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Millennials Are Causing the U.S. Divorce Rate to Plummet

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Re: Millennials Are Causing the U.S. Divorce Rate to Plummet

#81

Post by sandworm101 »

JadeNB wrote: post #50
sandworm101 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real racket isn't in ripping people off for services, but that everyone needs these services. Weddings used to be relatively private affairs. Costs were far less. Churches provided services to parishioners and associated gatherings were at family houses. Today we are expected to purchase everything. Take wedding dresses. They were not always white. Brides bought expensive dresses, but they would expect to use the…

> The real racket isn't in ripping people off for services, but that everyone needs these services. Weddings used to be relatively private affairs. Costs were far less. Churches provided services to parishioners and associated gatherings were at family houses. Today we are expected to purchase everything. I disagree that everyone needs these services, only that, as you say, many people expect to provide (or that thei…

https://www.theknot.com/content/military-wedding-ceremony-an...

I've been to a couple of these. The costs are basically nil and you get some perks (honor guards with swords, flyovers etc) that trump any fancy destination wedding.

Re: Millennials Are Causing the U.S. Divorce Rate to Plummet

#82

Post by komali2 »

odyssey7 wrote: post #75

Millennials are forced to be more careful, because they're climbing a difficult and important ladder into financial security. Most people I know who aren't looking to marry are just very aware that this is not the right time for them, neither finically nor in relation to achieving their professional goals.

I'm trying to find correlated information on young birth rates. My unprofessional guess is that a hell of a lot less people are getting teen pregnant and then marrying about it, which could lead to a messy divorce down the road (the thought of marrying some of the first people I hooked up with... I was 18 fucks sake...)

Re: Millennials Are Causing the U.S. Divorce Rate to Plummet

#83

Post by komali2 »

smoll wrote: post #34
jandrese wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bottom of the article says that they are also getting married less. Basically, back when the Baby Boomers were young it was a major source of shame to have sex outside of marriage for a lot of people, so they got married early and then discovered that it wasn't a good match. Lucky for them the divorce option was available at least. These days kids are much more free to experiment before they tie the knot and aren…

Wasn’t it just the sensible thing to do back when the definition of what people today think of as a “sin” was invented? Imagine if safe, reliable, widely-available contraception was around when they were first formulating it, I bet the rules would have been way different. I guess we could extend the metaphor perpetually - if there was no biological clock or aging at all, the rules might be completely different again.

The Romans sure as heck didn't think it was sinful - they'd throw a pig's bladder on and go to town. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexuality_in_ancient_Rome

Re: Millennials Are Causing the U.S. Divorce Rate to Plummet

#84

Post by quirkot »

pastor_elm wrote: post #44
thaumasiotes wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we’ve been saving for two years to have a wedding, and we’re planning a relatively cheap one The second part here is in conflict with the first part...

An upper middle-class wedding on the coasts at any venue goes for a minimum of 30k. A really cheap wedding is just having in your back yard with a keg, but I don't think the OP is talking about that. A nice wedding with all your college buddies, looking at 100k.

I assume you people are all in the heart of San Francisco or something, but that is still legit insane.

[edit] Also, I don't think you can still call a wedding "upper-middle class" if it's 6 digits. Holy moly. I'm shook

Re: Millennials Are Causing the U.S. Divorce Rate to Plummet

#85

Post by bunderbunder »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #54
bunderbunder wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The downside is that when they do have kids outside of marriage it's a worse situation as the families are less stable without the institution holding them together. There's an unstated major premise here - that any "two parents cohabitating" family, even an unhappy one, is better than a single-parent or separated-parents family. Is that true?

Why not just Google for it? According to this study, an unhappy 2-parent family has about the same negative effect as being in a single parent family. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2930824/ Of course, other studies may differ so this shouldn't be taken as conclusive.

More generally, I don't like to take any observational studies based on cohort data like this to be useful for attributing any sort of causes.

Whenever you've got people self-selecting into treatment populations, you need to be extremely careful about causality. For example, let's say that you've got a positive association between delinquent behavior and divorce, and that it seems to be stronger when the custodial parent stays single than it is when the custodial parent remarries. One story is that an unstable family situation causes delinquent behavior. Another equally plausible one is that difficult-to-rear kids stress their parents out, which causes them to divorce, and makes it harder for them to remarry.

It is possible to at least poke at these kinds of tangles, but you've got to be extremely diligent and careful about it. More careful than I think is possible in the "giant scattershot regression model" genre of observational study.

When I asked, "Is that true?", I meant it as a rhetorical question. I doubt anyone actually knows the answer. There's an idea, which I got from Green & Gerber's textbook on field experimentation, that some questions are just fundamentally unanswerable.

Re: Millennials Are Causing the U.S. Divorce Rate to Plummet

#86

Post by kradroy »

kodablah wrote: post #79
nimbius wrote: post #38

speaking as a millennial there is a big reason Marriage is overtaking divorce. Health insurance. Most of us dont have jobs that afford us competent healthcare. Seriously, thank the gig economy. Affordable Care Act providers either do not exist in some states or are overpriced/worthless for what they do cover. There are still roughly 25 states that have not expanded medicare either. Getting married is a quick and simp…

I'm not sure. This is at odds w/ some parts of the article near the end claiming marriage as a status symbol, specifically: > Fewer people are getting married [...] Many poorer and less educated Americans are opting not to get married at all Granted the article is not necessarily any more accurate. My pet theory is lack of societal compulsion.

I remember a Howard Stern interview (back in 2005-6?) with Paul McCartney where Howard asked if Paul was making his new wife sign a pre-nup. He wasn't. His response was "A pre-nup for someone who's worth half a billion dollars doesn't make sense. You'll live fine on a quarter billion dollars. It's the guy who's only worth $80k that should be getting a pre-nup."

I definitely put off marriage (I'm on the youngest side of Gen-X) because I saw how my parents' divorce ruined my father's finances and caused a lot of strife.

Re: Millennials Are Causing the U.S. Divorce Rate to Plummet

#88

Post by LyndsySimon »

komali2 wrote: post #82
odyssey7 wrote: post #75

Millennials are forced to be more careful, because they're climbing a difficult and important ladder into financial security. Most people I know who aren't looking to marry are just very aware that this is not the right time for them, neither finically nor in relation to achieving their professional goals.

I'm trying to find correlated information on young birth rates. My unprofessional guess is that a hell of a lot less people are getting teen pregnant and then marrying about it, which could lead to a messy divorce down the road (the thought of marrying some of the first people I hooked up with... I was 18 fucks sake...)

I don't know, but anecdotally, it seems like people don't feel they have to get married as much.

As for marrying younger... I met my wife at 14, married at 21, and had our first daughter at 25. We're 34 now and have two girls, and see no reason why we'd ever split. We're happy. I honestly don't think age has nearly as much to do with it as maturity and mindset.

Re: Millennials Are Causing the U.S. Divorce Rate to Plummet

#89

Post by tesin »

combatentropy wrote: post #87

"Many poorer and less educated Americans are opting not to get married at all. . . . Marriage is becoming a more durable, but far more exclusive, institution." How is it exclusive if it is by choice?

I think they are referring to people excluding potential partners due to their lack of money or education. But I agree, their writing insinuates the institution itself is discriminating.

Re: Millennials Are Causing the U.S. Divorce Rate to Plummet

#90

Post by justtopost »

pastor_elm wrote: post #37
sidstling wrote: post #9

I wonder how much cost plays in, I mean, my fiancée and I are adult middle class millennials and we’ve been saving for two years to have a wedding, and we’re planning a relatively cheap one.

what's cheap? 70k?

Idk, most of the more memorable I have attended were maybe a few grand. Mostly for the venue and bar, with friends and family helping out. The impersonal 100k affairs are embarrasing to attend pesrsonally. I have friends still eatig ramen, living in debt, and fighting bitterly over finances thanks to a 'dream wedding' that a majority of their actual friends couldn't even afford to attend. To call it depressing is to undersell the effect in my eyes.
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