In today's USA Today, there are two stories appearing side by side that I think are prescient and I have observed from being 20 years old.

The first story shows that young adults are increasingly waiting longer to get married.  Of those in their 20s, 73% of men and 62.2% of women have never married.  Just six years ago, those figures were 64% for men and 53.4% for women.  Researchers say that the reasons for the shift are cohabitation and the advancement of women's opportunities.

With this phenomena has come a reduction in the divorce rate.  The old adage that "half of all marriages end in divorce" is constantly accepted as gospel truth, but it has never been that high.  The divorce rate peaked out at 41% in 1981 and was 31% in 2002.  That is good news, but the downside of that lowered divorce rate is that fewer people get married period.  More young people are avoiding getting married at a young age to stay in the relative safety of cohabitation.

The second story is related to the first one.  It reinforces something I have known for some time now, but many are unaware of: female domination on college campuses.  Women now represent 56% of the college population.  That is even less than the graduation rates, which say that women earned 58.5% of bachelor degrees.  It is expected to rise to 60% by 2012.

The second story helps to fuel the first.  I attend American University, which is in Washington, DC.  AU is at this point 65% female.  To demonstrate how far we have come, when my dad went to Penn State in the mid 70s, the enrollment was 75% male.  In one and a half generations, college went from being a predominantly male institution to a strong majority female institution.  Things have change, some for the better, some for the worst.  In 30 years, women are going to dominate this country.  They may not ever earn more than men (because of a little thing called children) and many will give up careers to raise their little ones, but this generation of highly motivated girls has never been seen before in history.

That's a good thing if you are a single guy looking for a marriage partner, but for single gals, getting hitched may be a nightmare.  As girls have excelled in recent years, their brothers have not done as well.  Too many boys emulate gangsta culture or withdraw into the world of video games.  Too many guys seem to lack the go-getter spirit that their sisters have.  This is a prime reason for the delaying of marriage, but not the major cause.

The real reason for the decline of married twentysomethings is the prolonging of adolesence that has become a major problem for both sexes.  If someone gets married in their early 20s, most of their friends will try to dissuade them from tying the knot.  They will mention all the "fun" they will miss out on, and likely will regret missing out on it to the detriment of the marriage.  Of course, I want to have fun.  There are indeed some things you can only do if you do not have attachments and you should take advantage of those if you want.  But the implication behind the silent disapprovals of friends is that marriage is a bore and single life is a nonstop party.

If you are a social conservative and alarmed about the decline in desire for marriage, you need to do something.  You cannot wring your hands and wistfully recite platitudes like "marriage is a beautiful thing" or "living together spoils the marriage" or even "don't have sex before marriage".  The rhetoric has failed, as marriage ages continue to rise, cohabitation is now the norm, and wedding night virgins are going the way of the dodo.  You need to change the structures of youth culture.  Perhaps families and church groups need to financially support young married couples, or we need to encourage only those ready for higher education to go to college, letting the rest receive vocational training to establish themselves earlier.  The choice is to either abandon long held social norms--which I suspect many do not think man has the power to do so, or to find creative ways to reform the structures of society.