Read up on Milennials and you’ll learn a few things: We’re lazy, over-confident and coddled, according to TIME. We’re going to have a hard time finding work out of college. We’re tech obsessed, TV obsessed. We are the first generation to have the majority of its members support same-sex marriage and the most racially diverse. And we’re further removed from religious institutions than any other generation before us.
We’re also less likely to get married.
According to a nationwide poll conducted by the Pew Research Center this fall, just 26 percent of Millennials are married. When Gen X’ers were the same age,  36 percent of them were married, while 48 percent of Baby Boomers and 65 percent of the members of the Silent Generation (those born between 1925 and 1945) were married. Today, barely half of all U.S. adults are married — fewer than ever before. The survey finds that the young are much more inclined than their elders to view cohabitation without marriage and other family styles — such as same-sex marriage — positively (46 percent reported cohabitating at some point in their lives, which is double the number reported in the 1990s).
What are the reasons for this decline, and what do they say about the future of marriage?
Today, more than six-in-ten wives work (almost double from the 1960’s when many feminists likened marriage to a subordinate “prison”). And while more women work, more men stay at home. Data from the Pew Research Center shows that, in 2012, 2 million fathers were stay-at-home dads. Though not all of these men stayed at home to care for their children, the percentage who did (21 percent) is quite a leap from 1989, when only 5 percent of stay-at-home fathers said they stayed home to care for family.
Priscilla Yamin, a University of Oregon political science professor and author of the book, “American Marriage: A Political Institution,” sees thinks this shift represents an increased ownership of the future. Instead of following a line of actions many might consider the traditional “path to adulthood”— going to college, getting a job, getting married, having children— many Millennials prefer to make their own directions.
“I think people are seeing that society is shifting, so people are trying to figure it out on their own terms,” said Priscilla Yamin, “For instance, after the economic recession in 2008, they had to be more creative about getting work. And they also now may be more creative about how to structure their social lives.”
Jamie Bufalino, a UO history professor, agrees.
“Now relationships are more fluid — the expectation is that both parents will have to take care of the children,” Bufalino said. “So there’s a much greater sense that marriage isn’t a requirement for social cohesion and for a healthy state — by many, though not all, Americans.”
Still, even if men and women are both primary breadwinners, she is more likely to get paid less than he. According to a report released by the Council of Contemporary Families, the current wage gap means that women have to work 52 years to make what men do in 40. Michelle Budig, a sociology professor at the University of Massachusetts, found that men’s earnings increased more than 6 percent when they had children, while women’s earnings decreased 4 percent for each child they had.
Plus— despite the fact that most respondents of the Pew Research’s survey endorse a marriage in which both spouses work and split childcare duties—  67 percent of respondents say that it’s very important for a man to be able to support his family financially; while just 33 percent say the same about a woman.
“Entering into marriage may be based on a sort of egalitarian sense of love and romance,” Bufalino said.  “But once you enter into it, there’s a lot of social expectations that are gendered on the basis of ideas of dependence that we had a long time ago — even though that dependence may not still exist.”
And some of us are rethinking what has, presumably, gone hand-in-hand with marriage — monogamy.
Take senior Jessica Svetal.
Though Svetal grew up in a Christian community that insisted on marriage and family as the “backbone of society,” she eventually learned that being with one person wasn’t for her. A feature in Rolling Stone Magazine echoed this sentiment: Millennials, they insisted, had new ways of thinking of dating and sex than ever before — one edging away, however slowly, from monogamy.
“The more I spend time with people, the more I realize that different parts of me are compatible with different people,” said Svetal. “I’m starting to think that it’s just the way humans are meant to operate.”
Pew Research Center’s data illustrates this: 69 percent of those surveyed still do— at some point— want to get married.
Dylan Beal is one of those young adults. This junior is in the middle of planning his March wedding. He has been with his fiancé since high school and proposed to her this past summer. He wants to be with her for the rest of his life, so Beal sees marriage as almost a no-brainer.
“A lot of my parents’ friends aren’t married, though some have been together for ten years,” Beal said. “But I always knew that if I found that person, I would want to get married. Without it, I feel like you’re both separate a little bit. When you’re married, you feel more connected than when you’re dating.”
Nonetheless, marriage is on the decline. According to census data, the number of married women between the ages of 24-49 in each state has decreased every year since 1980 (except Utah in the 1990s). And that trend is universal: statistics on marriage trends compiled by the United Nations show that 87 percent of the world’s population lives in countries with marriage rates that have fallen since the 1980s. If that trend should continue at current rates, marriage won’t exist by 2042.
Even if a world without weddings seems a little far-fetched, the results from Pew Research’s survey are pretty clear: As alternatives to traditional marriage gain popularity, society is also becoming more and more creative when it comes to family and love.
And we, millennials, are spearheading this shift.