet tied the knot.
Statistics show the tri-county area is in step with the national trend of couples putting off marriage or forgoing it altogether. While 72 percent of Americans were married in 1960, just 48.4 percent were married in 2014, with 67.2 percent of Americans aged 20-34 having never married as of two years ago.
“Marriage is much less likely to happen and it’s taking longer to get there,” said Dr. Karen Guzzo, an associate professor at Bowling Green State University and associate director of the Center for Family and Demographic Research.
A 2014 study by the Council on Contemporary Families found that the percentage of men and women who cohabitate before marriage increased by almost 900 percent in the past 50 years, adding that two-thirds of new marriages took place between couples who have already lived together for an average of 31 months.
Living together is coming before getting married more and more because younger people just aren’t feeling ready for marriage as early as they used to.
“Think of marriage from 50 or 60 years ago,” Dr. Guzzo said. “You did it early in life, you grew and matured together, you got a crappy apartment together, then you got money. Now marriage is the last thing you’ve achieved after you do everything else. You’ve got a good job, you’ve sowed your wild oats, then you’re ready to settle down. It’s taking longer to transition into adulthood. There’s all this stuff that takes longer to do, going to college, grad school. Nobody thinks of somebody at 22 as a grownup anymore.”
Men holding off on marriage while holding on
Men are getting married later than women, both nationally and locally. The percentage of men aged 20-34 who had never married was higher than that of women in the same age range in Uniontown, Connellsville, Monongahela, Monessen, Waynesburg and California by an average margin of 11.08 percent. The percentage of men ages 20-34 never married was 16.1 percent higher than women in that age range in Greene County, 12.5 percent higher in Fayette County and 8.8 percent higher in Washington County.
Dr. Guzzo noted that men have always been older than women at marriage but believes the transition into adulthood has been tougher for men, thus contributing to the age discrepancy between the genders upon getting married.
“Women have made progress in education and careers,” Dr. Guzzo said. “More than half of college grads are women now. Employment rates for them are higher. The type of jobs men can get are different now. You can’t get that manufacturing or union job without a college degree like your dad had. It’s taking a lot longer for men to find they’re financially stable.”
Holding off on marriage seems to be particularly prevalent in Uniontown. According to American Community Survey data, a whopping 86.5 percent of men in Uniontown aged 20-34 had never been married as of 2014, 19.3 percent above the national average in that category. Similarly, 71.7 percent of women in Uniontown aged 20-34 had never been married, 14.1 percent higher than the national average.
Young couples looking to marry need jobs to make that happen. Uniontown’s unemployment rate of 14 percent was 4.5 percentage points higher than the Fayette County average as of 2014, according to American Community Survey data.
Dr. Francisco Zepeda, a licensed marriage and family therapist who works in Uniontown, said couples looking to marry that he has consulted are “more in tune with their finances” than his previous client bases in Milwaukee and Illinois.
“They’re seeing if they’ve got their finances straightened out before they get married more in this region,” Dr. Zepeda said.
Couples who are more financially stable due to one of the region’s most prominent industries are also together less as a result, Dr. Zepeda has noticed.
“When guys are working in the natural gas wells, they’re gone for two to three weeks at a time, then they come back for six days,” Dr. Zepeda said. “Couples I get are dealing with that kind of schedule. The closeness that used to be there isn’t there now. I deal with that kind of thing more than infidelities.”
’Marriage is just not an achievable goal'
Unmarried cohabitors in their late teens and early 20s are still having children even as they wait on wedding together.
“Forty percent of all births are to unmarried women, and 60 percent of those are to cohabiting couples,” Dr. Guzzo said. “These unions are fragile and break up a lot.”
In its 2012 report on the state of marriage in America, the National Marriage Project, a nonpartisan research initiative based at the University of Virginia, characterized the rapid decline in marriages among those who are high school but not college-educated as “a change that strikes at the heart of the American Dream.” Dr. Guzzo doesn’t agree.
“The National Marriage Project says marriage causes other problems, like crime rates, men not being civilized,” Dr. Guzzo said. “The other train of thought, which I fall more in line with, is it’s the effect of other structural changes. The labor market has bottomed out, and marriage is just not an achievable goal.”
It’s also a goal that younger generations don’t want to get wrong.
“They’re gun shy to marry,” Dr. Koresko said, referring to the rise in divorce rates among previous generations. “They’re not wanting to repeat what their parents did.”
“They see marriage as a lofty ideal, they really prize it,” Dr. Guzzo said. “They want to get out of their parents’ basement. ‘If we can just get by that, then we can get married.’ Then they don’t get to it.”
The word ‘soulmate’ weighs heavily on suitors too, Dr. Guzzo added. Young suitors want everything to be just right, even as they keep losing the financial agency to meet that high bar.
“It’s harder than it’s ever been,” Dr. Guzzo said.