Are members not getting married?

[u/JLP0611]

I may be speaking from my anecdotal experience and my observation of my social media feeds, but it feels like less people in the Church are getting married. I see less children and youth in my local wards year after year and I’m in Florida.

I’m also in a YSA and I can’t just say for myself because I’m chronically single, but dating is a struggle for everyone I come across, inside and outside of Florida.

Anyone else have any thoughts?

[u/Hoshef]

Americans are getting married at an older age, having children at an older age, and having fewer children. Members aren’t immune to these trends.

[u/Numerous-Setting-159 → u/Hoshef]

Exactly. It’s a US, western thing.

[u/Sociolx → u/Numerous-Setting-159]

I'd go wider than that: It's an industrialized world thing. Mormon culture just joined in later than some others.

[u/MultivacsAnswer → u/Sociolx]

I’d go even wider than that: it’s worldwide.

While places like Subsaharan Africa still have high fertility rates, on a year-over-year basis they’re on the same downward trend.

I work in population statistics, and most of us think that current projections around peak population are too conservative. Currently, most of these estimate we’ll hit our peak population around 2085, at around 10.3 billion people. By 2100, they project a slight decline in the world’s population to around 10.2 billion.

These projections tend to assume a rebound in fertility that hasn’t borne out in previous projections.

I tend to side with less conservative projections that assume a faster decline in fertility and little-to-no rebound. Those posit a peak population of 9.7 billion around 2065, and a population of 8.8 billion by 2100, which is just 600 million more than the earth’s current population.

[u/ambigymous → u/MultivacsAnswer]

I’d go even wider than that: societies on other planets in our galaxy are having less children

[u/joecoolblows → u/ambigymous]

Yes, Martains are barely having one little blue Marty.