I’m almost 29. Everyone I know over the age of 50 wants to marry me off.
A certain relative who shall remain unidentified likes to tell me, rather woefully at this point I think, that I’m unlikely to find a match here in California amongst the surfer bums. At least, not the kind of serious match that will result in marriage and the much-desired mythical “grandbabies” that my mom keeps requesting.
It has been suggested to me that golf lessons are an ideal place to meet more serious types, but I quite conveniently have a pinched nerve that would make swinging the club out of the question. (Sorry, Tigers.)
Would I like to be set up with one of the military officer acquaintances of a family friend?
Or, it has been hinted, might I wish to join a professional organization where I could perhaps give out business cards as date bait?
I have just one close friend who is married. Perhaps that’s not the norm, I don’t know. But frankly, my friends and I are typically far more concerned with figuring out what our next brunch stop will be than when we’ll get hitched. And kids? Quite a few aren’t even sure if they want them.
Research shows that marriage rates among Millennials are lower than in previous generations. But why? Is it that Millennials aren’t interested in marriage at all? Do we just want to live out selfish existences taking selfies with our furbabies (that’s slang for “pets,” for you non-Millennials) and spending all our spare cash on brunch instead of college tuition for future human children?
Or is it something else? Perhaps some less unflattering reason, preferably?
Search “Millennials and marriage” on the web and you’ll come back with some rather pointed titles:
• “For Many Millennials, Marriage Can Wait,” a December Huffington Post piece proclaimed.
• “Why are millennials putting off marriage? Let me count the ways,” The Washington Post quipped in October.
• The real doozy is courtesy of Bustle, also from October: “Millennials Aren’t Just Getting Married Later In Life — More Than A Third Will Never Marry.”
Stateline, a Pew Charitable Trusts project, analyzed U.S. Census data and, in an article released in February, found that in 2016, Utah was the only state where more than half of people aged 20 to 34 had been married at some point. “In 2000, 39 states were in that category,” the article noted.
In California, 69% of Millennials in that age range have never been married, according to the report. In 2000, it was 50/50.
The national median ages for marriage were 29 for men and 27 for women in 2016, according to the report’s analysis of census data. Those are two-year age increases from 2000.
At a time when people my age are delaying adulthood longer and longer as they cope with burdensome student debt and the high cost of living coupled with wages that don’t meet the requirements of these quandaries, dating and marriage have taken a backseat.
After all, it’s kind of hard for us to figure out whether we want to get hitched when we just moved out of our parents’ houses, and many into a place with up to three roommates.
These issues coincided with the development of technology that pretty much encourages total and utter laziness when it comes to romance: dating applications. And as a result, if you ask me, dating has become like a video game where no one advances to the next level.
I once texted someone I had been on a couple of dates with the simple query, “Drinks tonight?” In response, I received two long-winded, apologetic paragraphs explaining that I clearly had much higher expectations than he could live up to, that he was not in fact in a place for anything serious, and that it was best if we move along.
As a friend put it to me when I relayed the tale later that evening: “So you asked the bare minimum possible expectation – seeing you in a social setting – and that freaked him out?”
This was a dating application match. The fact that we went out at all is quite impressive, given that most people are so lazy on these applications that conversations typically fizzle out after an introduction. And honestly, I’m just as guilty of that myself.
This is not just my experience. One-third of online daters have not actually met up with the people they have corresponded with online, according to Pew Research Center.
Dating applications are the worst. Anyone who has used them for a length of time will tell you this. I blame the early 2000s MTV series “Next,” where a contestant would sit on a bus and would-be dates would enter to see if they could hit it off and go to a date location. But the contestant could at any time unilaterally declare “Next!” and the potential match would be whisked away by MTV goons.
This is the essence of online dating, except all you have to do is swipe right on your smartphone for “like” and left for the new version of “next.”
Will online dating lead to more marriages? Only 5% of married adults in America have met online, so maybe that should tell us all something.
I’m leaning towards no.
My last interaction with an online dater was with someone who let a conversation fizzle only to text me a month later. After I ribbed him for it, he replied: “Sometimes things need to marinate. Dry aged steaks can sit for months on end.”
“Congratulations,” I replied, “you literally just compared a woman to a piece of meat.”
Next.