Marriage means financial security and more spending, which boosts the economy. Are singletons selfish, or pragmatic?
Singletons don't contribute to the economy by buying candy hearts, even broken ones. Photograph: Phil Degginger/Alamy
As if singletons needed any more outside pressure on their romantic lives, here's a little more: unmarried people may be dragging down the whole economy.
Gallup’s Frank Newport and Joy Wilke found that the economy would benefit from more marriages taking place. Their recent survey of more than 130,000 people found that those who are married spend more.
Married Americans report a daily spending average of $102, followed by $98 among those who are living in domestic partnerships, $74 by divorced Americans, $67 by those who are single and never married, and $62 by those who are widowed. … [A]cross all age groups, those who are married spend more than those of other marital statuses.
“Married Americans spend more than the average American in part because they have higher-than-average income. Single Americans spend less, in part because they have lower- than-average incomes.”
Since "consumption" is part of economic growth, that means that the slow economy can be blamed, in part, on the prevalence of people staying single.
However, it isn’t that being married makes you spend more. Rather, it’s that those who can afford to get married can also afford to spend.
“Marriage is a luxury. It takes a lot to invest in someone else,” says Jennifer Silva, a sociologist at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Even leaving aside the fact that an average wedding costs about $27,000, marriage means being financially ready to take care of another person – and the burden of being a provider doesn't rest with only half of a couple.
Harvard's Silva and Sarah Corse, a sociologist at University of Virginia, interviewed over 300 working- and middle-class men and women in the US to determine what kind of financial milestones they'd hoped to reach before getting married. Most defined financial stability as finishing their educations and finding a job that would support them. They aren’t, however, looking for just any transient job. “They want a permanent job with benefits and retirement planning,” says Silva. “They want a career."
They also want to be free of the the $1tn in student loans sloshing around the economy. “Loans make them feel despondent and frustrated. It makes it hard for them to plan for the future,” says Silva.
In today’s economy, that’s unlikely to happen for many people.
As young people move back home with their parents, saddled with loans and struggling to find stable jobs, it’s no surprise they aren’t hearing wedding bells and planning big families. The Federal Reserve, which catalogues households, says that for five years after the recession started, in 2007, the number of new households in the US fell "by about 800,000 a year from the previous seven years."
The decline in the marriage rate is nothing new. It’s a trend that’s been going strong since 1970, although the decline has accelerated sharply. Over the past 40 plus years, the US marriage rate went from 76.5 marriages per 1,000 women to 31 marriages per 1,000 women. That’s a 60% decline.
The most affected are minorities and people with minimal education. Analysis by National Center for Families and Marriage Research revealed that since the 1950s, the marriage rate among Hispanic women decreased by 33% and among African Americans by 60%. Additionally, women who did not finish high school have the lowest marriage rate of all, at 28%.
While sharing a household with another person does come with financial benefits, like two paychecks and shared costs, it doesn't require marriage. Research by the US Department of Health and Human Services found that more and more people are living together now without getting married. In 1995, 34% of women lived with a man without marrying him. In 2010, that number was 48%. When the 2010 Current Population Survey revealed the number of unmarried, cohabiting couples went from 6.7 million in 2009 to 7.5 million in 2010, even experts were shocked.
And, of course, it partly came down to money.
“Our interviewees without college degrees expressed feelings of distrust and even fear about intimate relationships, and had difficulty imagining being able to provide for others,” Silva and Corse write in their research.
Silva also lays some blame on changing social norms. Not only is marriage no longer the only option when considering living with someone, but ending marriage is also a socially acceptable.
“We have more freedom than we had 50 years ago. You don’t have to stay in a marriage if you are unhappy,” says Silva. “Marriage is much more fragile now.”
Indeed, two-thirds of divorces are initiated by women, according to the National Marriage Project. What's more, women are also more realistic about their financial affairs when they do decide to marry. According to a survey of 1,600 members of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, there’s been an increase in demand for pre-nup agreements, with more women initiating the requests.
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