Which Men Marry and Why

Late last year, the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University released its 2004 annual report on the state of marriage in the US.

One interesting point:

"Challenging the popular stereotype of the marriagephobic male, findings from a new national survey of young heterosexual men, ages 25-34, indicate that while men are delaying marriage until older ages, most men are "the marrying kind." Among all men surveyed, those from traditional, religiously observant family backgrounds are more likely to be married, to seek marriage and to have positive views of marriage, women, and children than young males from nontraditional and nonreligously observant family backgrounds."

Please click "Read More" for further details.Another excerpt:

"Compared to the rest of unmarried men in this sample, those who say that marriage is "personally not for you" are strikingly more averse to marriage on a number of key questions. For example, they are substantially more likely to mistrust women to tell the truth about past relationships (60 percent v. 39 percent); more likely to worry about the risks of divorce (66 percent v. 53 percent); more likely to believe that it is okay for a woman to have a child on her own (70 percent v. 61 percent); more likely to say that they do not want children (29 percent v. 6 percent); more likely to say that single men have better sex lives than married men (52 percent v. 31 percent) and more likely to agree that "if you marry, your biggest concern would be losing your personal freedom" (62 percent v. 30 percent). They are also less likely than other unmarried men to have grown up in traditional families (41 percent v. 58 percent) and less likely to have had fathers who were involved in their lives (58 percent v. 75 percent)."

The article can be downloaded as a pdf file here.

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