Is marriage still the prize?

A few years ago I read a long thread about how white women have it so much easier when it comes to dating and finding their life partner. I never saved the link but I made a mental note to come back to it. It resurfaced recently in a conversation with a friend about the pros and cons of staying in your hometown after matriculating or graduating – getting married there, building a life there, raising children with your family and among people you grew up with ... Whenever I would see photos of my white high school friends on Facebook, many of them were still hanging out in the same friendship groups from school and a few had married their high school or university sweethearts. This led to us talking about dating and the limited prospects on Tinder – for Black women, specifically.

My question is, is marriage still the prize, and if so, for whom? 

The prize is not just the ring, it’s a whole social construct built to offer you security, safety, belonging. And underneath all of that, it’s about being chosen, innit? It marks the end of a chapter of searching and the beginning of an entirely new story, one in which you star as somebody’s chosen wife. We have been conditioned to believe marriage is as much an achievement as it is a significant bump in your social status.

Bear with me as I jump from one thread to another ... A friend and I were nattering on the phone one late Friday afternoon and came to the same conclusion: There is not one marriage in our respective friend circles we yearn to replicate. That is not to say that all our married friends are unhappy, just that in our estimation, there is nothing they have that mirrors or even comes close to the dream we’ve been sold.

Stats SA’s Census 2022 report shows a steep national decline in marriage – from 35.6% of adults married in 1996 to 23.8% in 2022. But the more interesting story is the racial breakdown and the one I’ve been alluding to. 

• Married white South Africans: 54.8%

• Married Indian/Asian South Africans: 48.5%

• Married coloured South Africans: 30%

• Married Black South Africans: 19.2%

Just under fifty-five percent vs 19.2% is nothing to sneeze at – white South Africans are marrying at nearly three times the rate of Black South Africans. 

As Black women in our 40s, both divorced with children, my friend and I took turns asking the other whether we would go back to our exes or be open to remarrying. We struggled to imagine having to readjust our lives to accommodate a new permanent partner – what would we have to trade off, and from where we sit, would it even be worth it? 

Searching for validation of my perceptions I came across this book, published in 2011 by Stanford professor Ralph Richard Banks. It’s titled: Is Marriage for White People? Its central argument is that professional Black women in the US face a narrower marriage market than their white peers, and that the gap widens the more educated and successful they become.

I’ve always noticed how quickly white women seem to find a new and serious partner quite quickly after a breakup, or get remarried after a divorce even in their 50s and 60s? – that’s merely an observation though; I don’t have data to support this. There is, however, well-documented US-based research and data about dating-app behaviour, showing that Black women are consistently the demographic least likely to be messaged back.

I recently listened to an interview on The B Word with Popi Sibiya, the inspiring travel vlogger who shows such a refreshing experience of African countries. 

In the interview she says: ‘ I think the reason women aren't married is that we're not willing to settle anymore. And guys, I hate to be the bearer of bad news: I don't think most of us are gonna get married.’ 

Bokang, the host, agrees and adds that ‘there’s gonna have to be a compromise on our standards.’ 

And Popi says: ‘But our standards are reasonable. Where we are now, we’ve compromised enough.’

She says that neither marriage nor children interest her, which is understandable, given her unconventional circumstances. But she also admits that she isn’t the type men want to marry because she doesn't do conventional things like, cook, for one. So there are more layers to her statements. Oksalayo she is happy. 

A couple of years ago, behavioural scientist Paul Dolan surmised that unmarried, childless women are the happiest. The claim was later challenged, but it just goes to show how badly we want the ‘marriage is bad for women’ narrative to be true – which speaks volumes about where the culture is at. 

At the nub of it is this hard truth: We are living in a very lopsided dating market. Not even our friends are able to match-make us. I’m not saying the eligible Black women pool outnumbers the Black men – well, that’s the argument that Banks makes in his book. That Black women are educated, professionally established and financially stable. I don’t have evidence to support that theory in our territory but we can confidently say that Black women have progressed educationally and professionally compared to the previous generation. Banks argues that because Black men hold more leverage, as rare diamonds, they are less inclined to settle down when the numbers are in their favour. His proposed solution: More Black women should marry outside of their race – to open up the options for themselves and help correct the imbalance for everyone.

It isn't only a story about who gets chosen. Our stats suggest women are increasingly the ones walking away once they can. Stats SA's 2024 divorce data shows wives filed 57.2% of all divorces granted that year, and nearly half of them were employed at the time – the report itself links the two, noting that financial independence expands a woman's capacity to leave a marriage that no longer serves here. Marriages themselves have dropped – down 28.5% between 2015 and 2024.

I would argue that marriage no longer offers the prize it was once sold to us as. I’m not proposing that it should be labelled a dying institution because I deeply appreciate the importance of a solid family structure, however unconventional. Let me not get into the absent father pandemic here …

What I do think is that Black women are the first to say the quiet part out loud – that all along, the prize was not marriage, but rather the life it was supposed to unlock. As it turns out, it’s one we are unlocking for ourselves; there’s no need for a ring. And once we’ve built a life that’s sturdy enough to stand on its own, the offer starts looking less like a prize and more like an inconvenience.