The opening paragraph makes for a gripping read, a society on the verge of collapse because 20-somethings are choosing to bunk up with their mates, rather than get married and start families.
Adultescents, kidults, the boomerang generation they all mean essentially the same thing: Something has gone terribly wrong with today’s 20-somethings. They are or, I should say we are something less than fully adult. Piled into group houses and shared apartments, we are part of the Friends generation. Whether by choice or by circumstance, we’ve built lives around our friendships instead of creating new nuclear families. The numbers bear this out. According to the latest census stats, the median age of first marriage for an American woman is almost 26, up from nearly 23 a quarter-century ago. The percentage of Americans who’ve never been married is climbing fast.
So there’s a three year difference in the average age, over a 25 year period, some people in the United States, (and probably other western societies also) are marrying at. Haven’t life expectancies risen by at least that amount, if not more, in the same places?
My calculations aside, there are some interesting observations about the increasing size of American houses compared with the decreasing size of American families.
