High-school dropout? Don't expect wedding bells
People who don't expect to marry tend to have lower incomes and are less likely to have university degrees, a Statistics Canada study indicates.
They're also more likely to be single parents, especially if they're women, says the study released on Tuesday.
The study, Always the Bridesmaid: People Who Don't Expect to Marry, quizzed 1,600 "mature" singles across the country in 2001 who had never walked down the aisle and weren't living common-law at the time.
Researchers defined "mature" as men and women who were older than the average age at which people first marry (28 for women, 30 for men) but younger than 55.
They estimated that there were more than 1.1 million mature singles in the country and about half of them didn't expect to marry.
The study found distinct differences between people who expected wedding bells and those who didn't.
The respondents who didn't think they would marry had median incomes of about $29,700 – 16 per cent lower than that of those who expected to walk down the aisle, at $34,400.
They were twice as likely to be high-school dropouts and only 24 per cent had a university degree, compared to 34 per cent of those who expected marriage.
The most important distinction between the two groups related to attitude, the researchers said. People who didn't expect to marry held much less conventional views about the importance of love, marriage and family.
For example, men who didn't believe being part of a couple was very important to their happiness were nearly five times less likely to marry.
Quebec singles much less likely to expect wedding bells
Sometimes the split was along cultural lines. Male francophones were nearly five times less likely to expect marry than male anglophones, for example.
Women living in Quebec were nearly four times less likely to see themselves walking down the aisle.
The researchers point out that Quebecers tend to hold a very different view of marriage than other Canadians. "Common-law relationships are far more popular in Quebec, where they effectively function not just as a 'trial marriage' but as a socially acceptable marriage substitute," the study says.
In contrast, marriage was more often expected by people who attended religious services frequently and people who were foreign-born.
The study was based on telephone interviews with people in 10 provinces, conducted in 2001 as part of Statistics Canada's general social survey on family and marital history.