The characters of Joey Tribbiani from ‘Friends’ and Barney Stinson from ‘How I met your mother’ claimed nothing compares to being single; dating but not committing. They had so many relationships, sometimes even fell in love but marriage was a no-no for these guys. Barney did eventually get married but then divorced. A study suggests Young Men might feel the same way these days.

Emancipation as the game-changer?

The social and political emancipation of women brought many changes to the concept of marriage. Young women in many countries want to pursue their careers and the financial independence doesn’t make marriage a must or need for them.

Way back, women used to get married for financial reasons, if nothing else, because the man used to be the breadwinner and the woman had no income of her own. With population shrinking in many countries of the world, Young People are encouraged to date and marry. Some claim the reason for such low birth rate in many countries is the fact that women don’t feel the need to marry or have kids anymore. However, according to the pew research center, it’s men who don’t want to marry these days while. among young women, the desire to marry is actually rising.

Pew surveyed women age 18-34. Since 1997, the percentage of women stating that they see a successful marriage one of the most important things rose from 28 to 37 percent.

On the other hand, this percentage for young men in the same period of time dropped from 35 to 29 percent.

The war on men

Suzanne Venker, the author of the article ‘’The War on Men’’ claims that all the gains of feminist movement created a gap between men and women. Men lost their traditional role of protector and breadwinner with more women acquiring a university degree and getting into the workforce.

She states divorce laws, in the eyes of men, work in favor of women financially and the divorce rate is high these days so men don’t want to risk it. When Venker surveyed men on the reasons they don’t want to ever get married, she found that they think ‘’women are not women anymore’’, claiming that they became too angry and got an attitude, compared to previous generations of women.

She claims men are tired of being blamed for a failure in a relationship and of women seeing them as enemies.

Data published by the Pew Research Center in December 2012 showed that, when it comes to the United States, barely half of all adults were married at the time, which was a record low. In just one year, from 2009 to 2010, the number of new marriages in the US declined by five percent. The age at which young people get married these days also changed, with women now marrying for the first time around the age of 27, while men do it at the age of 29.

Parenting still important

One of the conclusions of the research was that young people don’t think of marriage and childrearing as being necessarily connected as 52 percent of them said they see parenting as one of the most important things they want to achieve in life, while only 30 percent of them said the same about having a successful marriage.

The research also found that Millennials who grew up as children of divorced and single parents were less likely to claim both parents are needed at home for a child’s normal childhood. They are more likely to support single parenthood and unmarried couple parenthood.
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