First comes love, then comes … more US teen girls not dreaming of marriage
For decades, pop culture norms have told us that girls dream of their perfect wedding from a very young age. However, a newly published analysis of 2023 survey data suggests those tides are starting to shift, and perhaps it’s boys who could begin piecing together vision boards and scrapbooks in anticipation of their big day.
Marriage on the decline
Pew Research recently published an analysis of survey data collected by the University of Michigan in 2023. According to their findings, U.S. high school students are taking an increasingly dim view of marriage, compared to a similar survey conducted three decades prior.
Whereas 80% of 12th-grade students surveyed in 1993 said they’ll likely choose to get married in the future, only 67% held the same view in 2023.
Likewise, the percentage of students who said they were unsure if they would get married jumped from 16% to 24%. Those who definitively said they don’t want to get married increased by a mere four percentage points, from 5% to 9%.
Girls vs. boys
Perhaps more interesting, though, was the shifting attitudes toward marriage between girls and boys. Pew’s analysis found that the share of girls who say they want to get married one day plummeted 22 percentage points between 1993 and 2023. Now, 61% of 12th-grade girls say they see nuptials in their future, versus 74% of boys.
Meanwhile, the survey results and subsequent analysis illuminated other aspects of high schoolers’ outlooks on marriage.
In 1993, 59% of respondents said it’s very likely that they will stay married to the same person for their entire life. As of 2023, that number stood at 51%.
The number of teens who say they want kids of their own has also decreased over the past 30 years, from 64% in 1993 to slightly less than half (48%) in 2023.
According to Pew, there were no significant gender disparities in these other questions.
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Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
