Thirty and Still Single
In 1950’s, women were married at 20 and men at 23. Now it’s at is all time high, Women are walking down the isle at the age of 27 and 29 for men. Why? Well there are many reasons why. Are they not able to follow the old ways? Are they too good for the word marriage? Or are they too busy getting ready? Is it the smart thing to do or was the old ways the best way?
The first reason, being a gentlemen and having certain standard have become old fashion. Men and women have changed their mindset a lot over time. In the 50s winning the women’s heart and hand in marriage was a real prize. Bring flowers to her, taking her out on dates, and showing her manners was part of our culture. Now what is seen in more of lack of commitment, from fear or not wanting to be held down, and less effort to get the girl. This may be because women have lowered their standards as well and have let men get what they want with out a ring on their finger. No commitment usually leading to lack of loyalty, which in return brings people to not being able to trust. It becomes a cycle, leading the untrusting person to not commit. Some may fear to commit from their family history, they may have lived through a divorce or had one parent walk out. They do not want to end up in the same situation, so they may more cautious or run from it completely. In the old days, people would proudly show their partner to the world. But now people boost about sneaking off with someone else. In the 50’s
All it took was one google search for marital statistics to prove me wrong. According to a 2016 publication by the ABS, marriage rates have been on a high compared to the mid and late 1900’s. The very play that made me question the future of marriage was a pioneering play of the 1950’s by Ray Lawler, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll- a tale about unconventional relationships that don’t stand the test of time.
Now and days I just see so many people just laying down and making babies instead of having values and morals with being married before the kids come. I can’t say all marriages will last because I was married at 20 and we did not last very long at all.
Today people are blinded by money, looks, and social status. People marry for many other reasons but sometimes never for real true love. Money and looks can be part of the equation, but they are not really durable factors. Money and looks always end up, and you simply end up with your partner. That’s why
In the 1950s, almost everyone would get married right out of high school. If you didn’t get married, society thought there was something wrong with you, that made the other person not want to be with you. There were very few people that lived together that had kids but weren’t married. Living together, without being married, was frowned on back then; mostly because of religious beliefs. Churches frowned on divorce also. They believed that
Next, many women were under the age of nineteen got married in the 1950s and started their families with their husband (PBS). Women that went to college in the 1950s did not have a college degree because they potentially had to look for husband or else was in danger of being an old maid if they were not married. (PBS). It is different today because women can get married in the United States at any age and not be part of a social norm that happened in the 1950s. Partners that marry young in their early 20s today have a higher chance for divorce than partners who marry after the age of 25. (Pearlman pg. 203). According to Amato and Rogers (1997) says reasons that young married couples have problems in their marriage is because of infidelity, jealously, lack of maturity, and financial problems (Pearlman pg. 204). People also marry young because of the wrong reasons in today’s society For example, this wife was married to her husband because both
The sociologists of the time say that 4% of kids were born outside the marriage. They were marrying at a lot younger ages between 1900 and 1960 which average age went from 26 to 23 for men and from 22 to 20. Around that time the birth rate increased at a very dramatic rate. So after the World War II the whole meaning of marriage began to weaken, which started the next type of marriage.
Women are not as pressured to get married at such young ages and ignore career paths for themselves. Education and job opportunities today have opened up for women. Women are no longer obligated to stay at home and act as the only caretakers for their children. There are more roles in society for women that do not trap them inside the domestic sphere and cause them to be depressed or deprived of alternative lifestyles. I think that individualism and more opportunities should be offered equally to men and women, so today is the better time period for
Before marriage, young adults would participate in courting. Men began searching for a potential wife in their late teens while women began this process around the age of fifteen of sixteen. However, these colonial individuals did not actually marry until they were in their early to mid-twenties.The concept of marriage includes many objectives , “according to the mid-nineteenth-century edition of Webster's dictionary, marriage was "the act of uniting man and woman, as husband and
Long before 1970, divorce was relatively uncommon. Getting a divorce was very tedious. At that time, you could only get a divorce under grounds of adultery, abandonment, cruelty, intoxication or any other serious reason to no longer be together. What has changed and why has the divorce rate raised to 50% of all marriages? Divorce rates has raised to 50% because of society changes, view of monogamy, and young marriages.
For hundreds of years young children were married off early in life sometimes 12 years old for girls, and 14 years old for boys. So why doesn’t that happen now? This simply is because starting in the early 1900s the age “limit” as some would say started increasing. Now instead of having to be 12 or 14, a person has to be anywhere between 15 and 21 to get married. Some of the reasons why this change occurred is compulsory state schooling, child labor laws, and studies showing the negative effects of early in life marriages (Dahl).
In over half a century, marriage has transformed from being a social requirement to simply being an option in today’s society. What has caused this change? Many institutions in our society have changed drastically along with marriage. Although these institutions have not caused marriage to be optional, they do strongly correlate with the decreased value. The economy, education, religion, and government have all altered since the 1950s. When any institution encounters a change, all other institutions are affected. Family is a major institution in society, and I believe that marriage is an important aspect of this institution. Cohabitation, religion, women in the work world and divorce have all effected the way marriage is viewed today.
Just to list a few the family dynamic and the economy of today has altered juristically compared to the prosperous 1950’s. For families of today Nytimes.com states “Considered the purported ‘postponement of marriage’ by young adults today. In the late 1950’s about three-fourths of all women between ages of 20 and 24 had already been married.” Today young adults enjoy freedom and don’t involve the dream of
The 1950’s were cookie cutter; there was usually a working father, a homemaker mother, and a couple of kids. Although women were working and had jobs in the 1950’s, after WWII many women still stayed home being a house wife if the husband’s income could afford it. If women had jobs, and the job was unnecessary they were considered selfish. Having a husband at this time was more important than having a job or a degree. Marriage in the 1950’s was highly based around religion. Pre-marital sex was considered unacceptable, and women were married at ages as low as nineteen (People & Events, 1).
Marriage has increased in popularity, reaching a peak in 1971. Since then there has been a significant decline in the number of marriages, from 459000 in 1971 to 250000 in 2001.
In the generation where my grandparents came from, marriages were purely arranged by the elderly. Mothers or aunts usually selected a marriage partner for their sons. My grandparents got married when both of them were very