I came across a few posts on social media over the past few days and they all revolved around the same topic: the “fact” that fertility rates have fallen in the United States. Heck, even the New York Times had a “grab your pearls” headline: “U.S. Fertility Rate Fell to a Record Low, for a Second Straight Year”. The article titles were really misnomers because it’s not fertility that has declined but birth rates (although, one can argue, with appropriate scientific evidence, that we are probably less fertile, but let’s table that part of the discussion for now). It’s true that younger folks today aren’t having kids at the same rate as they used to. We all know the reasons, regardless of all the speculation, but it got me thinking about weddings and the wedding industry – and it’s not all bleak and pessimistic. According to the Denver Post*, 2016 was a record year for weddings with a “record-breaking 8,024 marriages recorded in 2016”.
I don’t have wedding numbers for 2017, but once I went down the Google-search rabbit hole I couldn’t get back out. Want to know what state had the most marriages? If you guessed Nevada, you’d be correct (not shocked) and Hawaii came in second (and it wasn’t a close second, folks)*. Although, people ARE getting married later in life – the average age of first marriage in the United States is 27 years for women and 29 years for men (for comparison’s sake, it was 20 and 22 respectively back in the 1960s)*.
As I crawled out of the Goggle-search rabbit hole of randomness, one thing remains true: at the end of the day, we truly enjoy helping each and every one of our couples and clients – whether they are just having a party to celebrate their life together, celebrating a wedding, or decided to elope and have a small party. No matter the circumstances, we have a variety of options for an array of budgets.
Here are the links - if you are curious:
https://www.denverpost.com/2017/01/05/denver-weddings-2016/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/227305/highest-marriage-rates-by-us-state/
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/12/14/barely-half-of-u-s-adults-are-married-a-record-low/
https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/03/getting-married-later-is-great-for-college-educated-women/274040/
Photo by Fernanda Méndez on Unsplash