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signs and wonders, Apostles arrested and freed, we must obey God, and Gamelio's counsel.

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The marriage rate in the United States is already troubling. It is going down and it shows no signs of turning around, and now,

the increasing political divide, especially between young women and young men, women going left, men going right,

will have a further detrimental effect on that rate. Welcome back to Issues, et cetera. I'm Todd Wilkin, joining us to talk about political views and the US marriage rate.

Lyman Stone is a Ph.D. candidate in population dynamics at McGill University, director of research for demographic intelligence,

adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, research fellow at the institute for family studies and co-author of a column

for the Atlantic titled, Now Political Polarization Comes for Marriage Prospects. Lyman, welcome back.

Thank you, it's always good to be with you all.

In terms of the bigger picture, what's happening to marriage rates in America overall?

They are in decline. I think most people have intuitive this, right? But yeah, the marriage rate is declining. People are getting married later,

and growing share of people are never marrying at all. So basically what that means is you have a lot more single people

at all ages, but particularly in their teens, 20s and early 30s, there's a lot more single people than there used to be.

You mentioned later marriage. How has that factored into these numbers?

Well, so you know, sometimes people change when something happens in life, but they still eventually get to it.

People don't usually have their first child anymore at 15 or 16, like they did in the past,

but that doesn't mean that they're not going to have a first child, right? They're just going to have a first child later in life.

So it can be tricky to untangle delay in something versus not doing it at all,

but in marriage, as with fertility, we actually see both. We see that there's a delay, these things are happening later,

and also fewer people are ultimately marrying at all.

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