At a time when marriage and birth rates are rapidly declining, a recent Pew poll finding that 12th graders are far less interested in getting married today than they were 30 years ago is alarming. In 1993, according to Pew, some 80% of all 12th graders said they were likely to get married someday, compared to just 67% of 12th graders who said the same thing today. Meanwhile, those who are not interested in marriage at all have almost doubled, from 5% to 9%.
But when you drill down on the numbers, an interesting gender imbalance develops. In 1993, 83% of 12th-grade girls expressed a desire to get married someday, compared to 76% of boys. But today those numbers are reversed, with an almost identical 74% of 12th-grade boys interested in marriage, but only 61% of girls.
Responding to the new Pew numbers, feminist author Jill Filipovic posted on X, “Might be worth asking what it is about high school boys that girls don’t find appealing, I have a feeling the list is long and informative.”
As someone who was once a high school boy (way back in 1993, actually), I can attest that Filipovic is absolutely correct that it would be easy for any high school girl to make a long list of things they did not find appealing about my fellow male classmates and me. But in our defense, we were teenage boys, and we had lots of growing up to do before we became appealing to women.
My question for Filipovic is, have high school boys really gotten so much worse than I was in the 1990s? Or maybe our schools and culture are sending a lot more anti-marriage messages to girls today than they were 30 years ago.
Pick any Disney movie from the 1990s. Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, Pocahontas, Hercules, and Tarzan all have romantic heterosexual relationships at their core. Fast forward to today, and Brave, Moana, Zootopia, Encanto, and Wish are all completely bereft of heterosexual pairing off. The female leads in all these movies are not only unmarried but also completely uninterested in marriage. Brave‘s entire storyline is anti-marriage.
And in schools, marriage is never promoted while self-discovery and professional achievement are endlessly encouraged. The little time spent on relationships with boys is all negative. Girls are taught that men are dangerous and to recognize signs of dating violence, coercion, toxic relationships, grooming, and manipulation.
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But are they ever taught how rewarding a life-long marriage to a spouse can be, or what qualities to look for in a good partner? Nope. Never. That would be far too patriarchal and heteronormative.
If we want our civilization to survive, we are going to have to turn our marriage and birth rates around. Maybe it’s time we started teaching our children how absolutely essential marriage is to their happiness and stopped attacking high school boys for being … high school boys.