Why are Americans growing indifferent to marriage?

Hadlee Knighton always planned to get married, but she could never see herself spending her life with anyone she dated. With Griffin Knighton, however, she says she found her best friend.

Hadlee and Griffin, who were married earlier this year, grew up a street apart from each other but didn’t really meet until Hadlee returned from serving a mission for their church. Griffin’s uncle, who knew Hadlee, suggested that Griffin go to hear Hadlee speak in church to report on her experience. They struck up a conversation afterward, and the rest is history.

“We saw each other every day after that,” Griffin said. “We just felt like we were best friends, you know? There was that romantic interest, but also, we get along really well, we have a lot in common, we can laugh, we can work through problems. We just clicked really well together. And I think when you have that ... why wouldn’t you get married?”

Both Hadlee and Griffin say marriage has changed their lives for the better.

“I feel like my life has more depth and meaning, having a commitment to someone and having that kind of depth of love that you just don’t get from dating,” Hadlee said.

The Knightons’ attitude toward marriage is growing increasingly less common in the United States. According to the 11th annual American Family Survey, Americans are not rejecting marriage as an institution, but they don’t think it’s as important as they used to.

“For the first time in the history of the survey, people now appear to be more interested in commitment as a value than they are in marriage as an institution,” the survey report states.

The nationally representative survey of 3,000 U.S. adults is a joint project of Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute, BYU’s Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy, and Deseret News. The survey was conducted Aug. 16-18, 2025, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.1%.

Do Americans think marriage is important?

Jeremy C. Pope, a co-author of the report, is a Wheatley Institute fellow in constitutional government, a senior scholar at the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy, and a professor at BYU. He said the survey shows a universal trend across spectrums like age groups and political affiliation of indifference toward marriage.

“It’s not that Americans are truly becoming negative or souring on marriage,” Pope said. “What is happening is that they’re losing some enthusiasm.”

Fewer than half of Americans agree that society is better off when more people are married, according to the survey — a number that has steadily decreased over the past 10 years. Meanwhile, an increasing number of Americans say being legally married is not as important as having a personal sense of commitment to their partner.

Pope doesn’t think everyone needs to be married, and he said people can live a perfectly happy, good life without getting married. However, research shows clear benefits to marriage specifically. It is correlated with better health and increased wealth and happiness — and Pope says people should be aware of the difference it makes.

Christopher F. Karpowitz, the other co-investigator of the study, a professor of political science at BYU, and a senior scholar at the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy at BYU, agrees. He said it’s potentially alarming that Americans do not value marriage as much as they once did.

“It’s not that people outright reject marriage — very few do — but there’s a kind of softening in the sense that marriage is an institution that is helpful in a whole bunch of ways," he said. “And our view is that’s potentially a concern.”

People are less likely to have an economic crisis if they are married, Karpowitz noted, and children are less likely to experience poverty when they have married parents.

The survey also found that Americans are increasingly worried about the economy and the cost of supporting a family. In light of those worries, the report suggests, “It is notable that fewer recognize the fact that married couples tend to be more stable financially, with higher household incomes.”

Do American women want to get married?

American men and women generally have different views of marriage, according to the survey. While 53% of male respondents agreed that society is better off when more people are married, only 37% of women agreed. While only slightly more men than women said they personally hope to marry in the future, there is a larger disparity in the strength of their responses — women who say they “definitely” want to get married are in the minority among their gender, while a slight majority of men say they definitely desire marriage.

 “Women are just less enamored with the institution now than men are,” Pope said of the results.

It’s difficult to say exactly why that is the case, but Pope has a few theories. He speculated that one of the reasons women may have a less favorable view of marriage than men do is that women don’t always see today’s men as marriage material.

Women are outpacing men in college enrollment and home ownership, and a growing number of men are reporting feeling aimless and isolated. Women are also growing increasingly more focused on their careers and outperforming men in the workplace. According to the survey, 43% of women do not believe marriage is more important than a career to finding happiness, while only 28% of men concur.

Pope says these results reflect an ideological component to the disparity in how American men and women view marriage , but there may also be what he calls a “performance component.”

“Women look at men and wonder if they’re bringing enough to the table to make marriage enticing,” he said. “They’re not sure that the men that they encounter are going to be helpful in a relationship.”

Further exacerbating the divide is the online rhetoric that claims marriage does not equally benefit men and women.

Pope says asking whether men or women get more out of marriage is akin to asking which blade in a pair of scissors is doing the cutting. Even if there isn’t an even split of labor and benefits in a marriage — which he acknowledges likely happens often — the overall institution provides a benefit to both individuals and society as a whole.

 “(Marriage) is just two people coming together and sharing things and building things,” he said. “It is sort of hard to figure out exactly where the lines are, where you would say, ‘Oh, you contributed enough, and you need to contribute more.’”

Do young Americans have unrealistic standards for marriage?

The problem here may be twofold: Sure, some people may not be stepping up to the plate, but others may have also created unnecessarily high expectations.

 Pope said, “It is worth asking the question: Have women created standards that are unlikely to be met by actual men?”

Hadlee and Griffin Knighton have seen this play out firsthand. Both said that while people should certainly have high expectations for potential partners, some have unrealistic ideals. Hadlee has noticed that some people don’t take the time to get to know someone before giving up on the idea of dating them. Griffin said some of his friends have understandable reasons to not go out with a certain person again, but other times he thinks their critiques are “kind of ridiculous.”

This may reflect the growing attitude among Americans that marriage should be a capstone event rather than a cornerstone to building a happy life. Pope said young Americans often think they need to have all their ducks perfectly in a row before they get married — have an established career, buy a house, have savings. But he says they may have things backward.

“The longer you go in life building all of those things without ... somebody else as a partner, the harder it can be to agree to build it together, to compromise,” he said.

The Knightons agree. Hadlee and Griffin were 22 and 23 years old, respectively, when they got married. That’s several years younger than the national average, but the Knightons said they don’t see a point in waiting until you’re older to get married.

“The older you get, the more set in your ways you are generally,” Hadlee said. “So I don’t feel like getting married young is really that bad, because you get to grow together and you get to build what you want your life to look like sooner.”

 “It forces you to grow up in some ways and change some of your habits,” Griffin said. “There’s definitely a lot of adjusting and sometimes it’s difficult, but it’s always for the better.”