Not Quite Adults: Why 20-Somethings Are Choosing a Slower Path to Adulthood, and Why It’s Good for Everyone

by Settersten, Richard; Ray, Barbara E.

  Marriage today, Furstenberg continues, is more demanding and exalted because expectations have risen and, with them, one’s standards for the perfect match. Marriage, in other words, is daunting. This is evident in the wariness and achievement-focus of the young women in Elizabeth Armstrong’s study. Only a handful of these women imagined marriage happening anytime soon. For the majority, the thought of marrying before their late twenties struck them as plain odd. Yet these women were “everywoman” college students: middle class, from the heartland, slightly conservative, very conventional. “If these girls are delaying marriage, pretty much everyone is,” says Armstrong. Indeed, Network findings reveal that only 45 percent of men and 60 percent of women are married by age twenty-eight today, compared with 79 percent of men and 84 percent of women in 1960.6

  The delay is caused both by the daunting reputation of marriage and because young adults today are not ready to get married until they get all their ducks in a row. Where once, as Furstenberg alludes, young people married first and then together set off on a path toward their goals as a couple, today they forge those paths separately, on their own. Only later, after a string of accomplishments—getting the degree, the job, the condo, settling in the city of their choice—do they begin to consider marriage, as Alex’s story shows.

  Alex is a recent graduate of Rutgers University now living in Astoria, Queens, where he shares an apartment with his grandmother, covering her rent, buying her groceries, and generally keeping an eye out for her. His parents, Puerto Rican and Cuban, moved the family to New Jersey when he was a freshman in high school for a better education. He and his girlfriend, Trina, met in college and have been together for nearly five years. “She’s my best friend,” says Alex. “We just get along great. In every endeavor that I’ve ever undertaken, she’s been my number one supporter.”

  Trina graduated a semester before he did and now works as a paralegal in Jersey City. According to Alex, she is everything he wants in a partner. He clearly adores her, and they “know each other inside and out.” And yet he also stresses that they both remain independent. “We both still have our own lives,” he says, “so it’s worked out.”

  Alex and Trina love each other deeply, and they enjoy spending time with each other. They also know they will marry eventually. But at age twenty-four, a time when their parents and grandparents were most likely already married, the two are in no hurry to tie the knot. Alex enjoys his freedom right now, and his life, while filled with work, friends, and Trina, has a carefree quality to it. After a day at the office, he makes himself some dinner and watches The Simpsons before heading to the gym for a workout. He calls Trina, who lives in New Jersey, a few nights a week. On weekends he goes out dancing, or he and Trina go to the movies or to dinner. Twice a month or so he heads to New Jersey to see his parents, talk politics with his Cuban father, and be pampered by his mother, who fills him in on the family gossip.

  He and Trina could marry if they wanted. They have all the “essentials” in place. Alex is not hampered by debt or obligations; he graduated debt-free with a bachelor’s degree in biotechnology. They decided to live on their own to get a taste of the world and what life is like as an independent adult.

  Alex earns a decent salary working for an oil company, yet he’s not feeling the connection he needs at work. He has decided to apply to law school, with plans to specialize in patent law. He has a vision for his life, and he knows how to achieve his aims. “I think the only way to do anything about the future is by doing something today,” he says. And doing it alone, he might as well have added. For Alex, this future vision includes law school, a good job, his own place, a sense of settled satisfaction with work and life—and only then, marriage and family. Alex—along with the majority of today’s twenty-somethings—is getting his ducks in a row and then getting married. As Furstenberg has said, “In years past, being married meant you were an adult. Today, you have to be an adult to be married.”

  Trina, too, is working toward her own goals. She, like Alex, plans to attend law school. “Hopefully [Trina] will also be a lawyer and we’ll be able to work together, which would be nice, ’cause that’s how I see us spending our time together.” Trina has occasionally mentioned the “M word,” but Alex balks. “I can tell you, it’s absolutely ‘talk to law school’ ’cause I can’t make that commitment until I have a career. One day, maybe, but not right now.”

  Some may say Alex is a typical guy, scared of commitment and unwilling to leave the party. The male fear of commitment has been fodder for many books and movies, all with the message that guys are absolutely phobic when it comes to settling down. Michael Kimmel, a sociologist at SUNY–Stony Brook, fills his recent book Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men with examples of men in their twenties who have no interest in settling down, preferring instead to extend the frat party for another decade. Our culture, he argues, allows them to do this, as their own fathers pass the phone to their mothers rather than give their sons good advice on how to be a responsible adult. Unchallenged to fill their traditional roles of provider and protector, young men continue their adolescent fascinations with Game Boys, boobs, and beer.

  That may be true of the select set of guys in Kimmel’s book, but the fear of commitment that many men express is not a case of arrested development. It is just the opposite, in fact. Many men acutely feel the pressure of family, responsibility, and the high expectations that women often have for marriage. Like Alex, they are struggling to build their résumés and get settled in a career in a work world that is no longer as stable as that their fathers occupied. They know that expectations for “the good life” require a good salary. They grapple with mixed signals from women, who in one breath talk about equality at home and at work, but in the other want men to pick up the dinner tab. They also grapple with the responsibility. “I’m just not ready for a wife,” many say—not to mention the possibility of an ex-wife and the heavy financial fallout of a potential divorce. What that really means is that they’re not sure they can live up to the expectations, whether their own or those of others. The fear then is not so much of leaving the party as of high expectations for marriage and everything it stands for.

  Alex is not the only one delaying marriage. Trina, too, is hesitant. She may hint at marriage, but she is not yet pressuring Alex to marry. She’s still getting her own ducks in a row. Yet the questions become: What if there’s always another duck to align? Is the laundry list of things to do first a sign of the high pedestal that marriage sits atop? Have the expectations for the perfect mate become so vaulted, the bar so high, that no one can meet them? Indeed, it would appear that with a decade of me time, the list of qualities young adults expect in a mate has grown to dossier proportions.

  The Growing Dossier of Qualifications

  Shu was living on her own for nearly a decade when she began dating her current boyfriend. Her hesitancy to make a deeper commitment to him and her concerns about their compatibility mark a deeper issue. After spending so much time on their own, young adults are finding that settling down with one person is not so easy. Their growing pickiness is not surprising. After all, one reason the military recruits eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds is because they are “green” and can be shaped more easily. After too much life experience, the sacrifices and demands of army life start to look less enticing. The same goes for the demands of marriage and cohabitation. The longer one is on one’s own, the harder it becomes to compromise.

  What do singles in their mid- to late twenties want in a mate? One twenty-six-year-old man from San Diego says he wants someone who “is goal-oriented. Someone where education is really important to them. Family, strong family ties. They’re warmhearted. I don’t like someone that’s selfish or narrow-minded. Also, someone that’s simple. They don’t look at the materialistic side of a person. They can appreciate someone for their inner self.” A twenty-eight-year-old we spoke to in San Diego is looking “for honesty, loyalty, commitment, monogamy. Just reciproci
ty in every way. Someone with ambition, strong personality, confidence, good sense of self, established.” Another young adult, a twenty-nine-year-old woman, talks of an equally “centered” partner. She sees her future marriage as a “place that’s together and I like who I am in the relationships. I don’t need to change anything about myself to be better in this. It should feel really good.”

  A cynical person would say, Good luck with all that. Such cynicism is justified to an extent. Americans have always put marriage on a pedestal. But this practice can all too quickly make the ideal of marriage unattainable. How many people, on their best day, can meet the above list? In Marry Him: A Case for Mr. Good Enough, writer and single-mother-by-choice Lori Gottlieb scolds her generation for having unreasonable standards. “Settling,” she says, has gotten a dirty name.

  Whenever I make the case for settling, people look at me with creased brows of disapproval or frowns of disappointment.… It’s not only politically incorrect to get behind settling, it’s downright un-American. Our culture tells us to keep our eyes on the prize (while our mothers, who know better, tell us not to be so picky), and the theme of holding out for true love … permeates our collective mentality.

  The prize is a partner for life who has the qualities and talents that will complement the other. As marriage and family expert Andrew Cherlin says of this new meaning of marriage, “Being married is less a required adult role and more an individualized achievement—a symbol of successful self-development.”7 The qualities are not necessarily that he be only a good provider or she a good mother, but that the mate be simpatico emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually as well—the über soul mate. Young adults want a good companion, an equal. They want a spouse who will share life with them, rather than split off into a separate role. They want to do it all together. Today’s young adults are on a quest not for a pragmatic business partner, as their grandparents often were, but a best friend to spend their life with.

  Austin, a twenty-nine-year-old from St. Paul, Minnesota, and his girlfriend, Janine, have been dating for five years. They are close, and he talks freely about their relationship in ways his father never would have.

  “There’s nothing I can’t say to her,” he says. “So, you are truly each other’s best friend. You mean the most to each other. And that’s what I like the best. I’m not depending on my brother to be my best friend, or my friend from high school to be my best friend. I know that the person I’m with will always be my best friend. And that’s, I think, what should mean most in any relationship.” He is not alone. Nine in ten singles in the National Marriage Project’s annual survey agree that “when you marry, you want your spouse to be your soul mate, first and foremost.”

  Yet this quest for a best friend or a soul mate often means that the twenties are spent searching and assessing, culling and rejecting, and the march down the aisle slows to a crawl.

  In many respects, Shu and Alex and Trina should be commended. They are taking marriage seriously enough to approach it slowly, taking the time to find themselves and find their perfect match while getting their ducks in a row. Their long path to marriage, however, begs the question of whether they will, in fact, marry someday. In a recent poll by the Pew Research Center, nearly four in ten young adults in their twenties said they were not looking for a mate. Surely marriage is not at its end, given that the majority of young people still say they want to get married. But with the rise in the numbers remaining single at all ages, the increasing numbers who say they’re not looking for a mate, and the slow deliberate path toward partnering up, the question hangs in the air: Have we exalted marriage beyond its capacity?

  From Hooking Up to Shacking Up

  With many more young people delaying marriage, the route that leads directly from dating and romance to marriage is fast becoming an eight-track tape in an iTunes world. Yet the expanding span of singledom is neither a cloistered nor celibate period. Young people do still crave companionship, not to mention sex, and they now have more options to pursue both without the yoke of marriage. Living together is one of those options.

  Living together no longer incurs the shame it once did. Today, more than one-half of first marriages are preceded by a stint of living together compared with virtually none fifty years ago.8 Even since 1980, the number of couples living together has quadrupled to five million. The twenties are a prime time for living together. One-fourth of women ages twenty-five through thirty-nine are currently living with someone outside of marriage, and another one-fourth have done so at some point in the past. The trend shows no signs of abating. About one-half of high school seniors say that they plan to live with someone before they marry.9

  Yet here we see education and options diverge dramatically. While college graduates are reconfiguring their path to the altar, they often live together first with the intention of eventually reaching the altar. Their counterparts who skip college are more often not getting to the altar at all.

  Test Run for Marriage …

  If the trends hold, Shu and her boyfriend will spend a year or so living together, working out the kinks about who does the dishes and who cooks and which kind of Soft Scrub to use on the bathtub. Their lives as single adults will gradually merge into a fused household, although they are likely to keep their checking accounts separate, at least for the time being. As the rush of initial excitement passes, they will grow comfortable with each other and settle into their combined routines.

  At some point after their first anniversary of living together, they will begin to hear the insistent drumbeat from their parents to make it official, and many of their friends will begin to pair up as well. Although the majority of young people today think of living together as a normal step on the relationship road, what distinguishes Shu from others are the signals she receives from her friends and family about the ultimate endpoint. This is not the first in a string of live-in relationships, but rather a test run for marriage. She and her boyfriend will move in together with a clear end goal: marriage.

  Ethan met his girlfriend, Zoe, when they were both in college at Johns Hopkins, he for pre-med, she for psychology. Ethan grew up in San Diego, a bright student with a bright future. He got into his dream school, Johns Hopkins, and moved east at age eighteen with his eyes set on becoming a doctor. Almost immediately, he met Zoe, who was living in the same dorm. She was everything he wanted in a woman, and they clicked immediately. “I go for ambitious, career-oriented women who I can talk to,” he says, and Zoe fit the mold. “I like women who want to make something out of themselves. Women who are capable of balancing a career and balancing family. And women who can complement me.”

  The two began seeing each other often. Their relationship was solidified when tragedy struck Ethan’s family. His father committed suicide. At about the same time, his mother was filing for divorce from Ethan’s stepfather, her second divorce in a relatively short period. If not for Zoe, he says, “if I wasn’t able to talk to her and tell her everything that was going on in my life, I don’t think I would have stayed in school.” But finish he did, in four years with a double major.

  At the end of their senior year, they both decided to take a year off from school and work. Zoe found a job in Baltimore, Ethan one in Bethesda, “and things just worked out.” They moved in together that summer. At that point, he says, they were both considering marriage, but Ethan was hesitant to move ahead. “I didn’t want to marry someone unless I lived with them for some time before. My mother’s been divorced twice. I don’t want to get divorced. So, I think that’s a really good way to know if things are meant to be.”

  They regarded living together as a trial run for marriage. “I mean, if we can’t live together when we’re not married, how would we be able to live together when we were married? So, yeah, to me it was just as much preparation for marriage as was dating.”

  Yet instead of marrying at the end of their trial run, they chose to postpone a little longer while they finished up school and settled into their
careers. Marriage will happen in due time, though. Ethan is certain of it. “If she can get an internship at Hopkins, I would have no hesitation about getting married at that time. I just don’t want us to be married and away from each other. Our relationship is as close to perfect as you can get. I think we complement each other extremely well.”

  Ethan and Zoe are well matched, coming from similar families and sharing similar outlooks on life—and on their life together. They agree on the importance of their both having careers, she as a psychologist, he as a doctor. They see children on the horizon, and they get along with each other’s families. They see in each other the qualities they want in a lifelong partner. For them, living together is designed to work out any kinks that might arise and to test-drive the relationship before taking the plunge.

  … Versus Serial Cohabitation

  One rung down, however, are those who are heading into the navy as a last resort, have a job on a construction site after dropping out of community college, or are adrift without a clear idea of where they want to go or what they want to be. Without solid prospects for steady work at a steady wage, marriage seems out of the question. More often than not, couples in this position will move in together, but—unlike Ethan and Zoe—they are not using cohabitation as a testing ground for marriage. Rather, they are moving in together as a way to combine finances, save some money on rent, or because other living arrangements suddenly evaporated. For this group, moving in together is more often an unplanned slide into coupledom than a conscious decision to see if they might be compatible as a married couple. More often than not, these couples do not marry at all.