I’m not even talking about the farming town dynamic of “marry the pretty girl as fast as you can, because you have few options to start with, and they get worse every year”. Here, I mean to discuss the factors that relate to individual choices (not government making it worse), even in a well run country, which build up to a situation that forces very young (well under 18 years of age) people to make marriage decisions.
First, I will talk about the impersonal denominator issue: that is, if we as family/marriage counselors sorted everyone, what percentage of the population could we realistically match to each other. Second, I will talk about the (non-legal, non-government) social factors that practically further reduce the denominator, to a level that approaches 1% or less. All this will support the overall conclusion.
At a theoretical possibility level, we should review the sexual revolution/contraception improvements and women’s lib in general. Promiscuity always was an issue in the relatively liberal West before these developments, but now there are no practical limits for either sex. Women can get sex at any time for free, while men still have to pay, but the social capability/acceptability and availability of sex significantly has increased from that which prevailed during the time of overt slavery (with the given exception of raping your slaves). Hence we have to consider that if someone wants to have unprotected sex with many partners, that they will. Such a conclusion is consistent with the VD data, and popular surveys, and anecdotes. A precise estimate anchored in the right area is difficult to provide, but we have to consider that average people in their late 20s or early 30s have had double digit sexual partners, therefore they have at least had herpes or chlamydia, amongst other types of VD. Hence, the first cut line is that 50+%, and probably somewhere around 75%, of the available mates at age 30, are unsuitable for marriage due to persistent VD.
The second limiter is the general suitability and desire of the mates to have children/raise a family. The general suitability is dealt with by other writings on this site, and boils down to that they have to be upstanding citizens, which, when that filter is applied to the general population, “if they are not in the top 25% of the population, you probably can’t get the family you want”. Of course, the pool of males/females further has to be reduced by the ones who actually want to have (more) kids. At a coarse (probably too optimistic, e.g. due to survivor bias) level, we could consider that between the VD issue, and the suitability, that only 25% of the single population is suitable for marriage; and based on modern Western fertility rates, it may be that only 50-66% of that 25% want to have kids. Again being optimistic, we consider that only ~17% of the population is practically eligible.
Next, we have to apply the health filters. For instance – there is a great deal of variation from country to country, but obesity rates on the order of 25% are not uncommon. Now, older people tend to be more obese, so there is not quite the same relationship to the dating pool, but in some countries (e.g. the 48 states) you easily could say that 30+% of the dating pool is fat. Amongst other issues, this means the kids will be fat, which is a cruel thing to do to your kids if you had a choice about it. We shouldn’t quite reach a conclusion here because there are issues about the mother vs. the father, fat with non-fat, etc…but we will hold this for consideration with other items.
We also have to consider dealbreakers; in particular, religion. If we were to consider that half the population is properly religious and half isn’t, and that neither would consider marrying the other, then that would lead to a halving of the dating pool. The reality is vastly more complicated, but this gives a sense of the downselecting/denominator issue.
We could continue to drill into other factors e.g. allergies to pets, caretaker statuses, lifestyle incompatibilities, etc. but you get the coarse idea: when you apply up-front, major qualifiers, even considering major compromises and lifestyle flexibility/acceptance, you’re already talking about eliminating 90+% of the available females/males from the dating pool.
Having considered the theoretical limits in regards to the basic functioning of the family, health considerations, basic compatibility, we have to look at socially, what people actually will choose to do. We have to consider realities like:
- Many women won’t settle for less than 6 feet tall, which excludes 85% of the male population.
- 20% of the women are quite unattractive to the vast majority of the male population.
- People typically don’t want to marry too much older or younger (and there are good reasons behind that), so although you might have a million people in a city, if you have an age band of +-5 years, you’re talking about a maximum theoretically available pool of ~5000 people, the vast majority of whom would be dating someone(s) at any given point. Moreover, as people in that population marry/couple up, the practically available pool drastically declines, especially for 30s or older males who (in a normal situation) want to have kids, and so can’t go upwards on age. The end result is that if you follow a conventional system (not to say the conventional system is right or wrong), where a person “gives you a spark” or it “seems like it can go somewhere” or “it seems like this person is right”, further reducing the denominator, it can be easy to work through the dating pool, even though the macro would tell you that you should have thousands of people (especially with online dating!), and hence a male or female easily should be able to get at least a mate in the top 10-20% of their overall preferences.
- If you match well (which doesn’t happen often) and have people dating within the 5% of prospects that they would actually be able to marry, you would consider that each person might be in consideration for a year or two – meaning that if dating were to start at age 15, people would have a rough upper limit of 20 people from whom seriously (not first date one and done) to choose before it comes time to have kids or not. Hence if we consider that a person should (and they should) date a decent selection of mates before making a 20+ years long commitment, you would be talking about marriage at 25-30 years of age, even if you start at the right time and date a large number of the right people.
- Queuing delays cause significant loss of time as prospects get older, because the remaining single people are waiting for all the dating couples to break up/take a break. So, getting through that ~20ish people that we would consider the ideal, is not likely. Indeed it is far more likely (and supported by the anecdotal evidence) that people only are having a few long-term relationships before making a marriage decision.
- The above discussion considered that all the people who at one point would make good spouses, actually are dating other people who might be good-ish spouses for them, which certainly isn’t the case. There is some level of gross weeding out that happens as well, which induces further time consumption/delays.
The practical result of these theoretical and social realities is what is reported: thousands of people in the bars/singles meeting places and online, but average people only having 3-4 even semi-serious/semi-qualified prospects from which to choose, for a first marriage. At that number, the tuned solution of the “secretary’s dilemma” begins to approach a first-satisfactory decision procedure: if you know you maybe have 2-3 serious prospects left in your dating career (and, if you are past 30, maybe zero), if your current prospect seems like good enough, your downside so significantly exceeds your upside that you have to accept whatever misgivings you may have beyond the most basic fundamentals and dealbreakers. That is, you have to settle for what in many ways may be a mediocre relationship. Then your kids, and society generally, look at your choice and say “why did they settle for that trash? why are they always fighting?” and in response, they raise their standards. That raising of standards will cause them to repeat the same behaviors, and get into the same situation.
I want to address the “95%” part of the title. There are some exceptions to this feasibility:
- You are a relatively slender, attractive young woman, particularly with a lighter shade of skin
- You are in the top ~5% of relatively young males (6 feet tall, not fat, somewhat facially attractive and muscular)
- You are super rich and can spend a large amount of time splashing around, looking for mates
Note that although these quantities by themselves are larger than 5% of the population, you should remember that issues like rape, depletion of the dating pool by e.g. soul mates, attractive guys deciding to play the field, etc. mean that although more than 5% of the population qualifies to have options, practically there will not be enough survivors from the rest of the dating pool to allow this entire eligible waiter pool, actually to delay their decisions for so long.
Absent massive individual behavior change that would constitute a radical culture shift, there are several choices people could make in response to this:
- The Pakistani/old Saudi solution of imprisoning women to stop the VD/cheating (though of course we also would want to consider male behavior)
- A strong, pervasive Indian-style matchmaking system amongst the family-minded
- Extremely early dating (9 years old) to try and cut off the VD angle
and the point of this writing is not to argue for or amongst them, but simply to remind you that humans respond to facts and conclusions such as the above.