Living Single

While it may have been so back in the early 1900's, choosing to marry at a later age isn't necessarily the same as being single in today's world. Too many young people are simply choosing to live together unmarried. Or to stay at home with Mom & Dad while they flit from partner to partner. Which would be alright, except for the fact that too often this results in children born into a completely unstructured and financially unstable lifestyle.

The link you provide for the local tv ad goes to a hacked paged

I would tend to lump wedding porn in with things like St. Patrick's day cards...the froth of a marketing machine working overtime to part people from their money.

But the wedding mafia is overplaying their hand. Our civilization increasingly requires longer schooling and career incubation periods, and people will wisely defer things like weddings.

I'd go so far as to say, bring it on, wedding marketers. The higher the cost and stress of weddings, the more people will say, "I can't do this. Come to think of it, I don't even need to do this."

I feel "Wedding Porn" is an appropriate appelation for this phenomenon. Esepcially during each holiday season with the *incessant* jewelry commercials. Each year we see woman portrayed as puppy dog-like creatures who will wag their tale as their man (or "The One") presents them with a costly piece of jewelry and 'pops the question'. Even as a male I find it insulting - to both women and men.

After reading "Singled Out," I, too, began to keep a mental tab on commercials that somehow had a wedding theme interwoven with the underlying product / service being sold. Most do so, likely because for many it's an elixer that most consumers have become used to absorbing.

This phenomenon is often seen in Iowa and Nebraska political advertisements. Every candidate will have an advertisement about how they were born and raised, married the spouse of their dreams, never been divorced, and had some great wonderful kids: vote for me! I grew up in Iowa watching those adverstisements, and while I admit I find those advertisements more assuring than the negative, mudslinging political advertisements in my current state of Missouri, I wasn't able to determine candidates' stances on issues because of the focus was on being a good ol' traditional boy or gal.

Good point about the politicians. I'll have to pay closer attention whereI'm at to see if that's true here, too.

I also wonder whether the constant drumb beat of matrimania also occurs in the commercials and media of other countries. I wonder whether any of us here know anyone in, say Italy, or wherever, who might be able to take a day or two to make a few notes about whether household products are packaged with a healthy dose of wedding themes.

Bella so often conflates things and/or introduces irrelevancies to reach her predictable foregone conclusion.

The advertisers are selling stuff, not weddings or marriage. They use weddings as a vehicle for their products for a variety of reasons. It works because, since a wedding is an orgy of female narcissism, it appeals to women (many of whom are already married!), who account for 80-85% of the discretionary spending in the economy. If it didn't work the advertisers wouldn't use it. They'd use something else which does.

The median age of first marriage data has nothing to do with this, so the hypothesis that people "aren't buying it" just doesn't follow.

One might as well purport that the rise in median age of first marriage among women is because women are getting dumber and dumber about how to get the Man Prize, so it's taking `em longer and longer to figure out how to get a man to commit and fork over a diamond ring.

Yes, they're just trying to sell products, but their efforts are influenced by the expectations of society. So there's nothing wrong with making a connection between the efforts of advertisers and the attitudes of society.

And it only seems logical to assume that when people start to delay something, they value it less. Of course, the rising age of first marriage could be due to something like economic factors. But it can also be argued that if people really valued marriage, they'd find a way to get married early even if it meant sacrificing something else important (like owning a house).

And it would be nice if you could have come up with a hypothetical alternative explanation that didn't sound so sexist.

I grew up in Germany - currently, the mean age of first marriage for women there is 30, for men 33. Overall, in my experience, the matrimania phenomenon is so much worse here in the US (commercials, singlism, etc). Being single at age 31, I feel so much more out of place here than back home (currently living in one of those "family values"- centered fly-over states doesn't help). Sadly, this will be a substantial factor when deciding whether to go back to Europe after finishing grad school.

It has caught my attention in the past that the 1950s (of which I’m a child) were the odd decade out. Victorian authors often are remarkably ambivalent about marriage. Charles Darwin wrote up a list of pros and cons while contemplating the matter. On the con side he wrote such things as a "terrible loss of time" and "less money for books." Among the pros was "constant companion and a friend in old age ... better than a dog anyhow." In the end, Charles decided against the dog. He married his cousin Emma.

It may be an improvement, but the median ages still don't seem old enough to me. I'm thinking this could be a data problem though- if you are collecting cenus data at a moment in time, and a person is single and 35, but then gets married when they're 45, they're not going to show up in the data for another 10 years. Since the trend is becoming more common over time, then there's going to be a lag in the data catching up to the reality.

I also wonder if, in very recent years, there's been a fashionable trend toward marrying younger again. In the 90s, we had the whole "urban tribe" movement, like in the last post with shows like Seinfeld, Friends, and Sex and the City. But then George Bush and neo-conservativism followed, and mass media has seemed obsessed with marriage and babies, you've got all these "experts" writing pieces about women's eggs drying up faster than once thought... I noticed it just looking through my college alumni magazine- most of the marriage were from the classes of 06 through 08! AND there's a backlog of over a year getting those photos and announcements into the magazine! A few years ago, most of the marriage announcements were from couples in their 30s or so. I've also been quite shocked working on the committee for my 10-year college reunion- all the other committee members are married with children. One of them even proposed that the class theme have something to do with "everyone" get married and having babies now that we're "over 30."

As women gain their independence the actual necessity of marriage declines. We don't need to get married to survive anymore. We have the ability to get better paying jobs allowing us to live our lives. I would much rather stay single my whole life than be bound by marriage. It just sounds like an eternal prison. Also, why spend thousands of dollars on one day when you could spend that money having a crazy awesome adventure in Ecuador or something? Overrated. I think we need to rethink marriage, and what it stands for.