One in Five Men Not the Marrying Type

Your suspicions have been confirmed: some guys just aren’t the marrying type. In fact, in a study conducted by the National Marriage Project, a research group at Rutgers University, there is a “small but significant” number of unmarried men who are just not good candidates for marriage.

What might be surprising to most women is how the men made the list. They are not the unemployed, living in their mother’s basement; they are not the guys who can’t stay home from the bar even one night a week. They are eligible bachelors between the ages of 25 and 34 who simply have a “low personal desire” for being married and have a negative attitude about women in general.

When one out of every five men is simply uninterested in marriage, particularly when the number of women already outnumbers the number of men, it certainly reduces the available life partners for women who do want to be married. According to the study, co-directed by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and David Popenoe, these anti-marriage guys don’t mind dating and are heterosexual, but do not want to be married.

The marriage-phobic group had plenty in common: they tend to come from nontraditional and nonreligious families in which the father figure did not play a large role in raising them. Marriage minded men, on the other hand, tend to be raised in traditional family homes with an actively involved father figure.

“Young women often find the search for a marriage partner daunting and confusing,” says Dafoe Whitehead, “since not everyone in the partner market is interested in marriage. These findings may help marriage-minded women identify the men who are most likely to be the marrying kind.” However, the survey showed that only 55 percent of men from the pro-marriage group indicated that they would be “ready to marry tomorrow if the right person came along.” Only 43 percent of men from other groups beyond the traditionally raised were interested in marriage.