How many of these never-married men are in a relationship? Unmarried != single. Stats on the number of singles who have never been in a relationship would be far more valuable.
Relationships, sexual or otherwise, are not subject to paperwork. The days of relationships, sex, or even reproduction being tied to marriage are long gone.
I was married for 11 years, had three children and am happily divorced. I’m glad I got married and I’m just as glad I was able to get a divorce.
What’s overwhelmingly changed in my lifetime (since 1980) is that young adult people would rather be alone with no children than take the risk on being unhappy or getting a divorce.
The single biggest change is that the average sentiment now in the “global-west” is “why should I risk my current lifestyle for the risk and pain of a family.”
That wasn’t previously really an option for most people - for a lot of structural reasons. A lot of it was structural repression and the fact that is gone is an unalloyed good.
However it does mean that the expectations for human communities and population growth that have undergirded humanity since the neolithic no longer apply.
We need to fundamentally rethink what humanity is working towards, at a global scale, if the gross population numbers had peaked for humanity.
I live in the metro region of Seattle.
I'm not sure what Third Space / Place would be viable to find a life partner. The region is relatively sparse and spread out due to bodies of water, hilly topology. By car everything still seems far and the road network (as always for anywhere) strained to the limits of what people are barely willing to tolerate for commutes. Transit infrastructure is mostly commuter busses for 9-5 jobs in Seattle, maybe a bus or two to Bellevue. The single artery of slow (no express last I road) 1 rail line each way light rail still under construction at end points and offering not much real benefit for someone trying to connect between points without transfers. Transfers outside of Seattle a huge annoyance due to sparse schedules and routes that generally don't go where someone might desire.
Which is a long way of saying; there's a very real transaction cost in time, energy, and financial resources to get anywhere.
Any hobbies, any venues, anything I can think of other than places like a library (to be quite and alone) all have their own costs. They're for profit, not for hanging out (for low / no cost) nor meeting new people.
It's to the point where I'd take a SciFi grade benevolent AI nudging stuff together to solve these intractable issues and get the right people into the right places so that matches do happen without winning the lotto level odds.
My anecdote: We had offices in the Pacific Northwest (Seattle and Portland) at a previous company.
A lot of young people worked in those offices. It was basically a rite of passage for them to move just outside of Seattle around the time they were getting married.
This was so widely understood that it factored into decisions about where to locate office buildings and influences remote and hybrid policy. If you wanted to attract and retain more experienced employees then being in-office only in the middle of the city was risky.
I do want to point out that never-married by looking at legal paperwork is a blunt instrument. There are reasons, especially for dual high earners, to not get a marriage license. Examples of tax-related things that don’t double when married;
-Income tax brackets above about $200k
-SALT cap
-Mortgage interest deduction
-HSA contributions (if have children)
-Dependent care FSA contributions
I wish they defined what "single" means for the purpose of this statistic. From what I see on the census website, it's as though they're counting people who are divorced, widowed, unmarried and also people who are in a long term relationship in the same category, which they're calling "single". Single to me means not in a relationship at all.
I guess I also wish they defined the boundaries of Seattle: do they mean the urban core, the city limits, King County, or the metropolitan region? I know relatively few married people who live in Seattle, but that's because it's too expensive to buy a house in Seattle's city limits. You either have to inherit a house, or have both people work in a high-paying industry for this to be affordable.
I also know more than a few couples who are in very long term, committed relationships, living in Seattle with no intention to get legally married. They are 'married' in the culturally meaningful sense, just not the legal one.
My point is it seems (to my inexpert reading) like their statistic is capturing very young people, who rent apartments in Seattle but aren't ready to get married, and older people who may have houses in Seattle, but are more likely to be divorced or widowed. But, they're mostly not talking about 30-60 year olds, who are more likely to be married, bu live outside Seattle and commute into it. Weird.
I don't know how much I care about this statistic.
Seattle, meaning the city, right?
When people get married and think about settling down and maybe having kids, they usually leave high cost of living cities. They want stability, something they can own or rent long term, and usually more space, especially if kids are coming.
Sometimes they move to the suburbs, sometimes across the country.
The only people who stay tend to be rich people who can actually afford to get some space and stability in the city. Even then many of those decide to leave anyway for other reasons, again especially if they want kids.
High cost city centers are basically an extension of college dorms at this point. They are where people go to start their careers or level up, not stay.
This is like saying “study shows that most people in a shopping mall are looking to buy something” then extrapolating some larger conclusion from that.
Patrick Boyle has looked at causes of decline in the total fertility rate around the world and concluded reduction in the formation of couples (married or not) is a major cause.
I live in Seattle now, am married, and have an infant. I find Seattle not friendly towards families at all. The going rate for a daycare here is 3.5k per month for an infant. My wife and I are both ~7%ers? individually and we can barely afford our home (a tall skinny townhouse with no yard) and the cost of 1 baby. Having a family is hard here... Also, I don't find Seattle safe for infants and toddlers, or anybody really..
What big tech wants are people who are willing to give up everything for the dream of making money, and that's what they got.
Edit: Our life is pretty good in any case. I would never let my kid go outside and play unsupervised in Seattle even tho I myself did this as a kid in my home town (the safety I was mentioning).
Marriages in the western world is a clear example of the 'overregulation'. And further marriage rate falls, more regulations are added. To the point that in Quebec various forms of cohabitation are considered as a marriage in court. That makes a relationship a serious liability.
My brother was a never-married single in Seattle, and it was the cause of his death at the start of the pandemic. He was terminally lonely and without purpose and suicided. But he was a tremendously loyal person. If he was able to make a connection and form a family, he would have been full of purpose. Instead he lived quietly in a small house in a quiet neighborhood, and after he died none of his neighbors could even recognize his photo. He lived within a community but never reached out to it, and nobody ever reached in. Socially he might as well have been living in a cave on a remote island. He was a free proton in an atomized society. Aka an acid. I blame society, my brother, myself, and probably you too if I can figure out how.
As a single man with no desire to ever marry (but plenty of great lovers in my life), I feel like we need more context about their lives before we can assume that "never married singles" means much of anything at all.
So, by "men", they mean 15 or older. Median age of first marriage is ~30 for US men.
Without looking at any data I’m guessing part of this is that married men end up with kids and can’t afford a home they want to raise kids in there.
Edit: also, school quality.
This article addresses how the 2015 SCotUS decision affected marriage stats. The factors in play then changed how I thought about marriage.
My 'tribe' attached money and other benefits to marriage. This fundamentally reframed marriage in secular ways; it diminished religions' claims on it.
We Christians had been solidly in charge of marriage and for the previous 80 years divorced had steadily climbed. I felt we should own that; we should stop blaming societal factors - because we were also part of society.
Prior to the 2015 SC decision on marriage, I was a strong proponent of civil unions. I felt CUs were a path to decoupling marriage from secular benefits (tax breaks, spousal privilege). However, hard liners held sway and they were having none of it.
After 2015 I openly hoped that gay marriages gained a better track record than 'traditional marriages'. I felt there was a lot we Christians could do to be better spouses - in ways that both partners would want to stay married. I hoped gay couples would set examples for us. This was a simplistic fantasy on my part, pure immaturity.
ftr: I presently identify as Recovering Conservative. Where I have religious leanings, they run counter to the modern right. I sometimes use more nuanced pronouns.
The incel problem is now an epidemic, I feel very sorry for the young men of late millennial era and Gen Z. From what I have seen dating for these generations has become incredibly difficult. When I was a young man (I am the last of Gen X) relationships were never “easy” but dating was. There are young men out there in their 20s who are still virgins, I had a son at 18.
Should there be a census for relationship status which is not just married / civil union?
Frasier never finds love?
TFR in the US is just as bad as in China
We're talking about Seattle because it is in the headline (the source is the Seattle Times). But there are 10 cities in the USA that have a higher percentage of "never-married single men." So this is a trend that is not unique to Seattle.
I just wanted to call that out since many of the comments seem focused on diagnosing what it is about Seattle specifically to lead to this trend.
IMO, it is mostly a housing issue. It seems like most new construction goes towards apartment complexes where the units are all 1-2 bedrooms, or else they go to more "luxury" big houses. I personally would love a 5 bedroom apartment in a dense, walkable city, but good luck finding it.
So I'm currently in the suburbs with my kids, even though I hate the suburbs.
The biggest change is that for the first time in history it's easier to live alone than in a family. 100 years ago good luck trying to grow anything on a farm without any help, and most children were free labor that would later convert into free retirement care. Nowadays you don't need others for basic survival, and children are a huge liability. With a little bit of creativity you can live in a city yet go a month without talking to anyone, and still have your biological needs taken care of. So many people choose not to, because truth is, most people don't like each other, it's just that in the past they'd either somehow get along together, or die. Nowadays they don't have to.
> As marriage becomes less popular among younger generations, Seattle men have hit a milestone of singledom: For the first time, half of the men living in the city have never been married.
How can this logical fallacy pass through editorialising? As marriage becomes less popular, for the same number of couples, you will have fewer marriages but not more singles.
Twice married here and never been to Seattle so I guess that's .... correlation?
perhaps instead of assuming marriage is good we should stop discriminating economically against unmarried people.
Anecdotally, among the people I know in Seattle, many people who have happily been in the same relationship for decades are not married. People are not avoiding long-term relationships, they are avoiding the baggage and fairly rigid assumptions that comes with state intervention in their relationships. There is zero social pressure to be “officially” married so people have no reason to do it for the sake of social conformity. Both men and women are subscribing to this.
I think some of this is a side-effect of many people planning to never have children.