The marriage rate in the United States has declined significantly over the past 50 years. According to the National Center for Family & Marriage Research, the marriage rate has dropped from 76.5 women married per one thousand unmarried women, down to 31.3 in 2010. Since 2010, though, the marriage rate has remained relatively stable.

Coinciding with the decrease in marriage rates is the increase in the average age of marriage. Sociologist Fr. Paul Sullins told Drew Mariani, “There’s almost a straight line increase since the 1960s” of the marriage age going up. Sullins suggests “extended adolescence” is partly to blame. In the 1960s, the usual markers of adulthood—marriage, steady employment, and a home —would often be done by the age of 25. Today, those markers happen later into American’s thirties.

Cost of living is one of the reasons people wait to get married. “Wealthier young people get married much sooner at a much higher rate than those who struggle a lot,” Sullins said. Those who are not as wealthy think twice before forming families, “when they start thinking about things that would be required to get married and then to have children…it seems beyond their capacity to do now.”  Fr. Sullins, though, thinks marriage and children are possible even for those who don’t think so.

This does not mean, though, that young people will never have kids. According to Pew Research, around half of young adults aged 18-34 say they would like to have kids someday.

In his short pontificate, Pope Leo XIV has spoken about the importance of good witnesses to marriage. In his homily last month for the Jubilee of Families, he said “today’s world needs the marriage covenant in order to know and accept God’s love and to defeat…the forces that break down relationships and societies.”

In another address that week, the Holy Father spoke about couples who choose cohabitation instead of marriage. The pontiff said they “need someone to show them in a concrete and clear way, especially by the example of their lives, what the gift of sacramental grace is.”