Unmarried, Still Children
Joan Frawley Desmond on Children Who’ve Been Raised for Everything but Marriage
Recently, a friend described an exchange between a mother and her son, a senior at a top university. He wanted to marry his long-time girlfriend. His mother retorted that she was more ambitious for him than his girlfriend was; she advised him to avoid an “early” marriage that might limit his options.
Another friend confided to me that he had counseled his high-school-age daughter to establish a decade’s worth of graduate school and career development before marrying. Marriage would complicate the task of achieving financial independence. And he just wasn’t sure that men could be trusted.
Without a Script
Many young people now earn parental approbation without achieving one traditional benchmark for adulthood: securing the love, commitment, and respect of a spouse. Such parental sentiments appear to be growing, and they have helped to extend and justify the footloose patterns of college life well past graduation day.
“Being 35 today is much like being 35 a generation ago. Adults’ lives are still framed by careers, marriage, children, and civic ties. But being 25 today is very different,” asserted William Galston, speaking at the Forum on Being 20-Something in the 21st Century, part of the Brookings Institution’s Responsible Parenting Project.
“Most young people in their 20s are living outside of institutions and without the structure and norms institutions provide,” continued Galston, author of a recent Brookings report, The Changing 20s. “Many feel that they are living without a script, making up their lives as they go.”
In 1970, only 21 percent of 25-year-olds had never married. In 2005, 60 percent had yet to wed. Asked to identify the key events marking the passage into adulthood, 96 percent of the young adults in one recent survey identified a full-time job. About half that number mentioned marriage.
In Jeffrey Arnett’s research for his book Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from Late Teens through the Twenties, he found marriage and children to be at the bottom of a list of events perceived as conferring adult status. While most young people believed that “accept[ing] responsibility for the consequences of your actions” and choosing “personal beliefs and values independently of parents or other influences” were crucial, only 15 percent thought marriage was.
Amorphous Milestones
Given our increased longevity, the rising demand for graduate degrees, the specter of divorce, the unstable and unpredictable job market, and the relative immaturity of today’s youth, it is easy to see why many middle-class parents think of “early” marriage as an albatross.
Joan Frawley Desmond is a freelance writer who lives with her husband and three children in Chevy Chase, Maryland. She is a recent graduate of the John Paul II Institute for the Study of Marriage and the Family.
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