Add it to yet another thing that Millennials have destroyed: Young people just aren’t doing marriage the way their elders did. Every day it seems, the Millennial generation attempts to chip away at the pillars of Baby-Boomer America. And now they’ve set their Snapchats goggles on ruining the age-old American tradition of divorce.
The United States divorce rate has dropped 18 percent from 2008 to 2016 according to an analysis done by Philip Cohen, a University of Maryland sociology professor. While cynics would argue that the drop in divorce rate is simply because the marriage rate has also fallen over the last several decades, Cohen’s study focuses on the divorce rate in relation to the number of marriages in those given years.
It turns out love just means a little more to Generation Xers and Millennials, or — at the very least — caution means more.
Bloomberg reports that Baby Boomers are still getting divorced well into their golden years, so much so that a term was created for the phenomenon, known as the “grey divorce.”
Cohen cites a younger generation which views marriage as a sort of leveling up — with couples focusing on financial stability and education before tying the knot.
“One of the reasons for the decline is that the married population is getting older and more highly educated…Marriage is more and more an achievement of status, rather than something that people do regardless of how they’re doing.”
That isn’t to say people are avoiding relationships altogether, rather new family structures are replacing marriage like cohabitation or polyamory.
According to a study done by non-profit organization Child Trends, couples are still living together, and the number of cohabiting parents with children is also growing strong. And although this YouGov poll shows that 68% of Americans aren’t down with sharing romantic partners, a growing number of Millennials and Gen-Xers are eager to at least discuss the arrangement — with about a fourth of respondents answering “It depends on the situation.” True that.
So you know, this doesn’t mean the end of the human race or anything. We’re just doing what we do best: Showing the older generations where we feel they went wrong and killing industries (the second marriage industry! The divorce lawyer industry!) one by one.
