Marriage isn’t dead among young adults — it’s just been pushed years down the calendar. A new national survey finds 86% of unmarried Americans ages 22 to 35 still expect to get married eventually, but their own timelines put that wedding roughly five to six years out from wherever they stand today, according to the “State of Our Unions 2026: The Dating Recession” report from the Wheatley Institute at BYU and the Institute for Family Studies.
Key Points
- 86% of unmarried 22-35 year-olds (of 5,275 surveyed) expect to marry eventually; 61% say “definitely,” 25% say “maybe.”
- The expected “marital horizon” runs 5-6 years out, regardless of a respondent’s current age.
- Women’s median expected marriage age is 33; men’s is nearly 35.
- Only 30% are currently dating at all, and just 31% qualify as “active daters” who date at least once a month.
The gap between wanting marriage and actively working toward it is the real story here. Nearly nine in ten unmarried young adults haven’t abandoned the goal — the report’s data pushes back hard against the idea that Gen Z and younger millennials have written off marriage as an institution. What’s changed is the runway they think they need before it happens.
That five-to-six-year horizon shows up consistently whether a respondent is 23 or 33, which suggests marriage functions less like a fixed deadline and more like a moving target that stays a set distance away. A 24-year-old expects it around 30; a 30-year-old still expects it around 35 or 36. The goalpost doesn’t get closer with age so much as it gets rescheduled.
Feeding that gap is the fact that most people in this age range simply aren’t dating enough to move toward the goal they say they want. Only 30% report currently dating in any form, casual or exclusive, and active dating splits unevenly by gender — 36% of men date at least monthly compared to 26% of women. If marriage sits five or six years away for most people, and most people aren’t dating regularly right now, that timeline has less to do with careful planning and more to do with dating simply not being a current priority or possibility.
The report frames this as a “dating recession” rather than a marriage recession, and the distinction matters. The demand side — the desire to eventually marry — looks largely intact. It’s the supply side, the actual behavior of meeting people and dating consistently, that’s lagging behind the goal. For a generation frequently described as anti-marriage, the more accurate read from this data is a generation that still wants it, just later, and with a dating life that hasn’t caught up to the timeline yet.
