It’s wild to say this, but in the early 1970s, the age at which most women had walked down the aisle was right around 20 years old. That’s crazy to consider, especially compared to men, who were around 22 or 23 years old before most of them had tied the knot. But that female tipping point did begin to shoot up pretty quickly. By the 1990s, the age of marriage for women was about 24 years old, and for men it was around 26-27 years old.
From that point forward, both lines begin to rise in near parallel. You can see from the trendline that somewhere around 2016, most men had gotten married by their 30th birthday. For women, that took until just the last couple of years. But here’s the one stat to think about—in 1972, the average person’s first marriage happened right around 23 years old. Today, it’s about 28 years old. There’s no denying this fact: people are delaying marriage much longer now.
Now, let’s inject religion into this equation. This is just that question about “never being married” across three groups—Protestants, Catholics, and the non-religious.
The upshot here is consistent and straightforward. The non-religious are way more likely to never have been married compared to Christians. That was true in the 1970s, and that’s true in 2024. The gap is really large, too. When comparing the nones to Catholics, the gap runs somewhere between 10 and 15 percentage points. It has narrowed at some periods, but then it just opens back up again. In 2024, about 43% of the non-religious had never been married compared to 27% of Catholics.
I do feel the need to point out that Catholics have always been less likely to tie the knot compared to Protestants, too. I don’t know if I would have guessed that. It’s pretty noteworthy how the lines just seem to run in parallel, too. No matter what year you look at, a Catholic is about five percentage points more likely to say they’ve never been married compared to a Protestant.
But any astute reader of this newsletter will know that the above graph has a real problem. Put simply: it’s age. The nones tend to be a lot younger than Protestants or Catholics. In the 2024 data, the mean age for Protestants was 50.5. It was 51.7 for Catholics but only 41.9 for the non-religious. Of course, getting married is largely a function of age, so we need to correct for that.