Mirage or Oasis: Marriage and Emerging Adults

Chuck Donovan / November 04, 2009

Visiting the complicated world of emerging adults (young people between the ages of 18 and 29, with data now available up to age 23), Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker report back with findings that raise challenges for the future of marriage as an institution. Some of their findings, which will appear next year in a volume from the Oxford University Press titled Premarital Sex in America, were presented last week at a Heritage Foundation conference on what scholarly research says about religious practice in America.

The good news is that emerging adults (five percent of fewer) say almost without exception that they expect and want to marry someday. The bad news is that this goal is not only being postponed for their late 20s or even 30s chronologically, but repositioned in ways that call into question whether marriage as they conceive it can be more than a mirage. (more…)