Gotta love this “Frankendate” graphic which ran with today’s New York Times, story about why so many Americans are single:. Referencing the research of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, the story notes: “with no biological or sociological clock ticking,” the article states, “boys can remain boys indefinitely.” The rest of the article digs deeper into the intersection of marriage, gender, and social class.
“[W]hen it comes to marriage, the two Americas aren’t divided by
gender. … The emerging gulf is instead one of class — what demographers,
sociologists and those who study the often depressing statistics about
the wedded state call a “marriage gap” between the well-off and the
less so. Statistics show that college educated women are more likely to marry
than non-college educated women — although they marry, on average, two
years later. … In the past, less
educated women often “married up.” … Now, marriage has become more one of equals; when more highly
educated men marry, it tends to be more highly educated women. … Women with more education also are becoming less likely to divorce,
or inclined to divorce, than those with less education. They are even
less likely to be widowed all in all, less likely to end up alone.The class gap happens in large part because, as Christopher Jencks, a professor of social policy at Harvard, said, “like marries like.” “If you wanted to predict the characteristics of who I would marry,”
he said, “knowing my education, the strongest correlation you could
observe is that someone who is educated is more likely to marry someone
who is educated, and someone who is not educated is more likely to
marry someone who is not educated.”
