The institution looks familiar, but the rules keep shifting.

Across the United States and much of the developed world, marriage is no longer unfolding on the same timeline older generations expect. Millennials are marrying later, differently, or not at all, and those choices are colliding with long held assumptions about stability, adulthood, and commitment. Parents and grandparents often struggle to understand what they are seeing, interpreting delay as rejection. The tension comes from mismatched expectations, economic pressure, and cultural change unfolding at the same time, leaving many families unsure how to interpret the shift.



