Why Aren’t the Kids Getting Married?

In 1976, when disco was still king and leisure suits were fashionable, 65 percent of American 12th-grade girls definitely wanted to get married. They wanted the big wedding, the kids, the Ford Country Squire station-wagon and the kitchen with the avocado-green appliances.

But somewhere between Saturday Night Fever and Top Gun II, something changed. Today only half of 12th-grade girls say they “definitely” want a partner for life. The fastest growing survey response is “Not Sure”.

Beneath the data lies a growing trend. The share of US households with married couples peaked in 1949. Since that time it has dropped 62%. Which is kinda surprising since in 2015 the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage. Theoretically we should have a lot more people married couples.

Kids of divorced or single parent households are less likely to see marriage as an important part of their future. For many of them, marriage isn’t a fairy tale — it’s a cautionary tale. They don’t reject it; they just don’t trust it. Partially because of this kind of messaging from yesterday’s NYT.

But there is more to this story than a few family of origin stats and a newspaper headline. It’s been a confusing time for young adults. Those in their late teens suffered through the Pandemic in high school and/or college. They were also the lab rats for the most confusing time in gender history. 

In 2020, around 2.5% of first year college students would not or could not identify their gender as male or female. Just two years later in 2022 and again in 2023, that number rose 172% to hit an astounding 6.8%. Sociologists refer to these kinds of dramatic swings as Black Swan events. An extremely rare and unpredictable event, which people often try to rationalize in hindsight as if it was predictable all along. At some schools like Andover College, numbers rose as high as 10%. It was the peak of an era.

But something strange is happening in 2025. Just two years after the Black Swan event, an even more surprising thing happened. A White Swan event — a highly predictable occurrence based on historical patterns. In the annual FIRE survey, first year college students shocked everyone. Just 3.6% of college freshmen reported their gender as “other”. So the share of students identifying as neither male or female has fallen nearly 50% in 24 months — back to historical levels.

In the fog of the pandemic, millions of young people were isolated, staring at screens all day. There’s a part of adolescence they totally missed. Why does it matter? It matters because identity formation requires friction. Awkward conversations. First dates. Heartbreaks and rejection. The rights of passage that you must experience in those confusing teenage years. But when the world shut down, the friction disappeared and identity formation stalled out.

It’s not surprising that the kids got a little confused. It’s a classic example of a Social Contagion. When enough people in your environment think, feel, or behave in a certain way, you become more likely to think, feel, or behave similarly. All those hours on-line watching Tik-Tok videos and Insta Reels led many to question their identity. And the contagion spread.

As life slowly returned to normal — classrooms reopened, sports resumed, friendships rekindled —something predictable happened. Most kids realized they were, in fact, who they’d always been. The White Swan moment of 2025 was not a cultural backlash. It’s a cultural return to pre-pandemic levels. They were simply returning to themselves.

But here’s where the story takes another turn. Because while gender identities may be stabilizing, intimate relationships are not. The percentage of high school seniors who have ever had sexual intercourse is now the lowest since the CDC began measuring it. Young adults aren’t just delaying sex — they’re opting out of relationships altogether.

Today, 24% of adults age 18-29 have had no sex in the last year. The share of men ages 18–30 who report zero sexual activity in the past year has tripled since 2010. That’s not a moral judgment — it’s another Black Swan event. Did someone forget to tell them that the pandemic is over?

We have a generation of young adults who rarely date, rarely commit, and rarely take emotional risks. And when you remove dating from the teenage years, you don’t magically replace it with mature adult relationships. You replace it with hesitancy. With fear. With the belief that intimacy is a minefield best avoided.

And so the question is: what happens to a society where young people don’t date, don’t connect and don’t marry? The answer is: we aren’t sure. But we do know this: both heterosexual and homosexual married people are significantly happier. Their self-reported well-being is 50% higher than those who never married.

But here’s the good news buried inside the data: confusion is often followed by clarity. The pendulum that swung wildly between 2020 and 2024 is settling. Young people may not be rushing to the altar, but they are re-affirming their identities.

The challenge — and the opportunity — is reminding them that anything good in life requires risk — regardless of your gender or sexual preference. Perhaps the next generation is slowly rediscovering what every generation before them eventually learned: that life becomes richer, not smaller, when you choose to share it.

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