OK—Not everyone loves Valentine’s Day, but everyone loves to play “Two Truths and a Lie,” the party game where you have to evaluate three statements and guess which one is FALSE!
This week, we thought it would be fun to feature three statements related to the dating world. All of this information—plus a lot more!—is covered in the latest report from Independent Women: “The Dating Decade: Hooking Up, Hanging Out, and Swiping Right.”
Can you spot the lie among these statements below?
A. The average American now spends more than a decade in the dating world before marriage.
B. Most young singles say they like having casual sex and engage in it occasionally.
C. Most young singles still hope to get married and have kids.
A. True! For most of history, “sexual debut” (or losing one’s virginity) and marriage were either concurrent or very chronologically close. In the 1950s, the window between these events was just a few short years for the average American.
Not so today. Sexual debut occurs, on average, at 17.4 years for women and 17.6 years for men, and this has held relatively steady over time. But the average age for first marriage is now much later: 28.4 years for women and 30.8 years for men. This means that the average American spends more than a decade looking for love in the pre-marriage dating world.
B. False! While many (most!) young adults say they find casual sex “acceptable,” we asked young adults about their personal preferences and behaviors in a new national poll. Only 31.5% of adults aged 18-29 told us that they liked having casual sex and engaged in it from time to time. Most young adults want sex and commitment to go together. While only small minorities of women (7.9%) and men (6.5%) said they were waiting until marriage for sex, many more (54% of women, 36.9% of men) said they would only have sex in a long-term, committed relationship. Interestingly, more men (10.9%) than women (7.9%) said they didn’t like casual sex but felt pressured to do it at times.
C. True! Despite following a slower timeline for these major milestones, most young people still hope to get married and have kids one day. In our poll, 80.5% of respondents (aged 18-29) were either married (18.5%) or said they hoped to get married one day (62%), and 70% said they either had kids already (24.5%) or hoped to have them (45.4%). Today’s dating landscape looks different from what our parents and grandparents faced. Due to changing social norms, new technologies, and even political divisions, dating is in many ways harder today than ever before.
To learn more about these challenges, read our full report here: “The Dating Decade: Hooking Up, Hanging Out, and Swiping Right.”