Great news hidden behind the latest Gen Z headlines
Last week, a survey of 2,000 Gen Z adults looked, on the face of it, like more bad news for marriage: nearly seven in ten said a wedding now feels more like a “production” than anything personal, and the word they reached for most often was “expensive”. The same week, Wired reported on “solomaxxing”, a viral trend that recasts staying single as “something to aim to, not avoid”. But look past the headlines, and the picture inverts.
The young have not stopped wanting to marry: 86 per cent of unmarried women under thirty, and 80 per cent of unmarried men, want to say ‘I do’. And the trend is warming, not cooling. Two-thirds of young adults now think marriage is important, and Gen Z are half as likely as Millennials to dismiss it as “irrelevant”. What they have been sold is a myth – that marriage means a spectacle they cannot afford. It does not, and they can see it now. Marriage is the vow, not the wedding bill: the lifelong union of one man and one woman, and still the firmest ground for raising a family.
So the desire is alive. What has been missing is the example – and here is the encouraging part, because marriage spreads. The best research finds it self-reinforcing: where marriage is common and visible among a person’s peers and their generation, they become more likely to marry too. The long retreat worked the same way in reverse – as marriage thinned out of a community, each cohort grew up seeing less of it, and expecting less of it. But a trend that feeds on itself can run in either direction. Turn it around in a friendship group, a family, a church, a town, and it turns the other way. Decline is not destiny.
I have seen it up close. One of my own Gen Z children married last year, another is engaged – each, in turn, following friends who married first. Multiply that by every friendship group in the country and you do not have a decline. You have a movement waiting to happen.
That is why the gloomy headlines miss the real story. A generation told marriage is unaffordable, outdated, even faintly embarrassing has quietly gone on wanting it – and needs only to see it done, and done joyfully, to want it out loud. So this week, do one small thing for real marriage. If you know a young couple, encourage them – not towards a wedding they cannot afford, but towards the marriage they can. Speak well of marriage where the young can hear it. Make it look like what it is: not a luxury, but a gift.
Coalition for Marriage exists to champion marriage as the lifelong union of one man and one woman, the gold standard for children and for society. The tide can turn – and among the young, it may already be doing so. Let us help it.