Going to the Chapel
Watch the marriage rate rise.

By David Klinghoffer, editorial director, Toward Tradition, and author of The Lord Will Gather Me In.
September 16, 2001 11:10 a.m.

oday I got an e-mail from my rabbi, reflecting on the grotesqueries of September 11 and citing Auden's poem "Musee des Beaux Arts" about the strange juxtaposition, characteristic of human life, of the tragic and the mundane.

Auden writes of a Brueghel painting, "The Fall of Icarus." The painting has the youth Icarus falling into the sea, his wings melted, while on the shore a plowman plows and on the water's horizon a ship sails as if nothing extraordinary had happened. Suffering takes place "While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;/[While] the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse scratches its innocent behind on a tree."

Auden means that events of profound terribleness don't change the world as it goes about the course of its normal existence: People working, people sleeping, people getting married. Was he right?

Actually, I've been wondering about that last one. We've heard again and again that the World Trade Center's vanishing will change American life in very practical ways. Obviously it will be harder to check your bags at the airport, but I'd suggest that other things may change that are less obvious. Take the age at which Americans get married.

The day after the disaster I called a college classmate in New York. He had volunteered as a poll watcher in the mayoral primary that morning in Bedford-Stuyvesant. When the disaster happened, the primary was cancelled and the subways shut down; so he had to walk the 10 miles from there to the Upper West Side. On the march from Brooklyn to Manhattan, even while bumping into friends here and there, he told me, "I felt so lonely."

He explained that this was because, for all the lively social existence he has cultivated, like so many unmarried people he is basically alone. He's 35 years old and, like much of our sociological cohort of big-city yuppies with fancy college degrees, he spent his twenties and early thirties messing around — "dating." Somehow the catastrophic loss of life brought home to him his sheer aloneness. And he offered an interesting observation: that this may change the way people like him (and like me before I married at 34) think about getting married.

Consider: The median age at which Americans marry has been edging upward for decades. In 1964 the typical American man got married at 22, the American woman at 20. In 2000, the man got married at 27, the woman at 25. But these numbers mask the reality that in Fly Over America people still get married young. It's in cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., that smart, hip folks don't start thinking about matrimony till they hit 30.

There are many reasons for this but one can be surmised from a glance at an actuarial table. If a guy like my friend lives healthily, he can expect to live to be 80 or 90 years old, at least. This is unlike his father or grandfather, whose expectations of longevity were more modest. If you expect to live eight decades, it costs you nothing to delay marriage. Thus as life expectancy climbed, so did the age at which we get married.

Then the World Trade Center imploded. From now on, sudden violent death is a consideration. You may be perfectly healthy, but then an airliner rams into your office building. Or, next time perhaps, a terrorist lights off a nuclear bomb in Midtown.

"My dad got married at 25," my friend said. "At my age, 35, he already had three kids." That is to say, his father at my friend's current age had already had a good taste of those things that make life meaningful: marriage, children. If the father had died violently at 35, he at least could have said to himself: I didn't miss out on anything important.

Not so with my friend, and many, many of our classmates. For such people, to die at 35 is to die absurd: having spent 15 years after college acting out the fantasies of adolescence, leaving behind nothing of permanent significance.

It may be that some of our peers will come to see this as my friend does, and reassess the life choices we have made up to now. If so then in cities like New York and Los Angeles — where the next terrorist assault will take place if America doesn't stamp out the threat — I advise you to watch the figures for median marrying age in years to come. See if they don't rise.