The REAL Reason No One Wants To Get Married Anymore (The Uncomfortable Truth)

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]Marriage is in trouble. Not like your aunt Carol's third marriage is in trouble. Although, you know, prayers up for aunt Carol. The entire institution is in trouble. Here's the number that started the panic. The marriage rate in the United States has dropped 26% since 2000. 26% in 25 years.

[00:00:17]The marriage rate today is 2.4 per 1,000 people. That is roughly half of what it was in the early 1990s. Half.

[00:00:25]The median age at first marriage in 2025 hit record highs. 30.8 years for men, 28.4 years for women.

[00:00:32]In 1974, those numbers were 23.1 and 21.1. 50 years ago, men were married at 23. Today, they're waiting until 30. And 1/3 of Gen Z is projected to never marry at all. 1/3. 34% of American adults have never been married. A record 20% of adults have never married. Up from about 1/4 in 1950. And fewer than half of all US adults are currently married. Let that land. Fewer than half of American adults are married. Marriage has gone from the default setting of adult life to the minority option. To the thing you do if you want to and can afford it. And increasingly, people are looking at the contract, the financial implications, the legal framework, the statistical likelihood of it working out, and choosing to file that one away for later. Or just not at all.

[00:01:16]And the response from the political class has been predictably, impeccably, almost impressively useless. Tax incentives, awareness campaigns, marriage education in high schools. As if young people are not getting married because they forgot how. They know how.

[00:01:30]They watched their parents.

[00:01:31]Which is for some of them part of the problem.

[00:01:34]The real reason nobody wants to get married anymore is not a failure of values. It is a system that made marriage a financial gamble in an era where nobody can afford to lose. This is the Fiscal Historian where history explains the present. Subscribe right now and turn on notifications. Here's the question for the comments below. Are you married, planning to marry, or have you quietly written it off? Drop your honest answer. We read every single one.

[00:01:58]Before we get into the reasons, let us address the elephant in the room. Or more precisely, the thing everyone says when marriage comes up. Half of all marriages end in divorce. You have heard this your entire life. You have probably said it. Here is the thing. It is not actually true anymore. The divorce rate has dropped by nearly 50% since 2000.

[00:02:15]50%.

[00:02:17]The couples getting married today are significantly more likely to stay married than the couples who got married in 1990. Because the people getting married today are older, more educated, more financially stable.

[00:02:28]And they have thought about it considerably more. Which sounds like good news, and it partly is.

[00:02:33]Except the reason divorce rates are falling is partly because the people most likely to divorce are increasingly not getting married at all. They are simply not entering the institution in the first place. So, we have stronger marriages with fewer people in them.

[00:02:47]Which is a bit like saying the restaurant has excellent food while noting the restaurant is empty.

[00:02:52]Technically accurate, missing the point.

[00:02:54]The first uncomfortable truth is the financial barrier. Because before we talk about romance and commitment, we need to talk about what getting married actually costs. The average American wedding in 2026 costs approximately $35,000.

[00:03:08]$35,000 for one day.

[00:03:11]One extremely photographed, extremely catered, extremely stressed about day.

[00:03:15]Now, some of you are thinking, that is why you elope. You skip the big wedding and just do it small. And you are right.

[00:03:21]That is a completely valid option.

[00:03:23]But here's the thing about the financial barrier to marriage. It is not just the wedding. The wedding is almost the least of it. Marriage fundamentally requires housing. You need somewhere to do the whole living together part.

[00:03:35]The median US home price in early 2026 is approximately $412,000.

[00:03:41]The median household income is approximately $80,000 a year. That is a price-to-income ratio of over 5 to 1. In the cities where people aged 22 to 35 actually live and work, the ratio is often 10 to 1 or higher. You cannot set up a married life in a one-bedroom apartment or more precisely, you can.

[00:03:59]People do it, but it changes the calculation on children immediately, which changes the stability of the marriage immediately, which changes the long-term prospects of the whole project.

[00:04:08]The Institute for Family Studies 2026 State of Our Unions report confirmed it. Young adults today are living in a depressed dating economy, a depressed dating economy. That phrase is doing a lot of work because a depressed economy produces depressed outcomes. And one of those outcomes is fewer people entering long-term commitments when the financial foundation for those commitments does not exist at the age when those commitments traditionally formed. The second uncomfortable truth is what happened to dating and this one is both genuinely interesting and genuinely alarming.

[00:04:40]The 2025 National Dating Landscape Survey surveyed 5,275 unmarried adults aged 22 to 35, the prime marriage years.

[00:04:49]And what it found was not pretty. The dating system that is supposed to funnel people toward marriage is not working.

[00:04:55]It is producing connections, but not commitment, encounters, but not relationships.

[00:05:00]And a lot of people who are technically dating but functionally not moving toward anything lasting.

[00:05:05]Dating apps have transformed how people meet and not entirely for the better.

[00:05:09]Before apps, finding a partner required effort, social risk, vulnerability, the terrifying act of talking to someone in person with your actual face and voice and nervous energy. Apps removed all of that. They made finding people effortless and they introduced something psychologists call the paradox of choice. When there are infinite options available committing to any one of them becomes psychologically harder. Why fully invest in this relationship when the app still has a thousand other profiles waiting? The answer, of course, is that the app always has a thousand profiles.

[00:05:40]And the perfect person on profile 1,001 does not exist.

[00:05:44]But the feeling of possibility keeps you from discovering that. The result is a generation that is more connected than any before it and more romantically adrift than any before it. 42% of American adults are currently unpartnered. 42% not casually seeing someone, not in a complicated situation, fully unpartnered. That is the highest proportion in modern recorded history.

[00:06:05]And you cannot get married if you cannot find someone to marry.

[00:06:08]Which seems obvious.

[00:06:10]And yet the marriage decline conversation almost never starts there.

[00:06:13]It starts at the altar. When the problem started at the app. The third uncomfortable truth is what the data says about men specifically. Because this is the piece of the puzzle that makes everyone uncomfortable.

[00:06:24]But the numbers require addressing.

[00:06:26]The marriage decline is not happening equally across genders. It is significantly more pronounced among men without college degrees.

[00:06:33]Working class men in particular have seen dramatic declines in their marriage rates over the past several decades.

[00:06:38]And the explanation that gets thrown around most often is that working class men cannot financially support a family. So they are less attractive as marriage partners and therefore less likely to find partners who will marry them.

[00:06:51]But here is where it gets complicated.

[00:06:53]The Heritage Foundation's 2026 analysis found that wages are not actually the primary driver of the working class marriage decline.

[00:07:00]Inflation adjusted wages for working class men did fall in the 1970s and 1980s but have risen since and have fluctuated rather than declined dramatically. So something else is driving it.

[00:07:12]The report points to shifts in cultural expectations and what it calls the Midas mindset. The idea that marriage has become something you do after you have arrived. After you have the career, the financial stability, the fully formed identity rather than something you build together while arriving.

[00:07:28]The problem with the Midas mindset is that arriving keeps getting pushed further away.

[00:07:33]The financial stability required before marriage felt achievable in 1985 when home prices were three times income. It feels genuinely unattainable in 2026 when home prices are five to 10 times income, and the student debt that did not exist for previous generations now follows people into what should be their family formation years. The bar for feeling ready keeps rising, partly because of genuine economic precarity, partly because of cultural messaging about achievement, and partly because every social media feed is full of perfectly curated weddings, houses, and families that represent the highlight reel of other people's lives and make your current actual life feel like an audition you are failing.

[00:08:11]The fourth uncomfortable truth is the legal and financial risk calculus. And we are going to get into this carefully because it is real, it is documented, and it affects decisions, even if it is deeply uncomfortable to talk about.

[00:08:25]Marriage is a legal contract. Most people think of it as a romantic commitment. It is both, but the legal part is underrated. When you get married, you are entering a financial partnership that will be adjudicated by the state if it ends, and statistically, a significant number of marriages end. Even with divorce rates falling, the risk is real. The financial consequences of divorce are severe, division of assets, potential alimony, child support arrangements, legal fees that can reach tens of thousands of dollars, a process that in contested cases can take years. For men in particular, the financial risk of divorce has historically been significant.

[00:08:59]Research consistently shows that men's standards of living tend to fall more sharply than women's following divorce, particularly in arrangements involving children. And this risk calculation is showing up in the data. More men are delaying marriage. More men are choosing cohabitation over marriage. More men are, when surveyed, honestly citing legal risk as a factor in their reluctance to commit legally.

[00:09:20]This does not mean marriage is a bad idea for most people. The research consistently shows married people are wealthier, healthier, and happier on average than their unmarried counterparts. Despite the narrative, the institution works for most people who enter it well. But perception is powerful, and the perception that marriage is a rigged game has become widespread enough to affect the marriage rate, whether or not the perception is fully accurate. The fifth uncomfortable truth is what happened to social pressure.

[00:09:46]This one is less economic and more cultural. For most of human history, the social pressure to marry was enormous.

[00:09:52]You got married because not getting married was weird, because your parents expected it, because your community expected it, because unmarried adults were viewed with a kind of mild civic suspicion, like you were opting out of something important. That social pressure was not always healthy. It pushed a lot of people into marriages they should not have been in. It kept people in marriages that were actively harmful.

[00:10:11]And removing it was, in important ways, progress.

[00:10:15]But removing the social pressure to marry also removed the social scaffolding that made marriage the default. When marriage stops being the assumed path and becomes one option among many equal ones, fewer people choose it, not because they actively oppose it, but because in the absence of external pressure, the internal calculation requires a much clearer personal case and in 2026, when the internal calculation has to contend with housing costs, dating app paralysis, student debt, legal risk, and the general ambient anxiety of modern adult life, making a clear personal case for a major irreversible commitment is harder than it used to be.

[00:10:50]The Heritage Foundation report confirmed that marriage rates decline as cultural emphasis on needing to be married decreases.

[00:10:56]This is not a conspiracy. It is cause and effect. Remove the cultural requirement and watch what happens to voluntary uptake. The answer, it turns out, is it falls significantly, steadily, measurably.

[00:11:09]The sixth uncomfortable truth is what marriage actually costs beyond the wedding, because the $35,000 wedding is only the beginning.

[00:11:16]The tax implications of marriage, commonly called the marriage penalty, mean that many dual-income couples pay more in taxes married than unmarried.

[00:11:23]The marriage penalty affects couples where both partners earn similar incomes, pushing them into a higher combined bracket than they would face separately. A couple, each earning $70,000, may pay significantly more in combined taxes as a married couple than they would as two unmarried individuals filing separately.

[00:11:41]Now, this penalty has been partially addressed by various reforms, and it varies significantly by income level and circumstances. But the perception that marriage is financially punitive, combined with the genuine cases where it is, has become another entry on the growing list of reasons to hesitate. And then, there's the cost of the divorce. The average contested divorce in the United States costs between $15,000 and $30,000 in legal fees for each party. The average complex divorces involving children, property, and disagreement can cost significantly more. And the emotional cost, which cannot be quantified, is the reason that people who have been through a difficult divorce are often the most reluctant to enter another marriage. The remarriage rate per 1,000 divorced or widowed adults has actually been declining from 33 to 28 between 2008 and 2016. The people with the most direct experience of what marriage costs when it ends are the ones least likely to try it again. That is a data point worth sitting with. The seventh uncomfortable truth is what the research says about what works, because this video is not anti-marriage. The data on the benefits of marriage is genuinely strong. Married people live longer on average. They accumulate more wealth than their unmarried counterparts. They report higher levels of happiness and life satisfaction. They have better mental health outcomes. Their children have better outcomes on nearly every measured variable. The institution itself is not the problem. The access to it and the conditions around it are. Countries that have maintained higher marriage rates in the modern era have done so by making the material conditions for marriage more accessible, affordable housing that young couples can actually enter, childcare that does not consume one entire salary, parental leave that does not force a choice between career and family, legal frameworks around divorce that are fair and predictable, reducing the terror on both sides of the contract. These are not romantic interventions. They are structural ones, and they work in ways that marriage education programs in high schools and tax incentives for married couples entirely fail to address.

[00:13:38]Because the barrier to marriage in 2026 is not a lack of information. It is not a failure to understand why marriage is valuable. It is the very practical obstacle of not being able to build the material foundation that makes a marriage feel possible rather than reckless. Here is the uncomfortable truth the title promised. And it is this. Nobody is anti-marriage. Nobody is sitting around thinking romance is overrated. Most people want a partner.

[00:14:02]Most people want stability. Most people want the thing that the research says marriage provides. The longer lives, the accumulated wealth, the companionship.

[00:14:10]What they do not want is to enter a $35,000 contract in a housing market they cannot afford while carrying student debt that started before they could vote with a 42% chance of being unpartnered when they try to find someone in a legal framework that makes the exit potentially ruinous. And then be told that the problem is a values deficit, that they are not committed enough, that their parents generation had figured something out that they missed. Their parents generation got married at 23 in houses that cost three times income without student debt, without dating apps, without the specific cocktail of economic and social conditions that makes the same choice dramatically harder in 2026. The marriage rate is not a moral report card. It is an economic indicator. It tells you whether the conditions for family formation exist.

[00:14:53]Right now in 2026, fewer than half of American adults are married. The marriage rate is at its lowest in a century, and 1/3 of Gen Z is projected to never marry at all. That is the receipt for every housing policy, every wage policy, every student debt policy, every child care policy, every structural choice made by every government that made the foundation of marriage less accessible for the generation that is now supposed to be building one. Fix the foundation and watch what happens to the marriage rate. Every civilization that stopped forming stable families eventually declined. Not in a single day. In the data, in the demographics, in the schools that got quieter, in the pension systems that got shakier, in the communities that got lonelier, until they were something different from what they had been.

[00:15:37]The marriage rate is the canary, and in 2026, the canary is looking a little pale.

[00:15:41]If this gave you a new perspective, hit subscribe. The Fiscal Historian.