Growing Number of Middle Aged People Have Never Been Married

Twenty years ago middle aged women were told if they hadn't married yet, their chances of doing so were practically nonexistent.

Now less-educated middle aged men face that problem.

The New York Times just ran a story that shows a significant increase in the percent of people who have never married. That is especially true for people with a less-than-high-school or high school education -- and that affects men more than women, because women tend to be better educated than men.

For instance, for every 100 men with a high school education in 1980, there were 132 women. Now there are 94.

And in 1980, a high school education could have qualified a man for a well-paying blue collar job and made him a more promising marriage prospect. Now that's far less likely.

In 1980, only about 5% of 40-44 year old men with a high school education had never been married. Now it's about 18%. For women of the same age and education, the increase was from 4% in 1980 to about 12% in 2004.

The lengthy NYT article probes the sociology and psychology of this trend, examining cohabitation as an alternative to marriage, more educated and more selective women, and whether men are simply choosing not to marry.

We think the fact that the percentage of middle aged never-marrieds is rising for both sexes and at almost all education levels (women with 4+ years of college are the exception) indicates that the change is society-wide. But the gap between the sexes does seem to have widened -- there now look to be far more middle-aged never-married men at each step of the educational ladder than similarly educated never-married women.

This isn't necessarily bad news if marriage isn't a life goal. Writers Eduardo Porter and Michelle O’Donnell note that "All the men interviewed for this article looked younger than their age. All said they were happy with their lives ..."

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The flip side of this issue is that there are now more college-educated women than men -- a problem that will only get more lopsided. Right now, men are only 42% of U.S. college enrollment, according to another NYT article.

Here at LifeTwo we have an article on Pew Research Center data showing that married people report themselves to be happier than single people.