Why are young people getting married again?

Lately, I’ve been having this recurring nightmare that I have just turned 25, and everyone around me is suddenly getting married or having babies. My parents are now hounding me, in ways I’ve never experienced before, about when I am going to get married and give them grandchildren. Even the idea of me potentially going back to school, which has always impressed them in the past, is simply no longer that important to them. All my independent achievements – my degrees, my job, the life I have built for myself alone – all cease to matter in the face of the institution of marriage. 

This is not a nightmare, but in fact what my life has felt like since I reached my mid-twenties. This shift is not just something I’ve noticed in my interactions with my parents, but also with friends and in pop culture. “Everyone is either engaged or at a run club, doing their masters or in Japan”, a popular post on X reads. Another observes, “My Gen Z sistas truly hold marriage as the prize, so interesting to witness,” in response to a post celebrating the recent engagements of Coco Jones, Ryan Destiny, and Normani.

In her Substack essay, “Pop Enters Its Wife Era”, Catherine Shannon writes that a lot of the major women in pop have either got married or engaged this year. “Music is an excellent barometer of culture, one of the best we have. So when four of the biggest female pop stars in the world get married or engaged within 12 months of each other [Lana Del Rey, Charli xcx, Dua Lipa and Taylor Swift], we should probably pay attention,” she writes. All of this is a testament to the fact that older members of Gen Z and young millennials are growing up. But with growing up comes social expectations (marriage, kids, settling down) that you either feel pressured to fulfil, internalise as your own desires, or, arguably, want to do. What has shocked me the most about the moment we’re in, and more accurately, this time in my life, is what Shannon characterises as celebrities “talking left” but “walking right”. 

To clarify, Shannon is not saying that marriage is inherently right-wing, but that it is perceived as conservative and traditional because of its long patriarchal history. In her book, Marriage, A History, Stephanie Coontz quotes historian Margaret Hunt, who states that marriage was “the main means of transferring property, occupational status, personal contacts, money, tools, livestock and women across generations, and kin groups.” To this day, it is men who benefit from marriage, as Clementine Ford highlights in her article: “Marriage is an inherently misogynistic institution – so why do women agree to it?”, as reports show that married men live longer than married women, are generally happier and healthier and see their economic prospects improve. 

After the popularisation of mainstream feminism in the 2010s, it feels especially jarring to witness people’s joyful participation in the institution, as tradwives subtly convince women through their glamourised TikTok videos, that feminism was a mistake and we should all retreat into the domestic sphere. Their content works in tandem with the Trump administration who are actively trying to push women to get married, have children and stay in the home after rolling back reproductive rights and defunding Planned Parenthood. 

During the 2010s, mainstream media declared that Gen Z were the most progressive generation in recent decades, with Time magazine professing that they “will change the world” in a 2018 feature. Madeline Lane-McKinley, in her galvanising new book Solidarity With Children, reminds us that young people are “often delegated with the impossible task of saving the planet” or changing the world, without any proper support from adults or infrastructures to do so. It was believed that Gen Z rejected social norms and craved something different and new for the world and their lives. Fast forward to 2025, and it appears that we have succumb to what it was assumed we were against: young men are more conservative worldwide, we are flocking to religion and, according to The Times Generation Z study, young adults today are more in favour of marriage than young adults 20 years ago, with almost two thirds of them believing that marriage is still an important institution. 

My own feelings on marriage aside, many generalisations have been made about Gen Z over the last few years, even though we’re a diverse group with complex feelings and thoughts about many things, especially marriage. What do young people really think about marriage today, and why are we seemingly more attracted to the institution than generations before us?  

I never really thought about marriage until the White Paper this past May upped the salary minimum for a work visa from £29K to £41K…It puts an insane amount of pressure on our lives – Gillian 

For some, the decision to marry is simple: “I’ve always wanted to get married but never to the people I dated in the past,” 26-year-old Anoushka tells Dazed. “It wasn’t until I reconnected with my childhood best friend [that] everything made sense.” Like Anoushka, 23-year-old Ria, also fell head-over-heels in love with their best friend, and that changed their whole belief system around marriage: “[My feelings on marriage] moved from being something that I could only see the legal and financial benefits of, to becoming a deep desire to entwine my life with my partner and officially and legally make us family.” 

For others, the decision to marry is entangled with political and interpersonal pressures. For example, 25-year-old Brandon, has been with his girlfriend for four and a half years, and is excited by the prospect of marriage, but does feel specific pressures from his family that he can’t ignore: “I certainly feel pressure from my mum and grandma. They make jokes whenever I have my partner over, which aren’t mean‐spirited but definitely have a weight to them, as if to say “it’s time to get married now, what are you waiting for?”” Similarly, 28-year-old Naïka has always wanted to get married and just got engaged in August. Still, she felt pressure from her mum whenever she was in a serious relationship because her family are Christian, and didn’t want her to live in “sin”. 

Our parents’ behaviour often makes us roll our eyes in annoyance, but their hold over our lives is far-reaching. It can feel wrong to defy their expectations, not just because they are our parents but because, as Michel Foucault argues, the family is now a site of key sovereign power (as we no longer rely on the monarchy or religion as heavily as we used to). As a result, the family serves as a disciplinary apparatus that actively (and effectively) enforces social norms and self-discipline. Maryam, who is South Asian and got married at 26, only felt those pressures dissipate once her husband proposed. “There was a period of time where I suffered a lot of trauma around forced marriage – a lot of people that I love were impacted so deeply that I thought that I wouldn’t ever recover. I lost my family, and I also lost some friends on the way,” Maryam recounts. “Truly, I didn’t think I’d get married for real until I met my husband..[When he asked me] I said yes, and the pressure from the past seemed to fall away. I feel extremely privileged to have been in that position.”

26-year-old Gillian feels coerced into marriage, not through pressures from her family but because of Labour’s new dehumanising and classist immigration policies. “I never really thought about marriage until the White Paper this past May upped the salary minimum for a work visa from £29K to £41K. I came here on a student visa, met my lovely boyfriend, got a full-time job, and was on a steady work visa. Suddenly, I was ineligible to renew, and one of the only routes to staying is a spouse visa.” She continues: “It puts an insane amount of pressure on our lives… Neither of us really believes in marriage, but the legal privilege of being married has become something of a defining factor in preserving my life.” For many like Gillian, marriage and relationships have become a lifeline for staying in the UK, as well as for renting or buying property during the cost-of-living crisis. As a result of these major political failures, some young people feel forced to settle down before they ever thought they would.  

Truly I didn’t think I’d get married for real until I met my husband..[When he asked me] I said yes, and the pressure from the past seemed to fall away. I feel extremely privileged to have been in that position – Maryam 

My friend Beth recently described this uptick of engagement announcements and discussions of marriage from those in her life as a “betrayal”. She explains that it feels as if her friends are rushing past this time in their lives, when they’re all together, into the next stage, where they will be apart. This is precisely what upset me when I started noticing the engagements of my friends and peers. Marriage does not automatically mean that one abandons friends or their communities (it can reaffirm one’s commitment to others). But, monogamous relationships can (and often do) separate us from each other unless we actively work against what we are socialised to prioritise: romantic and familial relationships.

However, in speaking to young people about marriage, it’s clear that they don’t necessarily want to rush past this phase of their life (of course, some do), nor have they just become more conservative and traditional. It’s apparent in the responses I received that marriage is still massively enforced upon us. From immigration policies, the cost of living crises, pressures to adhere to social convention, to the fear of isolation and of “dying alone”, as one person told me. There are still so many rights enmeshed within marriage, and value ascribed to it, that it feels very difficult to go against. But we deserve to live in a world where people don’t feel forced to get married through legal or social pressures, where all relationships are equally viewed as important, where our love is encouraged to spread outward rather than inward, and where one’s love does not feel like a betrayal or abandonment of anyone else.