A new study conducted by a team of academics on young people in the U.S. and Canada has found that marriage is still viewed positively by the majority of them.
These findings directly contradict widespread anxiety over the future of marriage as an institution, and even surprised the researchers working on this project.
"What was so striking about what the young people said is that no one really described rejecting marriage," said the academic in charge of the study, Maria Kefalas, a sociology professor at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia.
"I had a category all written — marriage rejector — and we couldn't find any. There was no one who said, 'Marriage is meaningless and I don't want to get married.'"
The study also found a huge difference between rural and urban young adults in their views of marriage. Rural young adults were named as "marriage naturalists" by the study because they still hold to a generations old view of marriage in seeing it as the inevitable "next step" in a long-term relationship.
"It was like a time capsule," Kefalas reported. "Marriage was expected. It wasn't fretted about, there was very little hand-wringing about it. A lot of the pressure for marriage was external in terms of social expectation that that's what you do."
However, urban young adults were more "marriage planners" said the study, in that they set high standards for potential marriage partners and revealed a conviction that marriage was something they had to be "ready for."
"We hear a story of, 'Of course we want to get married, but there's a lot more to it. There are so many more things I have to accomplish before I get married,'" Kefalas added. "It was crazy, how much work they were putting into this."
While more young people are living together first and common-law couples are growing at a much faster rate than ever before, Kefalas said this is more because of economic factors than a disillusionment with marriage. The current shifting economic landscape makes it increasingly difficult to gain the financial stability that most young adults feel they need before they marry.
"One of the great myths has been that young people, in particular millennials, are saying, 'We don't want to get married and marriage is irrelevant to us,' and that's not true," Kefalas insisted.
Kefalas' co-authors on the paper, published in the July issue of the Journal of Family Issues, are Frank Furstenberg and Laura Napolitano of the University of Pennsylvania and Patrick Carr from Rutgers University in New Jersey, reports canada.com.