The decline in marriage rates (US, Japan, Korea, Europe)

The US crude marriage rate peaked just after World War II, declined through the 1970s, briefly stabilized in the 1980s, and has fallen steadily since. The median age at first marriage has risen from 22.8 for men and 20.3 for women in 1960 to 30.5 and 28.6 in 2022 — a delay of almost a decade in two generations. The proportion of US adults aged twenty-five to fifty-four who have never married has risen from about nine percent in 1970 to about thirty-five percent today. Marriage has gone from near-universal to substantially optional in two generations.

Andrew Cherlin's The Marriage-Go-Round and subsequent work documents the bifurcation of US family life. College-educated Americans still marry at high rates, divorce at lower rates than a generation ago, and raise children predominantly within marriage. Non-college Americans marry less, cohabit more, have children outside marriage at much higher rates, and experience higher relationship instability. The "marriage-go-round" pattern — serial cohabitation with multiple partners and children — is increasingly a working-class American pattern, while the college-educated have settled into a quieter, more stable, but rarer marital norm.

Phil Cohen's 2019 paper showed that the US divorce rate has been declining since the early 2000s — not because marriages are happier on average but because the people who marry are increasingly selected for marriageability. The marriages that do form are between older, more educated, more financially stable partners who have already lived together and tested compatibility. The aggregate effect: fewer marriages, but more durable ones. The implication is uncomfortable for both the "marriage is dying" and the "marriage is fine" frames; both miss what is actually happening.

Mary Brinton's research on postindustrial Japan describes a labor-market structure that makes marriage particularly costly for women. The Japanese full-time employment system demands long hours and uninterrupted careers, but the social norm continues to expect married women to either exit the workforce or take a step down. Young Japanese women have responded rationally: by delaying or forgoing marriage. The state has tried to address this with childcare provision, tax incentives, and matchmaking programs, with little measurable effect. The structural problem is the labor market, not the marriage market.

South Korea's marriage and fertility decline is the steepest on record. Sang-Hun Choe's New York Times reporting has documented the multiple compounding causes: housing costs that make family formation unaffordable for young couples, hagwon education costs that make childrearing a multi-decade financial drain, gender-role expectations that have not modernized at the pace of female educational attainment, and a labor market polarized between elite "regular" jobs and precarious "non-regular" employment. The 2022 fertility rate of 0.78 — and 0.72 in 2023 — implies population halving within sixty years if sustained.

European patterns vary by region. France, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark have substituted cohabitation and civil partnership for marriage substantially, with fertility rates that remain among Europe's highest (though still sub-replacement). Italy, Spain, Greece, and Portugal have lower marriage rates and lower cohabitation rates, producing the lowest fertility in Europe. Germany sits between. The UK has followed a partial-substitution pattern closer to France. Eastern Europe has its own dynamic, with marriage rates that fell sharply after 1990 and have stabilized at low levels.

The substitution of cohabitation for marriage is the central question for whether the marriage decline is a decline in pairing or merely a decline in the legal form of pairing. The honest answer varies by country. In France and the Nordics, cohabitation is genuinely substitutional: couples form, live together, raise children, and persist for decades without marrying, and the legal protections of civil partnership have been built out to make this viable. In the US, cohabitation is more transitional: couples live together but the relationships are less durable and produce more relationship churn. In Japan and Korea, cohabitation remains uncommon, and marriage decline is mostly partnership decline.

Across all four regions, the underlying story is a renegotiation of the gender bargain that produced 20th-century marriage. The old bargain — male breadwinning, female homemaking, durable pair-bonding around childrearing — assumed a labor market and a domestic economy that no longer exist. The new bargain has not yet stabilized. Women have entered the labor force at scale; men have not entered the domestic economy at comparable scale. The result is a structural mismatch that depresses marriage formation, particularly in societies (Japan, Korea, southern Europe) where the old gender norms have proven most resistant to renegotiation.

Marriage rates and fertility rates are tightly correlated because most childbearing in most cultures still happens within marriage. The fertility decline is therefore both consequence and cause of the marriage decline: fewer marriages produce fewer children; the prospect of children-without-marriage further weakens the marriage norm. South Korea, Japan, and Italy are now in territory where fertility implies population halving within two generations. The economic and political consequences — for pensions, for elder care, for military manpower, for political stability — are not yet fully arrived but are baked in.

Across all four regions, religious affiliation has declined sharply over the same period as the marriage decline. The two trends are not coincidental. Religious institutions were among the strongest normative pressures toward marriage in the 20th century. Their decline removes a piece of the scaffolding. In the US, religious Americans still marry at substantially higher rates than non-religious Americans, and the trend lines diverge by religiosity. In Europe and East Asia, the religious-secular gap is smaller because religiosity itself has collapsed.

Phil Cohen's broader work has emphasized the unequal distribution of the marriage decline. The decline is not happening evenly; it is concentrated among non-college Americans, particularly non-college men. The implication is that marriage is becoming a marker of class privilege — a thing the educated and affluent still do, and the rest increasingly don't. This stratification has its own consequences for inequality: married households accumulate wealth faster, raise children with better outcomes, and confer the marriage premium on the next generation.

Migration has historically reshaped local marriage markets, and Maria Sumption's policy work on European migration has documented how immigrant communities sometimes maintain higher marriage rates than the surrounding native populations, partly through diaspora-network matchmaking and partly through retained religious-cultural norms. The longer-run pattern is convergence: second-generation immigrants tend toward the marriage rates of their host country within a generation or two. Migration thus modulates but does not reverse the underlying trend.

Think clearly across regions. The US, Japan, Korea, and Europe are running variations of the same story with different parameters, and the variations are diagnostic. Hold the data without flinching: marriage rates are down, age at marriage is up, class divergence is widening, fertility is collapsing in the most acute cases, and policy levers have so far failed to reverse any of this. The honest analysis names what is happening, identifies the structural drivers, and resists both the moralizing right and the dismissive left. Whatever comes next will be built on these numbers, not on the rhetoric about them.

1. Cherlin, Andrew J. The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today. New York: Vintage Books, 2010.

2. Cohen, Philip N. "The Coming Divorce Decline." Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World 5 (2019): 1–6.

3. Cohen, Philip N. The Family: Diversity, Inequality, and Social Change. 3rd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2021.

4. Brinton, Mary C. Lost in Transition: Youth, Work, and Instability in Postindustrial Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

5. Brinton, Mary C., and Dong-Ju Lee. "Gender Role Ideology, Labor Market Institutions, and Post-industrial Fertility." Population and Development Review 42, no. 3 (2016): 405–33.

6. Choe, Sang-Hun. "South Korea's Fertility Rate Sinks to 0.78, Despite Billions Spent to Reverse Course." New York Times, February 22, 2023.

7. Sumption, Maria. Family Migration to the UK. Migration Observatory Briefing. Oxford: University of Oxford, 2020.

8. Rosenfeld, Michael J., Reuben J. Thomas, and Sonia Hausen. "Disintermediating Your Friends: How Online Dating in the United States Displaces Other Ways of Meeting." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 36 (2019): 17753–58.

9. Twenge, Jean M. Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents — and What They Mean for America's Future. New York: Atria Books, 2023.

10. Murthy, Vivek H. Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World. New York: Harper Wave, 2020.

11. Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000.

12. Julian, Kate. "Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?" The Atlantic, December 2018.