Haley writes about “the danger in romanticizing young marriage, without also mentioning its rarity.” It’s also worth mentioning that young marriage is not the historical norm, either.

The average age of first marriage for women in the United States today is about 28 years old. For men, it’s about 30. Those are both higher than they used to be, and they have been increasing gradually for decades. But people in the more distant past did not get married very young, as is commonly believed.

Economic historians have studied age of first marriage as a possible factor in economic growth. A 2021 paper by labor economist Pavel Jelnov found: “Today, a high level of economic development is associated with late marriage, but for most of the twentieth century the opposite was true: economic growth was associated with early marriage.”

As economic growth first took off during the industrial revolution, the average age of first marriage decreased compared to what it was during the days of the agricultural economy. The average age of first marriage for women in pre-industrial Europe was around 25 (and a relatively high proportion of European women never married). If you zoom out to look at age of first marriage from 1800 to today, the line graph is roughly U-shaped for most Western countries.

As Jelnov explains, the economic theory is as follows: Men’s labor productivity increased before women’s did. During the industrial revolution, men moved into new, productive, industrial jobs while women still largely stayed at home. Since labor productivity is tightly correlated with wages, it meant that men quickly made more money and therefore became more marriageable, which drove the age of first marriage down. As women began to enter the workforce in large numbers after World War II, the trend began to reverse, since they could afford to work on their own and delay marriage. The availability of the birth-control pill further contributed to the rising age of first marriage.

The low point for age of first marriage in Western countries was during the 1960s. Jelnov estimates the mean age of first marriage for Western women in 1965 was 22.5, and for Western men it was 24.7. That was slightly lower than it was during World War II, and substantially lower than it was before the industrial revolution.

The United States around the time of the Revolutionary War had higher wages than Europe and consequently had a lower age of first marriage. That age increased for much of the 19th century. The U-shape in the U.S. began with the Second Industrial Revolution, around 1900. Age of first marriage declined from then until the 1960s, then began its ongoing increase.

It was industrialization and economic growth, not traditional values, that pushed the age of first marriage down, culminating in historically low ages of first marriage in Western countries, including the U.S., in the 1960s. Today’s ages of first marriage are unusually high, but the 1960s’ were unusually low, and they should not be considered a standard to which we must return.