Every few months someone announces, again, that marriage is outdated. A relic. A financial arrangement from another century that younger people have finally seen through.
It is a confident claim, and it is worth checking, because it is also a very old one.
The belief is older than you think
In 1978, a Time magazine survey of voters asked whether marriage was becoming obsolete. Just 28% agreed.
In 2010, the Pew Research Center, working with Time, asked 2,691 adults whether marriage was becoming obsolete. This time 39% agreed. Among Americans under 50 it was higher still, at 43%.
So the idea that marriage is on its way out is not a Gen Z discovery. It has been growing for nearly half a century. And that gives us something useful: a long enough stretch of time to see whether the people saying it were right.
What should have happened if they were right
If marriage were genuinely becoming obsolete, you would expect to see it coming apart from the inside. People marrying out of habit or pressure, discovering it no longer fits their lives, and leaving. You would expect divorce to rise, decade after decade, as the institution emptied out.
That is the prediction built into the word obsolete.
What actually happened to divorce
The National Center for Family and Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University tracks the divorce rate as the number of divorces per 1,000 married women.
It peaked in 1980, at 22.6.
By 2022 it had fallen to 14.6. In 2024 it was 14.2, lower again. That is a drop of more than a third from the peak, over the same decades in which a growing share of Americans became convinced marriage was finished.
Now read the two surveys again with that in mind. The 1978 one, where only 28% called marriage obsolete, was taken when divorce was close to its highest point on record. The 2010 one, where 39% said the same thing, was taken after divorce had already spent 3 decades falling.
Belief in the decline of marriage went up while the thing it was supposedly measuring went down.
The famous statistic tells the same story. You have heard that half of all marriages end in divorce. Researchers at the Institute for Family Studies traced where that number comes from in 2025: marriages formed during the divorce revolution of the 1960s through the 1980s. Their best estimate for first marriages formed today is about 40%. They are careful to say only time will tell, since those marriages are still being lived. But the coin toss everyone quotes describes marriages formed decades ago, not the ones being formed now.
The part that is true
None of this means marriage is as common as it was, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.
The same research center tracks the marriage rate: how many women marry in a year per 1,000 unmarried women. It peaked in 1920 at 92.3. It fell steadily from 1970 to 2010, and has since stabilised. In 2024 it was 31.2, almost exactly where it was 2 years earlier. The decline has stopped, but the level is far lower than it once was.
And marriage has moved later. Between 2010 and 2024, the marriage rate for women aged 18 to 29 fell from 53.7 to 48.8. The highest rates are now among people in their thirties: 62.1 per 1,000 unmarried women and 63.0 per 1,000 unmarried men. The only age groups where marriage rates actually rose were people in their fifties, and women in their sixties.
So fewer people marry, and they marry later. That much of the outdated story is real. What it leaves out is what happens next.
Not outdated. Not automatic.
Put the two trends side by side and a different picture appears.
Marriage used to be the default. Most people did it, and they did it young, often because it was simply the next thing that happened. Some of those marriages were wonderful, and some were entered for reasons that had very little to do with the person.
Now fewer people marry, they marry later, and the marriages that form are more likely to last. That is not what a dying institution looks like. It is what an institution looks like when it stops being automatic and becomes a decision.
We wrote in can you afford to get married about how marriage shifted from something you build a life on to something people wait until they feel ready for. This is the other side of that shift. Waiting has real costs, but the people who do eventually choose marriage are, on average, choosing it more deliberately.
Before this sounds too tidy
There is an overly neat version of this argument available, and it would be wrong.
Part of the fall in divorce is almost certainly selection. When people marry later, they marry with more of their life already settled, and some of the marriages that would once have ended never happen at all. A lower divorce rate does not mean any individual marriage has become magically safer. It means the group of people now marrying looks different from the group that married in 1980.
The claim here is narrower, and it holds: the evidence does not show marriage being abandoned by the people inside it. It shows fewer people entering, later, and more of them staying.
What the generation supposedly abandoning it says
If marriage were outdated, the clearest sign would be young adults who no longer want it. So Pew asked.
In a survey fielded in late 2023 of 1,495 adults aged 18 to 34, among those who had never married, more than two thirds said they want to get married one day. Another 23% said they were not sure. Only 8% said they do not want to marry. Men and women answered in about the same proportions.
Different surveys word this question differently and land on somewhat different numbers, including the one we covered in the dating recession. But the share who reject marriage outright stays small everywhere.
The more interesting group is the 23%. That is not rejection. It is uncertainty, and uncertainty has causes: not meeting anyone worth marrying, not trusting the way people meet now, not seeing a clear path from where they are to a marriage they would actually want.
Why the reputation outlived the reality
If the numbers are this clear, why does “outdated” keep sounding true?
Partly because what is visible is the delay. When people marry in their thirties instead of their twenties, a feed full of people in their twenties has fewer weddings in it, and it is easy to read an empty decade as a closed door.
And partly because marriage’s reputation was set during its worst stretch. The 50% figure, the jokes, the cultural shorthand that marriage is where romance goes to end, all took shape when divorce was near its peak. The institution quietly changed afterward. The story about it did not.
What changes when marriage is a decision
If marriage is no longer something that simply happens, then the skills that matter shift too.
When it was automatic, the main question was when. Now the questions are whether, and with whom, and they get answered by people actively deciding rather than drifting. That makes clarity more valuable than it has ever been: knowing what you want, saying it, and choosing someone who wants the same thing.
It also makes drift more costly. We wrote last week about microromance, arrangements designed so that nobody ever has to decide anything. When marriage was automatic, drift often ended in a wedding anyway. Now drift usually just ends.
Where this leaves VOOWA
I want to be careful not to overclaim, because the easy version is not true. No platform makes a marriage last. Everything the research links to a durable marriage happens between 2 people, over years, long after any app has done its part.
What a platform can do is match the way marriage actually works now.
If marriage is a decision rather than a default, then the first thing worth knowing about another person is whether they are making that decision too. On VOOWA every member states their marriage intention before the first message. Verification means you are not also spending months finding out whether someone is who they say they are.
That is the whole idea, stated plainly. Not a place for people who might eventually drift into something. A place for the people who have already decided marriage is not outdated, and are looking for someone who agrees.
VOOWA launches on Google Play on November 11, 2026, at 11 AM. The waitlist is open below. Once you are in, invite friends with your personal code: when 11 of them join and get verified, you get a month of Basic free, and at 22, a month of Premium.
