Those who never marry

United States census figures reveal that nearly 10 per cent of our adult population never marries. Only about 90 per cent of all who reach the age of forty-five have had the marriage experience. Since very few of the remaining 10 per cent will marry after that age, it follows that about one tenth of all adults end their lives as single individuals.

The percentage that never marries is even greater when all ages are considered. This is illustrated by the fact that of every 100,000 females born, only approximately 78,000 ever marry (of these, only about 65,000 eventually become mothers). This means that between one fifth and one fourth of all persons born never marry; some because of death before the time of marriage and others because they either choose it that way or lack opportunity on the adult level.

It would be both inaccurate and unjust to assume that the unmarried, as a class, are inferior to the married. Though some individuals remain single because of personality deficiencies, others never marry in order to better express their personal talents. Though society encourages marriage, it is rapidly coming to accept the unmarried state as normal and to remove many of the handicaps which formerly surrounded it.

Single persons of every age group have higher death rates than do those who are married. This is particularly true of the male, but with certain exceptions during the childbearing ages it applies to the female as well. Reasons are two: (1) Marriage is selective as to health, the tendency being for those with serious constitutional weaknesses or deficiencies to remain single. (2) Marriage tends to favor the health of its members by encouraging a more settled and systematic mode of living.

There is a strong probability that unmarried men and women differ from each other in regard to quality. In an earlier chapter we referred to the commonly observed tendency of men to marry beneath themselves for the sake of ego protection--supported by parallel tendencies of many capable women to want a career, to delay marriage for it, and to be more particular than men in choosing a mate.

This "marrying down" expresses itself in the areas of age, education, general socioeconomic status, and very possibly with reference to physical and emotional aspects of the personality. Folsom has used the term mating gradient to describe the tendency, claiming that it "would seem to leave an unmarried residue on the upper rungs of the female social ladder and on the lower rungs of the male ladder."

This point finds reinforcement in the fact that of women who don't go beyond the sixth grade in school, about 95 per cent marry, while only some 70 per cent of those who graduate from college ever marry. Apparently it is the more able and career-minded of the females that go on for higher education, and in going on they reduce their marriage chances, both by becoming older and by becoming too intellectual for the dominance-loving male. We should add parenthetically, however, that though marriage after college graduation becomes slightly less likely for the girl, this does not apply while she is in school; the college campus has proved itself to be an extremely productive laboratory for mate selection. Furthermore, as studies reveal, college marriages, when they do take place, are less likely to end in divorce than are noncollege marriages.