Hope Minor has no plans to ever get married.

The 22-year-old University of Iowa student said she has seen too many marriages fail and too many women trapped in abusive or unloving relationships for her to consider the option.

Minor, however, strongly believes in love — both platonic and romantic.

“There’s nothing to marriage, in my opinion, anymore,” she said.

The fourth-year student said she has her eyes on different goals than some of her peers who are approaching graduation. Popular sayings surrounding women about to graduate from college, such as ‘Mrs. Degree’ or ‘ring by spring’ don’t resonate with Minor as she looks to prioritize her career and relationships with her friends.

“I’m moving soon after graduation. If I were with somebody, I might be incentivized to move somewhere else,” Minor said. “[Marriage right after college is] just crazy. I don’t get it.”

Minor is not alone in her feelings about marriage. Recently, fewer and fewer Generation Z women are choosing to tie the knot.

A December 2024 study from the Marriage Foundation found, based on current trends, only a little over half of Gen Z will ever get married. This is in stark contrast to older generations, in which over half of all couples got married.

Mary Noonan, an associate professor at the UI who researches gender and family, said this shift for Gen Z is indicative of the dismantling of many societal and gender norms.

“Gen Z is much more open to alternative paths besides marriage, whether it’s a greater acceptance of singlehood — greater acceptance of cohabitation,” she said. “If we think about the Baby Boomer generation, they were much more traditional — dating, marriage, and then kids. So, I think the Gen Z generation is not feeling as confined, maybe, by those social pressures.”

Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz, an associate professor at the UI, said many women have been redefining what family means for them beyond the typical heteronormative “nuclear family” model that has been pushed in media and society for decades.

“It’s not just that young women are reticent about marriage and childbirth,” Fixmer-Oraiz said. “It’s that older single women, also who have maybe already been married and gotten divorced or have already had children, are also rejecting these lifestyles. We’ve reached pretty historic numbers in terms of older single women saying, ‘I’m not looking for love and marriage anymore. I’m going to restructure my life in a way that centers chosen family, communities of care.’”

Minor is one of these women who is looking to surround herself with strong female friendships and her chosen family.

“I would rather have five friends around me who I love very dearly than be stuck in a relationship with someone where we both hate each other, but we’re in it because we got married or because we just can’t be alone,” she said.

Noonan also noted education and financial stability as possible reasons why young women may choose to remain single. According to the Pew Research Center, 47 percent of Gen Z women have bachelor’s degrees compared to 37 percent of men. Consequently, Noonan said many women are entering the workforce out of college with higher positions and better-paying jobs than their male counterparts.

In older generations, Noonan said women would often get married due to less financial freedom, as women had less earning power before the 1970s. Now that transactional type of relationship is far less relevant and many women, like Minor, don’t see marriage as a necessary life milestone.

Sage Hollich, a 21-year-old UI student, has been dating her boyfriend for almost three years now and plans to get married and move in with him as soon as she graduates. After years of struggling with dating apps and “talking stages,” Hollich’s boyfriend finally caught her eye after he made an effort to take her on a date and see her in person.

“A lot of guys will try and talk to you for a really long time before they see you,” she said. “He was more adamant about getting together and meeting me, and it was really interesting because I hadn’t seen that before. Most of the time, the guys would chat with me for a month or two, and then we get together, possibly, or not even. It would fizzle out.”

Hollich said a major factor she thinks has made her relationship work so well is the age gap between her and her boyfriend, who is about to be 24. She said many men her age lack emotional maturity and aren’t looking for anything serious.

“I feel like definitely, women normally date up in age,” Hollich said.

The politics of marriage

Beyond lifestyle choices, Minor said recent legislation, such as the overturning of Roe v. Wade and Iowa’s six-week abortion ban, has also led her away from pursuing a typical family structure.

“I just think that there’s a lot of fear around having kids because maternal mortality keeps increasing, and we keep not doing a damn thing about it,” she said. “I fear more than anything getting pregnant because that can be a death sentence.”

Fixmer-Oraiz said the political divide between men and women in terms of opinions on reproductive rights has been a major driving factor behind women opting out of marriage.

“We see young women trending more liberal than men is part of what has fueled this gap in a desire for straight marriage, and it’s increasingly clear that conservatism has been overt and explicit about its hostility to women’s rights,” she said. “That’s a tough pill to swallow when you’re a woman and you’re thinking about your dating life, right? Who’s interested in dating somebody who fundamentally doesn’t believe that [women] should come to the table as a full and equal participant in our democracy?”

Recent discussions surrounding pronatalism and President Donald Trump’s interest in incentivizing women to have children are also a turn-off for women who are not interested in starting a family, Fixmer-Oraiz said.

“There’s a long history of political, social, and cultural pressure, placed especially on white, middle-class, and wealthy women to have children and raise them to ‘inherit the nation,’” she said. “Typically, we see spikes in pronatalist sentiment aligning with fears over declining birth rates. You’re seeing it now, fears over demographic changes that suggest white people might not be the majority in the United States now or in the future.”

The Trump administration is offering a $5,000 cash bonus for having a baby; however, Fixmer-Oraiz said amount is negligible when you factor in hospital bills and the costs of raising a child.

Instead, she said parents would be more likely to have children in a country that promotes maternal safety and supports children.

“If you want to talk about creating the conditions under which people think it’s financially viable to have children, you start by giving them decent, high-quality, affordable, if not completely free, health care,” Fixmer-Oraiz said. “You start with policies that support families — free higher education, gun control. Young people are reasonably concerned about numerous things, like mass shootings and violence. They’re concerned about climate, they’re concerned about the rollback in their own reproductive rights.”