Living in the Gray: Women’s Experiences of Missing the Marital Transition

Given the increasing trend of women delaying (or forgoing) marriage and the minimal scholarship on women's reflections of their life course trajectories, the purpose of the study was to examine the lived experience of White, college-educated women aged 28 - 34 years who have not married. Using descriptive phenomenology methodology, 32 interviews were conducted with 10 never-married women. Results suggested that their experiences were marked by uncertainty. The women were intensely reflecting on their life pathways, evaluating themselves, and enacting strategies to manage the pervasive uncertainty they felt. Implications about life course expectations and decisions, coping strategies, and experiences of "missed" transitions and related consequences are discussed. Key Words: life course, life transitions, never married, phenomenology. Across time and cultures, meanings have been assigned to chronological age. The social construction of age influences the timing of life transitions, having far-reaching consequences for individuals' expectations and behaviors throughout their lives (Elder, 1998). Marriage is a particularly salient age-graded life transition in the United States, and the timing of marriage has pronounced importance for women because of limited childbearing years and the value of marriage for their identities (Baber & Allen, 1992). The purpose of this study was to explore what it is like to be a woman in her late 20s or early 30s who has never married. We employed descriptive phenomenology methodology because the goal of this qualitative approach is to describe and clarify the essential structure of an experience through individuals' in-deptii reflections (Porter, 1998). We applied principles of the life course perspective to frame the current investigation. The life course framework attends to the development of life pathways, focusing on transitions among individuals' age-differentiated social and family roles in the context of changing historical circumstances (Elder, 1998). Two tenets especially germane to this issue are historical time and timing in lives. Historical Time and Individual Experiences The principle of historical time suggests that life trajectories are influenced by the historical period during which they occur (Elder, 1998). Many social, economic, and cultural conditions potentially influence the cohort of never-married women who are now in their late 20s and early 30s (Smock, 2004). Predominant factors have been cited by family scholars as either a cause or a consequence of a retreat from marriage: women's increasing economic independence, the rise in divorce and cohabitation, individualism, and an increasing disconnection between childbearing and marriage (Smock). Taken together, these factors have been described as contributing to the deinstitutionalization of marriage in Western cultures (Cherlin, 2004). Women who are the focus of this investigation were born during the late 1960s and the early- to late 1970s, decades in which the median age at first marriage for women increased gradually. In 1980, the median age at marriage was 22 years; in 1999, it was 25.1 years; and in 2004, the median age for women was 25.4 years, the oldest in U.S. history (U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2005). Since the 1970s, women's family formation patterns have changed considerably. Compared to earlier cohorts, more women married later or did not marry at all, bore children outside of marriage, and cohabited. Largely as a result of delayed marital entry, increasing proportions of women are single, with 41% of women aged 25 - 29 years and 24% of women aged 30 - 34 years being never married (U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States). Many scholars assert that women are opting either to marry later or to forgo marriage because of increased economic independence (e.g., Coontz, 2004; Gaughan, 2002). Given that more women are employed for wages than in the past, it is thought that they have less economic incentive to marry. …