When we started this newsletter, we aimed to focus on things that aren’t changing and things that are changing slowly. So far, we’ve done a lot of a former and not so much of the latter.
But here’s an example of something changing very slowly indeed, so slowly that it’s often overlooked. It’s the age at which people get married. It’s a fairly dull chart.
The average age people are when they get married has been creeping up for a long time. Year on year, it only changes very slowly – men who got married in 2020 were only 0.2 years (about 10 weeks) older on average than the men who got married in 2019. But over time that kind of gradual change really adds up. In the early 1990s, the average age of a man getting married in England and Wales was 26, and the average age of a woman was 24. That’s now 32 and 30, respectively.
That shift is only apparent in the data on opposite-sex marriage. Since same-sex marriage was legalised in 2014, the trends haven’t changed very much. The average age of a man getting married to another man was 37.7 in 2014 and 38.1 in 2020, for women it was 34.8 in 2014 and 34.6 in 2020.
Slow changes and big impacts
Demographic trends are almost always gradual. In futures work, that means they can often be taken for granted. That’s the wrong approach to take. As we wrote in our very first Slow Futures article, when we’ve analysed past predictions against what actually happened, it’s often exciting technological change that is exaggerated and over-hyped and boring demographic change is overlooked or forgotten about.
Maybe that’s fair enough. The news story based on data showing that the age people are when they get married has increased by a couple of months compared to last year would be a very boring news story. But when slow change happens over a long period of time, it adds to up to really dramatic change.
This is the same data as before, but with the x-axis taken all the way back to 1846 – as far back as the ONS provides data. It shows that marriage in the 1990s was more similar, in age terms, to the 1840s than to today. Most of the age increase since 1990 happened in the next decade, and the rate of increase has been slightly slower since about 2005, especially for men.
There are several reasons why we’ve seen this change.
Marriage is less relevant. The total number of marriages has declined over the past few decades. In 1972 there were 426,000 marriages – that remains the most ever in a single year in England and Wales. But in 2019, there were only 226,000 (it dropped even further in 2020, but Covid played a big part in that). Fewer couples want or need to get married before living together or starting a family, so it’s less likely to happen early in life.
Decline of religion. In 1970, 70% of marriages were religious. Over the next couple of decades that proportion dropped to around half and hovered at that level until it dipped below 50% in 1993. Since then it’s plummeted. In 2019, fewer than one on five (19%) marriages were religious. This simply mirrors the wider secularisation of British society – and in doing so removes another reason for getting married young.
Second life. In 2019, 34% of all marriages involved someone who’d been married before. That’s declined on the peak (42% in 1996 and 2000) but is massively up on the numbers from the 1960s, when only 15% of marriages involved someone tying the knot for the second time (or third, or fourth…). As divorce has become more acceptable and obtainable (before 1969 divorces were very hard to get) more people have had the chance to marry again. This naturally drives an increase in the age at marriage (although isn’t a factor in the data above, which only counts first marriages).
The Changing Meaning of Age
All of this adds up to the Changing Meaning of Age. What it means to be a particular age – the stage we’re at in life, the roles we perform, the expectations we have on ourselves and society places on us – is changing. Marriage is both a driver of that change and is driven by it; we get married later because marriage is no longer an essential precursor to family life, but marriage is no longer essential because of other demographic and social changes. That includes increasing economic independence for women, the unaffordability of housing, more time being spent in education and young people simply having different priorities for their lives. Almost all of that happens very slowly.
The charts shown above are fairly linear and straightforward. Here’s a more complicated one, fitting for the way marriage – as with so many other demographic trends – is getting more multifaceted. It shows the overall shape of marriage: the distribution of marriage, by how old the people getting married are, for select years since 1971.
The chart shows the proportion of marriages in that year that involved someone in each age band on the horizontal axis. The change in the shape of each line is stark: in the early 1970s virtually all marriages involved people in their 20s. By 2019, just 32% of marriages involved people under 30. In 1971, nearly one in five (18%) marriages involved a teenager. Now, virtually none. Today, marriage is just as relevant to people in their 60s as to people under the age of 25.
What does this mean?
This is one of dozens of similar shifts. The ages at which we have children, grandchildren, own property, finish education and retire - among many other things - are all changing. As a result, what it means to be a particular age is changing too.
The slow nature of demographic change means organisations are slow to notice. Many still don’t: building products, segmentations and strategies around rigid or outdated models of the life course.
The Changing Meaning of Age disrupts all of that - and requires organisations to work harder to understand the lives of their customers.
Hi Tom, surely life expectancy is a major factor. Mortality has declined since the 19th century, leading to a long-term rise in life expectancy for both males and females (see Figure 1). Males born in 1841 could expect to live to only 40.2 years and females to 42.3 years, mainly because of high mortality rates in infancy and childhood. Improvements in nutrition, hygiene, housing, sanitation, control of infectious diseases and other public health measures have reduced mortality rates, increasing life expectancy to 56 years for males and 59 years for females by 1920. Now we at 79 for males and 83 for females. Actual longer life is a second half of the 20th century phenomenon, the first half, as described above was more about infant mortality.