7 ms·
Half the men in Seattle are never-married singles, census data shows
- victoria289 2y ago[dead]
- knappa 2y agoSo, by "men", they mean 15 or older. Median age of first marriage is ~30 for US men.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago> Median age of first marriage is ~30 for US men. Based on genealogy I've done, this stat also applies to the late 19th, early 20th centuries.
- dragonwriter 2y ago> > Median age of first marriage is ~30 for US men. > Based on genealogy I've done, this stat also applies to the late 19th, early 20th centuries. It was ~26 in 1890 reached a low of around 22 in the 1950s, and has been trending up since; its been consistently lower for women, though that gap has fluctuated over time and compressed recently to less than 2 years. https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/julian-median-age-first-marriage-2021-fp-22-15.html https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/ju...
- WarOnPrivacy 2y agoMy observations vary by region. ex: I found later first marriages in NYC, earlier in Scranton PA - the latter being marked by a lot of labor-related deaths.
- dragonwriter 2y ago> So, by "men", they mean 15 or older. Which is kind of a silly age range to use for this purpose in Seattle, since Washington (unlike a number of other states) does not permit child (under 18) marriages and declares any marriage contracted by anyone under 18 void.
- elric 2y agoHow many of these never-married men are in a relationship? Unmarried != single. Stats on the number of singles who have never been in a relationship would be far more valuable. Relationships, sexual or otherwise, are not subject to paperwork. The days of relationships, sex, or even reproduction being tied to marriage are long gone.
- galleywest200 2y agoThe article mentions that widows impact the count for single women, so yes I think it is speaking about single people who have never been married, even if they did have a relationship of some kind in the past.
- jimbob45 2y agoAnecdotal but my friends don’t try at all anymore or they don’t put in any effort and pretend that’s not their problem (read: you need to shower daily). It’s stupid because the combination of singles mixers, tinder, and community events make it very easy to find a partner (keeping them is another story) but nobody wants to try. I’m of the opinion that porn has sapped their will to find women, even though it’s very possible to have a healthy relationship with porn and men have indeed had healthy relationships with porn throughout recorded history.
- parpfish 2y agoOr maybe the porn gives them everything they need from a relationship and we’re seeing that there’s a larger segment that genuinely doesn’t need/want to be in a relationship.
- unnaturally 2y ago[flagged]
- rileymat2 2y agoThis boggles my mind, porn only takes the place of a very small part of a healthy relationship.
- KolmogorovComp 2y ago> As marriage becomes less popular among younger generations, Seattle men have hit a milestone of singledom: For the first time, half of the men living in the city have never been married. How can this logical fallacy pass through editorialising? As marriage becomes less popular, for the same number of couples, you will have fewer marriages but not more singles.
- bqmjjx0kac 2y agoCan you explain the fallacy in more detail? It doesn't seem like a leap that if marriage is less popular, a larger percentage of the population is single.
- tyre 2y agoThey can be in a relationship (not single) but not married. I know people in relationships for 7+ years who haven’t married. That was far less common the further back you go.
- bodiekane 2y ago"Single" for the purposes of this just means "not married". They don't care if the man has a girlfriend, situationship or polycule. If a person isn't married, they're single for the sake of taxes, census data, etc.
- balfirevic 2y ago"Single" is a stupid word to use as an antonym for "married", even if technically correct according to the dictionary.
- georgeburdell 2y agoI do want to point out that never-married by looking at legal paperwork is a blunt instrument. There are reasons, especially for dual high earners, to not get a marriage license. Examples of tax-related things that don’t double when married; -Income tax brackets above about $200k -SALT cap -Mortgage interest deduction -HSA contributions (if have children) -Dependent care FSA contributions
- Spooky23 2y agoYeah this sort of analysis really requires survey data. As a widowed male, i gained an appreciation of the complexity of things. I’m not dating someone young enough to be my daughter, so the pool of available women consists of divorcees, widows, long-term single and various flavors of married and dating. Divorced people and widows have strong incentives, as spousal support and survivors benefits for children are contingent on not being re-married. Also, if you’re not planning to have children with a partner and have money that’s worth litigating over, (or property that was your late spouse that should go to a child) marriage complicates that.
- mindslight 2y ago- Collapsing two legal entities into effectively one. In the days of the healthcare cartel and other hyperfinancialized shakedowns, this seems like a poor idea. Corpos hire armies of lawyers to create new legal entities so their owners can escape liability. It seems foolish to sign a piece of paper that undermines your main access to that dynamic.
- kmeisthax 2y agoThe Sybil attack reigns supreme!
- toshinoriyagi 2y agoIsn't this all solved by just filing separately, not jointly?
- oidar 2y ago
- dgfitz 2y ago[flagged]
- jocaal 2y agohttps://archive.is/qMtHz https://archive.is/qMtHz
- russell_h 2y agoWithout looking at any data I’m guessing part of this is that married men end up with kids and can’t afford a home they want to raise kids in there. Edit: also, school quality.
- forgotTheLast 2y agoI'm from a different major North American city but the only married men I know who live within city boundaries either bought their residences 20+ years ago or were born/married into wealth. Everyone else moves to the suburbs once they get married or have kids because real estate in the city is unaffordable if you want 2+ bedrooms.
- jeffbee 2y agoTo see other examples of this in history, look at Ireland and their 19th century famine. They had the lowest rate of marriage and the oldest age at marriage of any European country. This effect was so profound that Ireland still has this demographic quirk, which is not cultural but has a root economic cause.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago> Without looking at any data I’m guessing part of this is that married men end up with kids and can’t afford a home they want to raise kids in there. It's also that parenting time is up 20 fold from a few generations ago. My parents spent a few hours a week parenting. My kids had 24/7 adulting.
- Aurornis 2y agoMy anecdote: We had offices in the Pacific Northwest (Seattle and Portland) at a previous company. A lot of young people worked in those offices. It was basically a rite of passage for them to move just outside of Seattle around the time they were getting married. This was so widely understood that it factored into decisions about where to locate office buildings and influences remote and hybrid policy. If you wanted to attract and retain more experienced employees then being in-office only in the middle of the city was risky.
- spicyusername 2y agoI mean, people who get married typically plan to have children next. At a minimum they tend to stop participating in many urban activities, night life, etc. Having children in an urban area is more expensive and the schools tend to be worse. I don't think this is a uniquely Seattle phenomenon. It's pretty common to emigrate from the city center to the suburbs when planning to start a family or otherwise "settle down". In most cases it's just simple economics.
- ghaff 2y agoThe finance people from my cohort from grad school moved to Manhattan and thereabouts to a large degree. 10 years later? I know one couple who still live there I think.
- pfdietz 2y agoPatrick Boyle has looked at causes of decline in the total fertility rate around the world and concluded reduction in the formation of couples (married or not) is a major cause. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ispyUPqqL1c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ispyUPqqL1c
- inglor_cz 2y agoSee also "The Global Collapse of Coupling and Fertility" https://www.ggd.world/p/the-global-collapse-of-coupling-and https://www.ggd.world/p/the-global-collapse-of-coupling-and I wonder if the ultimate cost (in lives never born) of technologies like smartphones and Tinder will be. If a significant part of the entire youth cohort never learns to interact with the other sex in the real world, we might be looking at a pandemics of loneliness - and at subsequent global birth deficits in eight to nine figures.
- pfdietz 2y agoI've come to a conclusion that the solution may be somewhat radical. If coupling is reduced, it should become the norm for women to have and raise children alone, or at least without a male partner. This increases the burden on women, so at the same time the number of children they must support would have to decrease. This could be achieved technologically, by filtering sperm to remove Y chromosome carrying gametes. As a result, the female/male ratio of newborns would dramatically increase. At the US TFR of 1.66, a 2:1 female to male ratio would be more than enough to maintain the population. Even higher ratios could be imagined, leading to an almost entirely female population. Social engineering to reach this state is left as an exercise to the science fiction writer.
- edg5000 2y agoInteresting point. Probably there are many historical case studies of populations with unbalanced sex-ratios. There are many reasons for it to go out of balance. Recent/currently China and Russia are examples. According to wikipedia; the ratio of boys to girls is 1.3:1 in some rural areas in China.
- jandrewrogers 2y agoAnecdotally, among the people I know in Seattle, many people who have happily been in the same relationship for decades are not married. People are not avoiding long-term relationships, they are avoiding the baggage and fairly rigid assumptions that comes with state intervention in their relationships. There is zero social pressure to be “officially” married so people have no reason to do it for the sake of social conformity. Both men and women are subscribing to this. I think some of this is a side-effect of many people planning to never have children.
- garciasn 2y agoAs someone who was married and is now divorced, I can absolutely see the draw. I don’t think of it as “state intervention in relationships,” as I’m not a libertarian, but aside from tax breaks, which mean absolutely nothing when I have to pay for my ex-wife to live carefree for the rest of her life simply because we were married and she was lazy, doesn’t offset the 19 years of tax offsets she squandered.
- graemep 2y agoI can understand that. My ex wife is currently after money from me after years of refusing to work (even when we really needed the money) - and I did more than half the work in looking after our kids too. Just to explain, divorce, child arrangements, and divorce finance are separate cases here. We do not have tax breaks for being married here in the UK. There is one tiny advantage if one person does not have a taxable income, but is pretty small. On the other hand I also (as I said in other comments) know women (and it is still almost entirely women) who have not got a fair deal financial because they were not married, but gave up work to look after the kids/be a home maker. That is just as unfair.
- BowBun 2y agoAgreed with this point. Folks are moving away from traditional relationship structures, and have been for a while. If you want a personal anecdote - I'm partnered, not married, we don't plan to have kids or marry, and worry pretty much 0 about retirement or having enough funds to pass on to another generation. We're just enjoying our lives for however long that may be.
- yosito 2y agoAs a single man with no desire to ever marry (but plenty of great lovers in my life), I feel like we need more context about their lives before we can assume that "never married singles" means much of anything at all.
- oldpersonintx 2y ago[dead]
- api 2y agoSeattle, meaning the city, right? When people get married and think about settling down and maybe having kids, they usually leave high cost of living cities. They want stability, something they can own or rent long term, and usually more space, especially if kids are coming. Sometimes they move to the suburbs, sometimes across the country. The only people who stay tend to be rich people who can actually afford to get some space and stability in the city. Even then many of those decide to leave anyway for other reasons, again especially if they want kids. High cost city centers are basically an extension of college dorms at this point. They are where people go to start their careers or level up, not stay. This is like saying “study shows that most people in a shopping mall are looking to buy something” then extrapolating some larger conclusion from that.
- ghaff 2y agoPeople, especially couples, moving out of cities as they get older has been a thing for decades. You’d think young urbanites would welcome this.
- trollbridge 2y agoIt means heavy car dependence unless you expect people to change careers when they have a family. Hence the modern American cityscape, with most the population spread out amongst suburbs.
- ghaff 2y agoA lot of the jobs are in the suburbs (finance being something of an exception). A lot of the tech industry is in car-reliant suburbs. I live in Massachusetts and, until west coast firms established outposts in Boston/Cambridge and pharma basically took over Kendall Square, there was basically no tech industry in Boston for a couple decades. And, yes, outside of Manhattan and young people essentially living like they did in college for a few years, car dependency is just what most people do.
- trollbridge 2y agoOf course, this pattern of human settlement is silly. Cities used to be hospitable to families, often with multiple generations living in them. Instead of needing a daycare and lots of miles in a car, grandparents and relatives were nearby to help with young children. On the other hand, forcing people outside of the city to afford a family means more GDP from building roads, selling tyres, replacing cars, petrol sales, oil refining…
- fHr 2y ago[flagged]
- tejas911 2y agoShould there be a census for relationship status which is not just married / civil union?
- MaxPock 2y agoTFR in the US is just as bad as in China
- keepamovin 2y agoTwice married here and never been to Seattle so I guess that's .... correlation?
- delichon 2y agoMy brother was a never-married single in Seattle, and it was the cause of his death at the start of the pandemic. He was terminally lonely and without purpose and suicided. But he was a tremendously loyal person. If he was able to make a connection and form a family, he would have been full of purpose. Instead he lived quietly in a small house in a quiet neighborhood, and after he died none of his neighbors could even recognize his photo. He lived within a community but never reached out to it, and nobody ever reached in. Socially he might as well have been living in a cave on a remote island. He was a free proton in an atomized society. Aka an acid. I blame society, my brother, myself, and probably you too if I can figure out how.
- eduction 2y agoHey I’m really sorry for your loss. And sorry he didn’t find that connection. Do you think a different city would have been better for him? I only visited Seattle once and I know this is a cliched thought but I do wonder if the weather and sprawl undermine people’s chances to make connections. Vs a more dense or at least sunny city.
- delichon 2y agoHe was much more active and open when he lived in Santa Cruz. But then, also younger. I don't know what he saw in the damp cold gray north.
- swyx 2y agovery sorry for your loss. i've been similar in Seattle and it was tremendously alienating. I left as soon as I could. Obviously not a seattle-only thing but I think Seattle is so full of picture perfect couples (working 9-5, big tech/big tech adjacent, dog, 1.5 kids) and gloomy weather that it is the perfect combo of depression fuel for anyone that doesn't fit that mould. the only social activity is beer. so you aren't just lonely but you also get drunk and fat (and probably shave your head bald and grow a beard but thats more portland spilling over).
- TriangleEdge 2y agoI live in Seattle now, am married, and have an infant. I find Seattle not friendly towards families at all. The going rate for a daycare here is 3.5k per month for an infant. My wife and I are both ~7%ers? individually and we can barely afford our home (a tall skinny townhouse with no yard) and the cost of 1 baby. Having a family is hard here... Also, I don't find Seattle safe for infants and toddlers, or anybody really.. What big tech wants are people who are willing to give up everything for the dream of making money, and that's what they got. Edit: Our life is pretty good in any case. I would never let my kid go outside and play unsupervised in Seattle even tho I myself did this as a kid in my home town (the safety I was mentioning).
- nradov 2y agoThere's hardly any place which is really "friendly" towards professional families with infants. For safety reasons, daycare centers have to maintain staffing ratios so it's always going to be extremely expensive (unless you're poor enough to qualify for subsidies). As for safety, for some reason those big tech employees keep voting for progressive politicians whose failed policies have ruined their cities. I guess voters are getting what they want?
- losteric 2y ago1. Seattle is quite safe. Friendliness is different than safety 2. It all comes back to housing density/supply. As you say, daycare costs are dominated by staffing ratios/wages - which are a function of cost of living. The surge of high income earners + housing supply deficit = pricing out daycare workers (and daycares).
- derektank 2y agoSeattle has a higher homicide rate than New York or LA and it is running well above its own historical rate; in 2014, the entirety of King County had fewer homicides than the city of Seattle did in 2024. It is safer than many other US cities, but US cities are quite dangerous by first world standards which is why many people opt to raise kids in suburbia.
- toomuchtodo 2y agoPew Research: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/28/a-record-high-share-of-40-year-olds-in-the-us-have-never-been-married/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/28/a-record-...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dfilppi 2y ago[dead]
- alexyz12 2y agoFrasier never finds love?
- abenga 2y agoSadly no. I was rooting for Reagan, short though her days were.
- betaby 2y agoMarriages in the western world is a clear example of the 'overregulation'. And further marriage rate falls, more regulations are added. To the point that in Quebec various forms of cohabitation are considered as a marriage in court. That makes a relationship a serious liability.
- jeffbee 2y ago"Common law marriage" is ... common ... at least under ... common law. Canada, like America, is influenced by the uniquely bad English common law heritage. Even Quebec with its pretend Frankenlaw system that blends civil and common law can't escape the influence.
- nullc 2y agoI don't know about other countries but it mostly does not exist in the US. Only 9 states allow one to be created, one of which requires it to be certified by a court. And in those states that do you must intentionally, openly, and conspicuously hold yourself out as married... so the urban legends about accidentally ending up married are just that-- urban legends-- at least in the US.
- jeffbee 2y agoWell, the beauty of the common law tradition is you, as a hypothetical co-habitator, have no idea whether you are "accidentally married" in any particular regard unless or until the matter comes before a judge for whatever reason. Your aggrieved former not-quite-spouse can make whatever claim to equitable judgement that they can imagine in, say, Colorado. Contrast this with, say, Poland or France, where under their civil traditions there is no chance whatsoever that your unmarried person who lived with you will be able to claim your estate when you have died.
- seaourfreed 2y agoWho made that happen in Quebec? I'm asking an honest question as an outsider. Trying to understand. Did 51% of the population want that? Did the government force it, even through 51%+ of the population didn't want it? I'm just curious. Your insights would be greatly appreciated. Which group wanted it and made it happen?
- mjevans 2y agoI live in the metro region of Seattle. I'm not sure what Third Space / Place would be viable to find a life partner. The region is relatively sparse and spread out due to bodies of water, hilly topology. By car everything still seems far and the road network (as always for anywhere) strained to the limits of what people are barely willing to tolerate for commutes. Transit infrastructure is mostly commuter busses for 9-5 jobs in Seattle, maybe a bus or two to Bellevue. The single artery of slow (no express last I road) 1 rail line each way light rail still under construction at end points and offering not much real benefit for someone trying to connect between points without transfers. Transfers outside of Seattle a huge annoyance due to sparse schedules and routes that generally don't go where someone might desire. Which is a long way of saying; there's a very real transaction cost in time, energy, and financial resources to get anywhere. Any hobbies, any venues, anything I can think of other than places like a library (to be quite and alone) all have their own costs. They're for profit, not for hanging out (for low / no cost) nor meeting new people. It's to the point where I'd take a SciFi grade benevolent AI nudging stuff together to solve these intractable issues and get the right people into the right places so that matches do happen without winning the lotto level odds.
- pizzadog 2y agoThis is a huge point I think. I live in metro Seattle as well. I've lived in a few other American cities in my life, all bigger than Seattle, but I've never felt further away from the rest of a city than I have living here. The city is just downright terrible to navigate and the normal kind of urban sprawl that gives a city its "heart" is totally choked by the terrain. I've lived in places where I wouldn't blink at a 30 minute walk to and from a friend's house or a bar, but in Seattle that almost inevitably means hiking up at 45 degree incline for half of the route. Genuinely I don't know what could be done to solve this aside from saturating the city with transit options, but it's in the back of my head whenever I hear people complaining about problems around here. "Why is the traffic so bad?" "Why is housing so expensive?" "Why is everyone sad?" It's because the topography of the city looks like a fucking rollercoaster.
- AndrewKemendo 2y agoI was married for 11 years, had three children and am happily divorced. I’m glad I got married and I’m just as glad I was able to get a divorce. What’s overwhelmingly changed in my lifetime (since 1980) is that young adult people would rather be alone with no children than take the risk on being unhappy or getting a divorce. The single biggest change is that the average sentiment now in the “global-west” is “why should I risk my current lifestyle for the risk and pain of a family.” That wasn’t previously really an option for most people - for a lot of structural reasons. A lot of it was structural repression and the fact that is gone is an unalloyed good. However it does mean that the expectations for human communities and population growth that have undergirded humanity since the neolithic no longer apply. We need to fundamentally rethink what humanity is working towards, at a global scale, if the gross population numbers had peaked for humanity.
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y agoWe were never gonna scale our population much further anyways. Arguably, the social changes we’ve seen could be a response to our reaching a (very approximate) carrying capacity and experiencing friction against further growth in myriad ways. That’s the way I’ve been thinking about it at least. > That wasn’t previously really an option for most people - for a lot of structural reasons. I’d be interested to hear more about this if its no trouble. I’m in my twenties so not much knowledge of this stuff.
- abenga 2y ago> I’d be interested to hear more about this if its no trouble. For women, at least, you could not be independent (legally at least). You needed a man to co-sign applications to open bank accounts/credit cards/etc. Fewer well paying jobs were available to you. All these were worse still if you were a member of a minority.
- AndrewKemendo 2y agoEffectively what the other response said. Women in the US were effectively treated like second class citizens across the board and were not permitted to have any kind of independence. The history of sexism in humans is pretty disturbing and creates a foundational schism in the structure and coherence of society. The concept of equality and “freedom of opportunity” or “freedom from oppression” is unfortunately not something humans have ever functionally been able to demonstrate (at least in any way that transmits to other cultures or generations)
- karaterobot 2y agoI wish they defined what "single" means for the purpose of this statistic. From what I see on the census website, it's as though they're counting people who are divorced, widowed, unmarried and also people who are in a long term relationship in the same category, which they're calling "single". Single to me means not in a relationship at all. I guess I also wish they defined the boundaries of Seattle: do they mean the urban core, the city limits, King County, or the metropolitan region? I know relatively few married people who live in Seattle, but that's because it's too expensive to buy a house in Seattle's city limits. You either have to inherit a house, or have both people work in a high-paying industry for this to be affordable. I also know more than a few couples who are in very long term, committed relationships, living in Seattle with no intention to get legally married. They are 'married' in the culturally meaningful sense, just not the legal one. My point is it seems (to my inexpert reading) like their statistic is capturing very young people, who rent apartments in Seattle but aren't ready to get married, and older people who may have houses in Seattle, but are more likely to be divorced or widowed. But, they're mostly not talking about 30-60 year olds, who are more likely to be married, bu live outside Seattle and commute into it. Weird. I don't know how much I care about this statistic.
- steve76 2y ago[dead]
- danielktdoranie 2y agoThe incel problem is now an epidemic, I feel very sorry for the young men of late millennial era and Gen Z. From what I have seen dating for these generations has become incredibly difficult. When I was a young man (I am the last of Gen X) relationships were never “easy” but dating was. There are young men out there in their 20s who are still virgins, I had a son at 18.
- jfuasdjfwa 2y agoAnecdotally, I've never had any success in my attempts to date ciswomen. Not tall enough, not wealthy enough, not fit enough, not educated enough. There was always some metric I failed to meet. In contrast, dating queer folk has been a joy. They accept me for who I am.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y agoThis article addresses how the 2015 SCotUS decision affected marriage stats. The factors in play then changed how I thought about marriage. My alignment in early 2010's was staunchly RW Christian. The 2015 changes in marriage law had me reconsider what marriage was historically. I came to some conclusions (that I mostly still agree with). My 'tribe' attached money and other benefits to marriage. This fundamentally reframed marriage in secular ways; it diminished religions' claims on it. We Christians had been solidly in charge of marriage and for the previous 80 years divorced had steadily climbed. I felt we should own that; we should stop blaming societal factors - because we were also part of society. Prior to the 2015 SC decision on marriage, I was a strong proponent of civil unions. I felt CUs were a path to decoupling marriage from secular benefits (tax breaks, spousal privilege). However, hard liners held sway and they were having none of it. After 2015 I openly hoped that gay marriages gained a better track record than 'traditional marriages'. I felt there was a lot we Christians could do to be better spouses - in ways that both partners would want to stay married. I hoped gay couples would set examples for us. This was a simplistic fantasy on my part, pure immaturity. ftr: I presently identify as Recovering Conservative. Where I have religious leanings, they run counter to the modern right. I sometimes use more nuanced pronouns.
- watwut 2y agoHistorically marriage was economic and practical arrangement. People frequently married after fairly short time of knowing each other and the reasons were frequently that they had to - and not just because someone got pregnant.
- AngelaScott22 2y ago[dead]
- anal_reactor 2y agoThe biggest change is that for the first time in history it's easier to live alone than in a family. 100 years ago good luck trying to grow anything on a farm without any help, and most children were free labor that would later convert into free retirement care. Nowadays you don't need others for basic survival, and children are a huge liability. With a little bit of creativity you can live in a city yet go a month without talking to anyone, and still have your biological needs taken care of. So many people choose not to, because truth is, most people don't like each other, it's just that in the past they'd either somehow get along together, or die. Nowadays they don't have to.
- UtopiaPunk 2y agoWe're talking about Seattle because it is in the headline (the source is the Seattle Times). But there are 10 cities in the USA that have a higher percentage of "never-married single men." So this is a trend that is not unique to Seattle. I just wanted to call that out since many of the comments seem focused on diagnosing what it is about Seattle specifically to lead to this trend. IMO, it is mostly a housing issue. It seems like most new construction goes towards apartment complexes where the units are all 1-2 bedrooms, or else they go to more "luxury" big houses. I personally would love a 5 bedroom apartment in a dense, walkable city, but good luck finding it. So I'm currently in the suburbs with my kids, even though I hate the suburbs.
- puppycodes 2y agoperhaps instead of assuming marriage is good we should stop discriminating economically against unmarried people.