Thread by @lewis_goodall

So for personal reasons, marriage has been on my mind. Have been reading @ONS data on the subject.

I hadn’t quite realised just how big and rapid the changes have been over the past 50yrs. Says something about or misunderstanding of the past and about being young(ish) today🧵

NB- before we start I have no view whatever on the pros and cons of marriage as an institution for anyone, this is just about what's happened to it as a social institution in our society and what might have driven it.

So let’s take 2019 as the last reliable year we have and compare with half a century

In 1973 there were 400,000 marriages in England and Wales

By 2019 that had fallen to 213,000

So a fall of nearly half, in half a century, despite population growth (albeit fewer young people)

And what I find interesting is the peak for this is much later than you might think. The peak for marriage in Britain was 1972.

In 1972 there were 84 marriages per 1000 unmarried men and 63.5 for women

In 2019 it was 18.6 marriages per 1000 unmarried men and 17.2 for women

To put it another way in 1972 1 in 12 of all unmarried men in the country got married! You were very likely to know people getting married each and every year.

In 2019 that fell to fewer than 1 in 50.

And that decline started to happen very rapidly by the mid-1970s.

Looking at it by age gives you another sense of the change. In 1976

👰28% of all women were married aged 20 (!)
💐77% were married by 25
💒91% women were married by 30

Today only 1 in 3 women are married by 30. Similar story for men (about 1 in 4).

In other words, that cultural memory of the so-called permissive society is wrong. It really wasn't

The average age has also gone up considerably. 50 years ago the average age- for a first-time marriage- was 22.8 for women and 25.1 for men. In 2019 for a it was 31.5 and and 33.4

This isn't about saying it was better back then btw, or now. It's just revealing in terms of reminding us what we think of as the nearish past was closer in time and essence to the war and before, than it is now.

Why the change? Co-habitation is so much more common today than it was then and that can only be a good thing. Same sex couples can also get married today and they couldn't then, which is an unalloyed good. So many more women have careers, choices and better lives than then.

It also stands to reason that cost is also a prohibitive factor and that we're seeing a period where an extended adolescence goes on for longer. Some of that will be for good reasons, more higher education etc, some for bad- huge housing costs, lack of ability to start a family.

And those things will all feed into today's news that the number of babies being born has fallen to 1.5, the lowest on record and a demographic timebomb.

news.sky.com/story/live-bir…

So in half a century we've seen a profound change in the way early adulthood is conducted, for both sexes, when "settled" life begins, when families are likely started. These changes are probably going to be intensified by the pandemic and the economic crisis we're in.

And though marriage doesn't begin to capture all family life, there can be no doubt it is so much harder for couples to do the "married thing" and have a wedding, a house, children earlier even if they wanted to. It poses newish big long term challenges, esp. for the Treasury.

So guess what- either continue with high immigration levels far into the future, or a government gets really serious about some of the reasons why adolescence now has to last into the 30s and beyond: crippling housing costs, crippling childcare costs, student loan repayments etc.

And btw if we're honest, the actual answer to avert significant long term demographic problems, is a bit of both of these.

https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1692183274540408966?s=20

For those asking why it’s been on my mind (and the real wrong ‘uns saying don’t do it), all connected with something that happened at the weekend 👇

https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1691159533924573185