Several websites that track such things are saying that only one out of every three teens today has even dated in high school and that most of those relationships lasted weeks or months rather than years. Wow. One of out every three. It is no wonder that we are having trouble convincing folks to marry. Dating and courtship rituals have gotten rather rusty along the way. In 1990, seven out of every eight seniors had gone on a date. That number has switched. About 2% of all those dating in high school would qualify as high school sweethearts and, sadly, more than half of those do not make it to their tenth anniversary (ordinarily I would say wedding anniversary but in this age of long term cohabitation they may not have married at all). Apparently half of those high schoolers have flirted with someone by social media but that has not always nor regularly led to in person relationships. Teens are spending more time learning about themselves, entertaining themselves, thinking about careers, and figuring out what they want out of life --- something that may not necessarily be a romantic relationship or marriage.
On the good side, teen pregnancy is down. On the bad side, abortions of any kind for women older than teens is up. Gone is the proverbial young teen girl who finds herself pregnant and the father is also a teenager not ready for marriage. Instead, abortion customers are repeat customers and older -- those for whom marriage is not in the cards and certainly not motherhood. Another surprising turn from the stereotype of old. That is in part due to the lack of dating and romantic relationships among those teen girls. Birth rates are down across the spectrum of ages but a pronounced decline among teen girls.
Apparently we as a culture and a church are not modeling healthy marital relationships in a way that appeals to youth and would interest them in dating or in marriage. The opposite may be true. We may be giving them a poor example of love and marriage and one which the youth are turning down as not worth the trouble. Strange. For all the emphasis on happiness, it would seem that among those married and those who could be dating, happiness and fulfillment are not quite related to marriage and family. Among those who saw marriage as the hallmark of maturity and adulthood, this is not an appeal to the younger crowd either. The statistics tell us that among the religious, marriage is held in higher esteem but not necessarily radically higher and not enough to make Christians stand out from the rest of the culture. That ought to make us sad. It ought to encourage us to be more deliberate in the home and in the congregation as we support and encourage our youth to the courtship rituals designed to find a spouse and the shape of their lives within marriage and a family. High school sweethearts are becoming folklore and mythology and this is a signal of some tough times ahead.
2 comments:
I couldn’t agree more. High School is no longer the same. Dating is not the same. Courtships in the traditional sense are not practiced widely today. Societies evolve or devolve into bizarre forms fashioned by popular thought and contemporary fashion. People are largely swept along with the tide of change, and they either comply or resist. When I was in the tenth grade of high school on Long Island, among my small circle of close friends and classmates, none to my recollection were from divorced households. In my senior year, I dated a pretty girl in the junior class. It was a non sexual relationship, with a few kisses, but nothing further. Neither one of us wanted to be involved in something we were not prepared for, and without sounding too pious, we both knew it would be wrong. Our upbringing and religious values had prepared us. Besides, I did not know love, but I knew that I respected her, and regarded her reputation. These were not odd values, I thought at the time. Most of my friends held similar ideas. Was I naive? I didn’t care about that. Rather be naive than reckless or impetuous. After a few short years, with high school behind me, military service over, 4 years in the Marines, I noticed how our society had changed, and there was no going back. In college, women cursed as badly as the men, divorce was common, cohabitation acceptable to many, and my world and its naïveté had changed. My feeling is this: The world and society are always changing, but we can make the choice to resist what is against our faith and conscience. In doing so, we walk as Christians who came before us, seeking a better land, and not afraid of calling Jesus our Lord and Savior. Soli Deo Gloria
In the last half century marriages between high school sweethearts have declined, partly because of the increased percentage of men and women delaying marriage in order to go to college, graduate school, or establishing careers. For men the median age for first marriage has gone from 23.2 in 1970 to 30.6 in 2022. For women the median age for first marriage went from 20.8 in 1970 to 28.6 in 2022 (https://www.infoplease.com/us/family-statistics/median-age-first-marriage#google_vignette)
One obvious effect of the increased median age for women is less time for giving birth to children (also affected by the increased use of birth control). This can be seen in the average number of births per woman, which decreased from 2.48 in 1970 to 1.66 in 2022 (https://www.macrotrends.net/datasets/global-metrics/countries/usa/united-states/fertility-rate).
Post a Comment