As Canada enters peak wedding season, guests may notice a few more grey hairs on the brides and grooms.
Increasingly, Canadians are delaying getting married — or choosing to never marry at all.
“Fewer people are feeling like they’re ready to get married or finding a partner that they feel is ready to get married,” said Maude Pugliese, assistant professor of population studies at the Institut national de recherche scientifique in Montreal.
In 2022, Statistics Canada put the average age of marriage in Canada at 35, up from a low of 26 in 1968.
Over the same period, the number of couples getting married fell steadily, dropping from eight ceremonies per 1,000 people to just two.
Sources point to a number of factors behind these trends. In previous decades, women needed to marry to best ensure their own financial security. They also faced significant religious and societal pressure to marry.
Today, a majority of women participate in the labour force, and young Canadians are less likely to be religious than older generations. Research shows non-religious women marry less and later than non-religious women.
Marriage is no longer an expected milestone for many Canadian couples, says Pugliese. Instead, marriage is seen as a “capstone,” where partners only get married after first achieving educational and career goals.
“It’s not so much like a sign of commitment … it’s becoming more of a celebration of the couple’s accomplishments,” she said. “They expect to have achieved more and more right before getting married.”
‘People are scared’
Barry Nussbaum, a family lawyer and founder of Nussbaum Family & Divorce Lawyers, agrees that the pressure to achieve life goals before getting married is one reason young couples put off tying the knot.
Many are also unsure whether they can support themselves — let alone a family. “People are scared about the commitment of having kids, the housing costs … it’s astronomical,” he said.
Last year, the median age of first-time homebuyers in Ontario was 40, up from 36 in 2014.
Couples who cannot afford to get married will often choose to cohabitate instead, says Pugliese.
“Unmarried cohabitation … has become very prevalent … it’s almost as if people now … expect to go through this stage. It starts as an extensive form of dating, and then eventually it really becomes a testing ground for the relationship,” she said.
Stephanie Courte, a marriage officiant at Rose Gold Celebrations in Montreal, says cohabitation has become the norm among the couples she sees.
“It’s very rare, very rare that couples don’t live together,” said Courte, who has officiated nearly 300 weddings.
The growing popularity of common-law unions has become another key reason for delaying marriage, according to a 2022 Statistics Canada report.
The prevalence of common-law relationships varies by province. In 2021, Quebec had the highest proportion of common-law couples, at 43 per cent, while Ontario had the lowest, at 16 per cent.
However, common-law couples often do choose to marry later, says Courte. Couples will often tell her the reason they are getting married is to demonstrate their commitment to one another.
“It’s not just a piece of paper,” she said. “It’s so much deeper than that.”
‘Doing things differently’
While some couples are putting off marriage, a substantial minority never marry at all.
A 2018 Angus Reid survey showed a third of Canadians aged 45 to 54 had never married, while a fifth of those aged 55 to 64 never had. By age 65 and over, it was one-tenth.
Chantal Heide, author and relationship coach at Canada’s Dating Coach, says some women view the “cost” of marriage as too high.
“Women nowadays are actually saying marriage is a scam,” said Heide. “[Women] are seeing that independence leads to a greater opportunity to pick a better life.”
Ultimately, not getting married — and especially not having children — allows women to achieve financial security more easily, says Heide.
Declining marriage rates contributes to Canada’s falling fertility rate. Last year, Statistics Canada reported that Canada’s fertility rate of 1.26 births per woman puts Canada among the world’s “lowest-low fertility countries.”
A large part of the decline in birth rates can be directly accounted for by a decline in marriage, says a report by the Institute for Family Studies, a U.S. think tank.
Heide says many women today are not interested in the burdens that come with marriage and parenthood.
“Women are tired of looking after themselves, looking after the home, looking after their job, looking after the child, looking after the man in the house,” she said.
“That’s how you used to do things … That’s in the past. We’re doing things differently.”
The article highlights a significant shift in Canadian marriage trends, with individuals waiting longer to marry due to factors like financial pressures, career goals, and changing societal norms. Interestingly, this delay in marriage could be contributing to a decline in divorce rates. Data indicates that the crude divorce rate in Canada has decreased from 12.7 per 1,000 married persons in 1991 to 5.6 per 1,000 in 2020 . This suggests that individuals who marry later may be more financially stable and emotionally prepared, leading to stronger, more enduring marriages.