5 years later: marriage rates and spinsterhood projections

About 5 years ago I posted on Marriage rates and end game spinster predictions. In that article I estimated approximately:

1. 9-14% “unwanted spinsterhood” — about 1 in 10 women
2. 19-24% “unwanted cohabitation and unwanted spinsterhood” — about 2 in 10 women

IFStudies has a blog about: 1-in-4 projecting childlessness among today’s young women.

Image is from the above link.

Already over 30% of women are single at 35 years old, and only 15% are single at 50 years old. I believe this includes cohabitation data as well. My data I was working with in the other post was only up to age 44-45ish (same data as Dalrock), so going up to 50 provides even a better snapshot of what is going on. Currently 15% of women are single at 50% and that appears on the rise.

They estimate it’s going to be about 25% in the long run, or approximately on the upper bounds of what I estimated. However, that’s just singleness and doesn’t necessarily include unwanted cohabitation. Therefore, the number of women that are unhappy is likely about 10% larger than that which would place that around 35%.

Image is also from the above link.

Additionally, the try to control for those with “child free” ideals.

About 1% of women over the age of 40 are “childfree,” meaning they don’t have kids and they report having a zero-child ideal (or believe it’s not ideal to have children). An additional 2-4% are ambiguous; they might be childfree or childless. But even if those two groups are added together, yielding maybe 5% of women being childfree, about 15% of women over 40 in the GSS report having no children, yet having a fertility ideal higher than zero. These women are childless. In other words, even today, about 75% of women without children who are past their reproductive years are properly described as childless, not childfree.

Grouping the ambiguous with the childfree is being charitable. Instead of about 75% of the childless women, it’s likely to be closer to 80-90% or so are childless.

In another analysis, I talked about how it is likely obesity that is driving the decline in marriage.

Currently,

• 15% of women are childless.
• 34% of women have children out of wedlock (40% out of wedlock * 85% women with children).
• 51% of women have children in marriage

Both childless and out of wedlock births are increasing, so it’s possible that we’ll ultimately see only 30-40% or less children being born in wedlock.

This makes it all the more imperative to have good father figures, mentors, and discipleship programs from Churches. Lots of kids are going to be coming from broken families, and lots of men and women are going to be single.

Advertisement