Why are less people getting married?

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I would move to another place possibly another state and live off of welfare with my future wife and kids if I find the right church of Christ woman....My church is the only place realtistically my mom will tolerate me looking for a wife. I am banned by my mom from getting on a dating site. I am also banned by my dad for looking for dates on facebook.

It's hard to break away from your parents' influence when you are disabled!! !

I had to go through the untethering process with my mom but it wasn't easy!

Are you looking for a wife so you can escape the situation with your mom?

Or do you TRULY want marriage?

I just want marriage so I can biblically have sex and also so I can be elder in the church of Christ.

That's a petty reason to get married IMHO

Marriage should be based on love and commitment NOT sex!! !

Sex is just a component of a romantic relationship or marriage

But I do understand where you are coming from, having to abstain from sex until you get married due to religious beliefs!

It sucks...

I have no choice other than getting kicked out of my church if I joined it and they found out.

What a fantastic lever of power it is, when a religion figures out how to lord access to sex itself, over its followers

Hopefully because they are getting smarter.

/drops microphone.

Give her another 35 years.

This is why I wish I could get people to understand that religion is harmful, but everyone needs to find their own journey for themselves.

my 2 cents:
- a person can be smart, persons on the other hand...
There is no implicit evil in religion, we all believe something, have to let go of our knowledge, and have it drift into belief at some layer of comprehension. This is where I see 'religion' (as much as I do not like the word, knowing how it became tainted through human history, but it still qualifies). So back to my first phrase, religion is ok. organized religions are troublesome and prone to what any social endeavor is prone to...

but Kada, what's your point... we're talking about marriage and religion?!?
sigh...
My point is to try and indicate that: religion is personal and marriage is as well.
If 2 people can find themselves fitting together like pieces of a puzzle (please allow my romanticizing for an instant), and work out there differences, sacrifice some individuality and become a "unit" to take on life and its unknowns...
I humbly and respectfully bow to them.
I do not revere social media characters, movie or tv stars, politicians or entrepreneurs;
But I hold a deep reverence for people who dare to combine their efforts and take on life and try and make a nest for their children, to (fumbling as they may) try and attempt to build a future together.
These are true heroes to me!
I know I'm speaking from a position of privilege, as not all of us have the innate ability to walk that path. Which is fine and takes the number 2 in my list of reverence Knowing yourself and your limitations is extremely hard and challenging. and can only humbly be done by giving it a go...

All cultures have something like marriage. It's something that will never go away. Biologically, men unfortunately have so-called "first abandoner advantage" (evolutionary psychology speaks of this): men unfortunately can run away from a woman they have impregnated, and do the deadbeat-Dad thing. Then to make matters worse, kids can grow up very maladjusted psychologically, if the mother does a bad job of rearing the baby. There was a controversial and infamous psychology experiment about the effects of bad mothering, by Harlow.

https://www.simplypsychology.org/harlow-monkey.html

A great book on these sort of developmental problems in human babies is "What Happened to You", by Winfrey and Perry.

In a conservative, traditional setting (with no pre-marital sex), sex is just about come exploding out the gates, starting on the honeymoon, so powerful commitment attestation (you know, marriage) is a bulwark against "first abandoner advantage", harlow-monkey-style childen etc, which might otherwise follow the impregnation which is fairly likely to happen next. So marriage can be said to be functionally all about making strong public attestations - at tremendous effort and cost - which will hopefully avoid this automatic, egregious psychological damage if the parents are really bad parents.

This commitment attestation can't be powerful enough. There is also the so-called "7-year itch", which besets virtually all couples. So over time, we shouldn't be surprised to see the marriages getting more and more expensive, and lavish. The bigger the better; the stronger the public statement made, about commitment. Small fortunes are spent on wedding rings, dresses, hell rentals, DJs, professional photographers (even when smartphone cameras are awesome these days), etc. The wedding ring must be an expensive diamond. Wage savings measured in half-years are expected by every one of these modern-day wife-queens, to pay for such a worthy diamond ring. Not one of those still ultra-hard, cheaper Moissanite rings, which can also scratch glass, and act as a symbol meaning "this one is mine, back off", to deter competing horny men who want one's wife for themselves. The symbol of commitment just wouldn't be as powerful, you see.

Then economic downturns come. Oh no, who can afford a marriage anymore? All the rituals and symbols and lavish ceremonies were predicated on waterfalls worth of cash being readily available to satisfy the wife-queens that a sufficient commitment was attested to, assuring them that "first abandoner advantage" wouldn't happen to them.

That's why no one wants to get married any longer.

The sacrificing of the now to enhance a shared future, in an increasingly atomized, individualized social landscape is becoming less and less attractive. we're going into the Jordan Peterson "shunned crab"-state of being.

Perhaps a useful addition here to this topic would be to indicate that; searching for 1 sole reason to explain a complex and as stated personal topic such as marriage and family constitution will always and by design fail.
For as we often see even here in WP reflected, many posts end in variations of "it depends", or "that works for you but not for me".

Are we talking shunned crab, or full shunned lobster here?

thank you for the correction maestro... Lobster indeed!

Interestingly in much of Europe people seem to have stopped bothering with marriage but are still forming families and raising children. I don't really see the same trend happening in the US. Here people still get excited about the idea of getting married. There are probably a thousand reasons for the difference and I won't try to guess.

The only people left who still get married are the ones who are getting re-married probably because they know what to expect from the process and marriage!! !

It's the ones who are entering into marriage for the first time like me who are turning away from it!

Americans want the "wedding & honeymoon" aspect of marriage NOT necessarily marriage itself

Take away the wedding spectacle and honeymoon vacation & I guarantee no one would get married anymore!!

The entire institution of marriage and ancient ritual of weddings would COLLAPSE!! !