For the first time in three decades of national surveying, high school senior boys are more likely than girls to say they expect to get married someday, according to a new analysis from the Pew Research Center.
In 1993, 83% of 12th grade girls said they wanted to marry. The Pew report published Nov. 14 found that as of 2023, 61% say the same — a 22-point drop. Pew notes that the pattern was once reversed.
“In 1993, a larger share of girls (83 percent) than boys (76 percent) said they wanted to get married someday,” Pew reports. “But the share among girls dropped by 22 percentage points over the last 30 years.”
Boys’ expectations, on the other hand, have remained comparatively stable. In the most recent survey, 74% of boys said they wanted to marry, “virtually unchanged” from the early 1990s, Pew reported.
The findings draw on data from the Monitoring the Future study, a long-running national survey of 12th graders conducted by the University of Michigan. Pew analyzed responses to questions about teens’ views of marriage, children, and long-term relationships dating back to the early 1990s.
According to Pew, marriage still holds broad appeal for most teenagers: Two in three seniors said they expect to marry at some point. But uncertainty has increased for both genders. Nearly one in four say they are unsure whether they will marry, up from 16% in 1993. Only a small share say they do not expect to marry at all.
The growing hesitation appears in other areas of family life as well. Seniors today are less likely than those surveyed three decades ago to say they are very likely to want children or to expect to stay married to the same person for life.
The new findings have sparked a wave of commentary online, where writers and researchers argued that the numbers reflect a broader reevaluation of relationships among young women. A widely shared Substack essay by Celeste Davis circulated on X this week, claiming that “scientifically speaking, women should in fact have very little incentive to seek out boyfriends or husbands” and citing research indicating that single women may experience greater longevity, more financial autonomy and less household labor than married women. Her essay, which also argued that married women “get less sleep, less exercise,” and face higher risks of depression and stress-related illness, drew tens of thousands of shares and appeared in dueling threads debating whether marriage benefits women at all.
But others argued that the online backlash overstates the risks of marriage and cherry-picks the most alarming findings. Some researchers pointed to large national surveys showing a different overall pattern. Data from the 2022 General Social Survey, one of the longest-running studies of American adults, consistently finds that married women, including those with and without children, are more likely to describe themselves as “very happy” than unmarried women.
In a 2025 report from the Institute for Family Studies titled “In Pursuit: Marriage, Motherhood, And Women’s Well-Being” researchers find that, in a nationally representative survey of 3,000 women ages 25 to 55, married mothers were consistently more likely to report being “very happy” than any other group of women.
Some analysts also note that many of the health studies circulating online examine older generations or specific high-conflict marriages, rather than the broader population. A 2013 meta-analysis of 93 studies noted that much of the research tying marriage to poor health outcomes draws from “clinical or high-conflict samples,” rather than the general married population.
Still, no single dataset can fully explain why teenagers’ views on marriage are shifting, or how those attitudes may translate into adult choices. The evidence on women’s well-being in relationships is wide-ranging, often dependent on the generation studied, the quality of the relationship, and the measures used to assess health or happiness. Some studies compare married and unmarried women without accounting for age or socioeconomic differences. Others focus on women in distressed or high-conflict marriages, while still others examine broad national samples that mix diverse experiences together. As a result, the current debate often strings together findings that are not directly comparable.
While the new Pew data clearly document a long-term decline in girls’ expectations for marriage, they offer no conclusions about what is driving the change. The drop is unfolding against a broader backdrop of shifting family patterns: Adults are marrying later than in past generations, and a growing share never marry at all.
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