Why the Youths Are Choosing Avocado Toast Over Marriage

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I’m almost certain that my marriage works primarily because the litter box is my husband’s purview. (Purrview? I’m sorry, I couldn’t help myself.) When we moved into our home a few years ago, Patrick transformed a built-in linen cabinet into a bespoke feline shitter, hand-crafting a special door with a cat-sized carve-out. Even though I’m the one who brought the cats to our relationship, scooping and sifting the litter is part of his half of our household chores, and he does it nearly invisibly, and without complaint.

Weird flex, I know. But it speaks to the kind of man he is: a thoughtful, compassionate problem-solver who takes his role as a genuine partner seriously. If the gloomy complaints of other modern married women are any indication, I’ve caught a real unicorn. I couldn’t tell you how I did it; most of the other decisions I made in my twenties were middling at best. But we’re celebrating our 13th wedding anniversary this week, and I have to be a cornball about it: I love that dude more every day, and for much more than his commitment to a clean cat box. It enriches my life to share it with a person who makes me feel loved and seen and respected every day, but our marriage also just plain makes my life easier, and isn’t that part of the point? To share the boring and burdensome stuff, too—to be each other’s safety net and soft place to land.

I don’t know whether my marital happiness is especially unusual, but among my age group, marriage itself is increasingly so. Millennials and Gen Z are waiting longer to get married than previous generations, and fewer young people than ever are choosing marriage or long-term relationships in the first place.

The dominant cultural narrative is, of course, that this is a woman’s problem both to have and to solve—even though young women today have little reason to believe the antiquated institution will make their lives easier.

“American women are giving up on marriage,” crowed a Wall Street Journal headline last month. The article is an Ur-exemplar of the form when it comes to hand-wringing “way-we-live-now” legacy media cultural investigations, bemoaning that “American women have never been this resigned to staying single.”

Giving up. Resigned. The framing is hardly subtle: marriage is a fundamentally desirable situation for women, and if fewer people are getting married, the womenfolk had better do something about it. And the “do something” part usually amounts to demands that women lower our expectations. As Kelle Salle wrote for Refinery29 last year in a piece about the particular challenges Black women face in partnering up, “Although an e-Harmony survey found that 71% of men felt pressured to get into a relationship, compared to 58% of women, the latter tend to bear the brunt of societal pressure.”

The presumption that husband-hunting is the default state for single women saturates pop-culture romance narratives; it’s such a pervasive trope that I feel silly even making the observation. Y’all don’t need me to tell you that the sky is blue. But searching for hetero gender-swapped stories really brings the thing into contrast: when I challenged my friends and Bluesky folks to identify pop culture properties that tell the story of a single male lead looking for long-term love, the same suggestions popped up again and again: The Wedding Singer. Coming to America. How I Met Your Mother. The challenge becomes especially difficult if you weed out male-lead romance narratives that don’t involve the guy being singularly obsessed with wooing one woman in particular. (Sorry, Ed and Westley.)

If, in the real world, declining marriage rates are a problem—and I’m not even close to convinced they are—they’re a problem for people of all genders. But the primary pushers of the marriage-at-all-costs narrative are political conservatives predictably concerned with promoting marriage as a compulsory heterosexual institution without which the very fabric of American society will unravel. I’m not being hyperbolic, or perhaps I’m not being hyperbolic enough: the subtitle of Get Married, a 2023 pop sociology screed by right-wing academic Brad Wilcox, literally suggests that people must get married to “save civilization.”

Conservative efforts to ban abortion and defund domestic violence resources give lie to the narrative veneer that guys like David Brooks just want us all to be happier. If marriage on these terms is meant to save civilization, we have to ask: at what cost, and to whom?

I think there are demonstrably greater threats to civilization than growing singledom. (If we’re spitballing, climate disaster comes to mind, a problem that marriage seems ill-equipped to solve on the necessary scale.) I just can’t imagine concerning myself with the relationship status of strangers in the first place, but I certainly can’t imagine considering it a bad thing that young people are choosing to stay single instead of rushing into long-term relationships that may or may not fulfill them. But the conservative marriage panic isn’t about whether people are fulfilled, or really even about whether they’re getting married, per se. It’s about the preservation of a very narrow kind of partnership, one in which two cis people have a church wedding weeks after college graduation, followed by as many kids as possible—and mom had better stay home to raise them. The kids thing is especially important for the increasingly unsubtle white supremacist “natalist” contingent, a hotbed of truly horrifying ideas about forced marriage and birth.

These marriage evangelists aren’t cheerleaders for queer marriage, for polyamorous relationships among married hetero folks, or for marriages like mine, between people who’ve chosen not to have children. But whether marriage—monogamous heterosexual marriage in particular—is a worthwhile endeavor depends on what you can expect to get out of it, and women have good reason to be circumspect on that front. A 2024 University of Toronto study suggests that single women are happier than single men. Married men are healthier and live longer than single guys, but married women don’t see the same longevity benefits. It’s especially telling that divorced women are much less likely than divorced men to remarry. Of course, I don’t reckon that these statistics are front-of-mind for relationship skeptics. More likely: it’s simply occurring to millions of women that, if they are no longer obligated to pursue marriage out of social obligation and a need to secure the related economic and political benefits it once provided in the absence of other survival options, why force it?

There’s an anecdote from that goofy WSJ piece that really gets me, a bit about a woman who attended a singles mixer in D.C. and left not with the phone numbers of future dates, but of other women who were similarly unimpressed with the guys on offer. The women now meet “for drinks or dinner multiple times a month.” What a tragedy! Woman in search of husband finds supportive community instead.

But for the Brad Wilcoxes of the world, such an outcome seems to be just that, tragic. In fairness to the men who are the biggest scolds about modern marriage rates, it does track that the guys who are keenest to demand that women shut up and settle down are also the ones who look like they genuinely need a lady to lay their clothes out every morning if only to ensure they don’t walk around with their shoes on the wrong feet all day. (Which is, I suppose, tragic in its own way.)

There’s a reason marriage evangelicals are in such a dither: they see marriage as a means of social control, and view the decline of marriage as a sign that—horror of horrors—people, and especially straight women and queer folks, are figuring out ways of owning their lives and futures beyond and outside of the strictures of Western heteropatriarchy.

We only need to look at right-wingers’ vile responses to Tim Walz’s aw-shucks, Midwestern-dadditude last fall for proof that the marriage panic is about something much darker than wanting a landscape dotted with white picket fences. Marriage evangelists view decreasing marriage rates as an attack on straight, cisgender men’s authority in a zero-sum game of power. JD Vance famously supported the repeal of no-fault divorce, and divorced men were, as the New Yorker put it, “more likely than any other segment of the population to support Trump” in the last election. Conservative efforts to ban abortion and defund domestic violence resources give lie to the narrative veneer that guys like David Brooks just want us all to be happier. If marriage on these terms is meant to save civilization, we have to ask: at what cost, and to whom?

You will not be surprised to learn that, according to right-wingers, feminism is to blame. But notably, young people’s disinterest in marriage has come about without any explicit, concerted resistance efforts. Social and political changes have of course enabled more women than ever to participate in public life—we’re even allowed to dig ourselves into our very own credit card debt!—but as an organized “make men unfuckable” project, it’s been pretty slow-going for feminism. As Flytrap co-founder Nicole Froio recently wrote in a deep-dive about American white women’s appropriation of the 4B movement following the 2024 presidential election, such efforts tend to be hyper-individualistic, rather than meaningful political strategies.

I don’t believe hyper-individualism, even hyper-individualistic, choose-my-choice feminism, is at the heart of young people’s supposed rebuke of relationships and marriage. Quite the opposite: I see young people imagining new, creative ways of being in community with each other. I see queer and trans people building chosen families, taking expansive views of what it means to care for each other that go well beyond the essentially narrow construction of heterosexual, marriage-based partnership. If young people are rejecting anything, it’s impossibly tired ideas, like the one that says that men and women can’t have meaningful platonic friendships or that women are always fundamentally in competition with each other for men’s attention. Importantly, alternative forms of community and family-building—especially of parenting and co-parenting—that eschew obligate marriage are fundamentally pro-social developments. They have the potential to resist or even upend all kinds of authoritarian sociocultural paradigms and oppressive institutions, not least among them being, you know, fucking capitalism.

I don’t know what men can do to address the systemic barriers that reportedly make them increasingly less marriageable as a population. That’s for them to figure out, if they give such a big shit about it.

Neither do I buy that there’s something essentially screwed up about the ~ youths today ~ in general. It seems perhaps too simplistic to note that historically low dating rates among young people in the early 2020’s might be less about a unique, endemic anti-sociality and more about the fact that a multiyear global pandemic is the kind of thing that puts something of a damper on one’s ability to make goo-goo eyes at the star quarterback over a chocolate milkshake. But the existence of the global pandemic is not once mentioned, nor even referenced, in this hand-wringing Atlantic piece about the decline of marriage and the “social crisis of our time.” Seriously engaging with the anthropological fallout of a worldwide health crisis just gets in the way when what you really want to do is harp about people not doing gender in the way you’d prefer.

Indeed, marriage evangelists—even liberal ones—would have us believe that relationship-seeking people these days, and especially relationship-seeking women, are simply too picky. A common lament of right-wing marriage researchers is that men have become less marriageable because they are falling behind economically. Such folks lean hard into the presumption that women’s economic success necessarily comes at men’s expense—that the happiness life-pie, divided into economic, educational, and familial success, only has so many slices, and women are eating more than their share. The result is, once again, putting the onus on women to adjust their standards down, rather than for men to step it up. It’s a suggestion that becomes even more preposterous in light of marriage evangelists’ demands that married people engage in the costly endeavor of child-having and -rearing, and those same people’s political opposition to the kinds of pro-family policies that might actually lessen those burdens.

I don’t know what men can do to address the systemic barriers that reportedly make them increasingly less marriageable as a population. That’s for them to figure out, if they give such a big shit about it. They certainly have the resources: today, men make up 72 percent of the U.S. Congress, and all eight of the richest people in America are men. They can consider not acting like complete assholes, or getting off the incel internet. And they can start literally any time.

I won’t hold my breath, because I don’t need to. None of us do. If people are increasingly free to opt out of marriage instead of being bullied into it, we’re already on the right track.

This piece was edited by Katelyn Burns and copyedited by s.e. smith.