Delayed Marriage and its Problems

By Paul H. Landis; McGraw-Hill

It is commonly stated that the age of marriage in the United States has been delayed because of the development of industrial culture. This statement is nonetheless untrue. This is probably due to the fact that frontier conditions were not conducive to early marriage. On the other hand, there is little question that urban-industrial civilization has in the industrialized part of the world delayed the age of marriage beyond that which characterized most primitive peoples.

Youth problems involving sex delinquency, too great intimacy in dating, and to some extent problems of social diseases and prostitution, are frequently excused or explained on the ground that the age of marriage has been greatly delayed for American youth in this generation. If one takes youth as a whole, this view is in error, since as we have seen there has been little change in the age at which young people marry; and such change as there has been has been in the direction of younger marriage.

However, it is probable that the reasons for delaying marriage today are somewhat different from what they were a generation ago. This may have some significance. It is also likely that the general social situation which the unmarried youth faces today is so much different as to make the person who delays marriage face a different series of problems from those faced by the single person a generation or two ago. The delayed marriages of earlier generations in our agrarian society were probably in the major percentage of cases due to the fact that the young man had gone out to the frontier and would not consider placing a wife in a frontier situation until he had knocked the rough edge off the hardships that the environment required. After he had broken the land, built a home, and perhaps acquired a degree of economic security on the land, he went farther east and found himself a wife or asked the girl he had previously known to come and marry him. This was true also of the European immigrant; usually not until he had established himself did he bring his fiancee.

As society has become more urban, the delay in marriage among most classes is caused by such factors as economic necessity or a desire to complete one's education, but during this period there is free association with members of the opposite sex. Dating and more or less intimate contact with members of the opposite sex rather than isolation characterize the unmarried person's experience. This situation probably is responsible in a considerable part for such problems of delayed marriage as we now have among youth in the United States. There is the constant stimulus of a desire to marry, or at least to perform all the physical functions of marriage, and at the same time an overruling necessity to continue unmarried. The educated group, especially, find it necessary to delay marriage until the late twenties when they have completed college and have made a start in their chosen professions.

In spite of the fact that youth, on the average, are marrying earlier than a generation ago, the fact remains that modern economic industrial life puts serious handicaps in the way of marriage. Periodic economic crises, deter thousands of marriages simply because many young people dare not face the responsibilities of establishing families without assured incomes.