I don’t
Timothy P. Carney
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Is the wedding dress going the way of the MP3 player, the printed map, and the rotary phone?
David’s Bridal, America’s biggest retailer of wedding gowns, is laying off 9,000 workers and filing for bankruptcy. Maybe some tiny portion of its struggle is due to brides opting for J. Crew dresses or pantsuits, but the fate of David’s Bridal is mostly a result of millennials’ loss of interest in marriage and Generation Z’s indications that it will be even less excited about ever having a wedding.
MARRIAGE EARNING PARITY REVEALS HAPPINESS GAP FOR MOTHERS
The “marriage rate,” the number of new marriages per 1,000 unmarried women, was 76.5 in 1970. It fell to 28.0 in 2021.
In the mid-1960s, an overwhelming majority of young adults (ages 21 through 36) were married or had been married. Before the pandemic, that number had dropped below 50%. The pandemic pause on marriages created a bit of a makeup-bump in 2022 and 2023, but with that bump waning, the prospect looks bad for the wedding industry.
Some of the problem surely rests with the existence of a “wedding industry,” which tricks young couples into thinking they need to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for a single party. But David’s is hardly an offender there. Its gowns are on the affordable side.
David’s is struggling because marriage is falling out of fashion.
Some of this is merely the shift of marriage to later in life, but much of it is simply less marriage — and less of the stuff that leads to marriage. You see, it’s not merely lifelong matrimony that’s on the decline. It’s all sorts of partnering.
“Unpartnered” is the word that the Pew Research Center uses for those who do not live with a spouse, a girlfriend, or a boyfriend. The numbers show the ranks of the unpartnered increasing 31% from 1990 to 2019.
People are dating less and have significantly less sex these days than they did a generation ago, as Kate Julian reported a few years back in an Atlantic magazine feature on the “sex recession.” So post-marriage America is not just a story of less ceremony and less lifelong commitment. It’s one of less connection and less love — and fewer white dresses, too.