First, you might ask, what are your chances of getting a mate of any kind? If you are a man, and are interested, you can be almost one hundred per cent certain you will marry. More than ten per cent of the eligible men today won’t marry, but that will largely be due to the fact that they prefer to remain bachelors.
If you are a girl the chances that you will marry are not quite as good. At the start of the war about thirteen per cent of the girls were failing to marry. The prospect now is that for several years after the war about fourteen or fifteen per cent will fail. It will be a good market for men.
Girls in some age brackets will be hit harder than others, and we sympathize with the girls past twenty-five who feel they were passing the peak of the eligibility curve for marriage while many of the best male prospects were still away in the armed forces. These girls have cause for concern. The surplus of grown women over men—which is something new in our population—has been increased by war casualties. And the number of men who prefer bachelorhood is apt to increase from ten per cent at present to perhaps fifteen per cent because the older a single man becomes the less he thinks about marriage. This war has created a great many “old” single men.
It is estimated that between two million and five million of the marriageable women in America today will never marry. Sociologists are already worrying about this “lost generation” of our women between twenty and thirty-five, with those in their late twenties presumably hit the hardest.
You may ask when a girl reaches the peak of her eligibility for marriage. In normal years the peak is between nineteen and twenty-one, and the curve declines markedly after the twenty-fifth birthday. Here are the chances for men and women to marry by certain ages:
CHANCES OF WHITE MALES AND WHITE FEMALES BEING MARRIED BY VARIOUS AGES (1940 CENSUS)
| By Age | Chances of Being Married | Chances of Being Married | Chances of Marrying at Some Particular Year of Age | |||||
| Men | Women | Men | Women | |||||
| 14 | 1 | in 1000 | 3 | in 1000 | 1 | in 1000 | 3 | in 1000 |
| 15 | 2 | ” | 12 | ” | 1 | ” | 9 | ” |
| 16 | 3 | ” | 39 | ” | 1 | ” | 27 | ” |
| 17 | 7 | ” | 90 | ” | 4 | ” | 51 | ” |
| 18 | 21 | ” | 177 | ” | 14 | ” | 87 | ” |
| 19 | 54 | ” | 270 | ” | 33 | ” | 93 | ” |
| 20 | 109 | ” | 372 | ” | 55 | ” | 102 | ” |
| 21 | 190 | ” | 456 | ” | 81 | ” | 84 | ” |
| 22 | 272 | ” | 538 | ” | 82 | ” | 82 | ” |
| 23 | 371 | ” | 613 | ” | 99 | ” | 75 | ” |
| 24 | 457 | ” | 671 | ” | 86 | ” | 58 | ” |
| 25 | 531 | ” | 714 | ” | 74 | ” | 43 | ” |
| 26 | 592 | ” | 749 | ” | 61 | ” | 35 | ” |
| 27 | 650 | ” | 780 | ” | 58 | ” | 31 | ” |
| 28 | 694 | ” | 799 | ” | 44 | ” | 19 | ” |
| 29 | 738 | ” | 823 | ” | 44 | ” | 24 | ” |
| 30 | 748 | ” | 822 | ” | 10 | ” | 1 | ” |
| 31 | 790 | ” | 853 | ” | 42 | ” | 30 | ” |
| 32 | 791 | ” | 853 | ” | 1 | ” | 1 | ” |
| 33 | 814 | ” | 870 | ” | 23 | ” | 17 | ” |
| 34 | 828 | ” | 874 | ” | 14 | ” | 4 | ” |
The odds for men show that only about one in ten marries before he is twenty-one; one in three marry at ages twenty-one to twenty-five; about three to ten marry between twenty-five and thirty, and about one in ten marries between thirty and thirty-five.
A factor unfavorable to the older girls, past twenty-five, is that as men become older they tend to marry increasingly younger girls. Normally, for example, a man of twenty-five will marry a girl of twenty-two, whereas a man of thirty-one will probably marry a girl of twenty-five. That’s why girls in the present twenty-five to thirty-five group may be hardest hit by the war. One encouraging possibility, however, is that veterans are looking for more wisdom and maturity in their brides than civilians of the same age usually do. There have been a good many reports of veterans marrying girls five and ten years their senior.
Idealistically, the best age for a girl to marry is from twenty-one to twenty-seven, and for a man from twenty-five to thirty.