From ‘happily ever after’ to ‘not so fast’: Why young women are turning from marriage

Once upon a time, little American girls grew up with the simple belief that if you were brave and kind enough, your story would end with “happily ever after.” Today, for many young women, that expectation has shifted toward something closer to “happily never after.” 

New polling from Pew, a nonpartisan research firm, shows a striking change in how senior girls think about marriage. In 1993, more than 83 percent of graduating girls said they were very likely to marry. Yet today that share has fallen to about 61 percent. Interest among boys has hardly changed and remains around 74 percent. 

This is not simply a case of young people turning away from commitment. Instead, it is a story about young women in particular losing confidence in marriage as a desirable goal, and that shift should concern anyone who cares about happiness, loneliness or even life expectancy. 

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Research has consistently shown that married people are happier, less lonely and live longer than their unmarried peers. Yet the national marriage rate has fallen sharply, dropping 31 percent since 2000 and about 65 percent since 1970. 

For years, much of the discussion around declining marriage has focused on men, and issues such as boys falling behind in school, struggling to find rewarding jobs, and retreating into screens, scrolling, porn and isolation. Yet, this new data suggests that something is also shifting in how young women imagine their futures, and those shifts in imagination often shape what a generation comes to see as possible or worth pursuing. 

There are most certainly multiple reasons for this shift. One contributing factor for why girls are less interested in marriage are the stories and narratives they’ve absorbed since childhood. Once upon a time, Disney made it routine for heroes and heroines to finish their stories by finding true love and a life ahead together. In the 1980s and 1990s, films such as The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and Mulan offered a closing scene in which the central couple moved toward a shared life.

Yet suddenly that screenplay stopped. After Tarzan, in 1999, the classic happily ever after ending associated with marriage almost disappeared. Apart from Tangled in 2010, and perhaps Gnomeo and Juliet the following year, Disney no longer ended its central stories with a joyful marriage. Now heroines don’t fall in love so much as discover themselves. Rather than settling into commitment, the lead character embarks into a life of independent fulfillment. Rather than hearts and a carriage, the final image is now more likely to be the solitary heroine standing confidently alone on a mountain or a throne. 

If a girl spends her childhood watching stories and hearing messages from authorities in which marriage is marginal, optional or even treated as a constraint, should it be any surprise when she doesn’t place marriage as a cornerstone of her hopes for adulthood? 

Parents often reinforce this new script without intending to. We encourage our daughters to get their education in order first, to build a career, to be able to pay their own bills and never have to rely on anyone. There is wisdom in wanting our kids to be capable and financially secure. Yet when the strongest message is that needing another person is a kind of failure, it becomes harder for some young women to see marriage as anything other than a risk to that hard-earned independence. 

The truth is that none of us are truly independent. We come into the world unable to do anything for ourselves, we grow up because a family raised and looked after us, we rely on others throughout our adult life, and most who progress deep into old age will need to depend on caretakers. The people who handle this reality best are not those who insist on standing alone, but those who build strong, stable relationships of mutual love and support.  

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If fewer young women prioritize choosing the path of marriage, the consequences will not be limited to the wedding industry. Over time, we can expect more loneliness, more isolation, less happiness, an even lower birth rate, weaker communities and shorter lives. 

So, what do we do about it?  

Well, our response cannot simply be to lecture young adults or scold them for failing to value commitment. We have to offer them better stories and more compelling examples. Parents, church leaders and teachers need to better encourage young people from youth to understand that the best science shows prioritizing marriageable relationships is the most reliable path to happiness and personal fulfilment. It means speaking honestly about what a healthy marriage looks like, not as a flawless fairy tale but as a beautiful project worth the sacrifice.  

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We can also help young men and women know that most first marriages will last a lifetime and that choosing someone worthy of healthy dependence is not weakness but wisdom. They ought to know that a prioritizing a shared life with self-sacrifice often turns out to be richer and more meaningful than a carefully guarded solitary one chasing shallow consumerism.  

For a generation of girls, the script has quietly shifted from “happily ever after” to something closer to “happily never after.” If we care about their future and about the future of our society, we need to begin rewriting that ending, not by returning to nostalgia, but by telling the truth that for most of us, a life given and received in lasting love is still the deepest version of happily ever after we are likely to find.