Taylor Swift generation ‘desperately’ seeking reliable love as marriage rates fall across Europe

Taylor Swift’s wedding to NFL star Travis Kelce at Madison Square Garden on 3 July has provided an unlikely backdrop to a debate about marriage, family stability and Europe’s demographic future.

The ceremony, watched closely by millions of Swifties, coincides with the publication of a new book by Dr Harry Benson, the research director of the Marriage Foundation. In RELIABLE LOVE – The Psychology of Marriage and Commitment, released on 1 August 2026 and available from Amazon, Benson argues that young people have not abandoned marriage so much as found themselves uncertain about how to achieve it.

The so-called Swiftie generation is “desperately” seeking reliable love, he claims, and still regards marriage as the clearest public expression of commitment. The argument comes as marriage rates have fallen across much of Europe, fertility has reached historically low levels and governments face difficult questions about ageing populations, family policy and the cost of raising children.

According to Eurostat’s demographic data, the European Union’s crude marriage rate fell to 3.9 marriages per 1,000 people in 2024, representing about 1.7 million marriages. That compares with a rate of 5.0 per 1,000 in 2007. The figures do not mean that marriage has disappeared from European life, but they show that it has become less common and is generally taking place later.

The decline in marriage has occurred alongside a marked fall in births. Eurostat recorded an EU fertility rate of 1.34 live births per woman in 2024, down from 1.38 in 2023 and the lowest figure yet recorded. The number of births fell by 3.3 per cent to 3.55 million, while 41.1 per cent of children were born outside marriage.

Some experts have linked this demographic trend to the decline in marriage rates, and that couples are tying the knot later, highlighting how married couples tend to have more children than couples who cohabit.  They also point to delays in both marriage and parenthood because of housing costs, insecure employment, childcare pressures and changing expectations about relationships.

Dr Benson argues that the data should prompt politicians to examine whether public policy is helping people to form and sustain the families they say they want.

Evidence from Britain suggests that marriage remains an aspiration for many young adults. Numerous studies support this, and Benson’s own research, drawn from decades of relationship studies and original doctoral work, reaches a similar conclusion. He found that 93 per cent of men and 96 per cent of women agreed that marriage was a very strong or fairly strong sign of commitment in a relationship, while nearly nine in ten young people said they wanted to marry.

“Taylor Swift’s wedding is wonderful news and proof that the vast majority of young people aspire to marry,”

Benson said.

“Indeed, you only have to listen to the lyrics of her song to hear her desire to wed.”

He points to Swift’s song So Long, London, written after the end of her six-year relationship with actor Joe Alwyn. The lyrics include:

“You swore that you loved me but where were the clues? I died on the altar waiting for the proof”.

Benson said the words reflected a wider desire for certainty among young people, particularly young women.

“Whether you call them Gen Z, Swifites or just young people, they understand the importance of marriage and the statement it makes,”

he said.

“These sentiments are regardless of wealth, but because of the psychology behind marriage, the desire to find reliable love, love we can trust, is what most young people want.”

He argues that marriage provides a public and psychological structure around a relationship. Two people make a decision, act on it and communicate that decision to their families and friends. In Benson’s view, that clarity can influence how they think about the future and how they respond when a relationship encounters difficulty.

“Marriage provides this by each person committing to a life together and then celebrating that commitment in front of their friends and family,”

he says.

One of the most jaw-dropping claims in RELIABLE LOVE is that the association between marriage and stability cannot simply be explained by income, age or education.

“Most astonishingly of all, the poorest couples who marry are less likely to split up than the richest cohabitees.”

That finding challenges the argument that married couples have better stability rates only because they are more prosperous, older or better educated. Benson accepts that background factors matter, but says they do not account for the whole difference between married and unmarried couples.

His analysis revisits two defining studies published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies in 2010 and 2013. Those studies concluded that much, or almost all, of the lower dissolution risk among married couples could be explained by the characteristics of the people who marry. Benson says that conclusion was affected by a flaw in the underlying data, and shows that a quarter of the data was missing.

After rerunning the study with the missing information and controlling for nearly 30 different traits, he concludes that marriage has a significant independent effect on stability and accounted for about half of the difference. In the figures presented in the book, the probability of splitting up among couples who married at some stage was 26 per cent, compared with 46 per cent among those who never married.

While the claims will be contested by some researchers, both the quality of the data and the lengths to which Dr Benson went to ensure the study was not biased are impressive. As he argues dismissing marriage as merely a status symbol of the better-off fails to explain why it remains attractive even when people are under no legal obligation to choose it.

The book also attributes some of the fall in marriage rates to “commitment shy men”.  Dr Benson says men are twice as likely as women to delay a decision to marry, while also regarding marriage as less urgent in their twenties. The pattern changes in later life, he argues, with men in their thirties eventually placing a higher value on marriage than women, 79 per cent compared with 73 per cent.

“Men do eventually want to get married,”

Dr Benson writes.

“It used to be that boys had to prove themselves in order to get the girl. The price of sex was commitment. No more. Now it’s all on a plate. The result is ambiguity. And ambiguity is a relationship killer. How can we find reliable love if we don’t know where we stand? Maybe the old way wasn’t that bad after all”.

The argument is not that cohabiting relationships lack seriousness or affection. Millions of couples live together successfully, and many children are raised in loving unmarried households. Dr Benson’s point is that cohabitation can leave the nature and destination of a relationship less clearly defined, particularly where one partner expects marriage and the other is content to postpone the decision.

“Even if young adults no longer have to go through the social, psychological and legal gateway of marriage in order to sleep with one another, almost all acknowledge that marriage is the ultimate sign of commitment and reliable love,”

he writes.

The distinction matters to the wider question of family breakdown. Dr Benson notes that although marriage rates have declined in Britain, divorce rates have also fallen. Research conducted by the Marriage Foundation has found that divorce is at its lowest level since the 1970s. He argues that the family-breakdown problem is not primarily the result of more married couples divorcing, but of the growing number of couples who separate without ever marrying.

“The problem is not divorce, the end of marriages, but the growing number of breakups among couples who never married,”

Benson says. The book argues that family breakdown rose fivefold between the 1970s and the 2010s, driven largely by these unmarried breakups.

The policy implications are stark. Government cannot manufacture love or compel people to marry. But in an era where young people genuinely want marriage and governments want stable family life, there is an overwhelming case for ensuring that economic conditions do not make those aspirations needlessly difficult.

Previous research by the Marriage Foundation highlighted how the UK’s benefit system penalises those individuals in receipt of benefits who decide to move in together in what has been widely accepted as a “couple penalty”.  A problem compounded by high housing costs and job instability that is not just a UK problem but can be seen across the EU. Indeed, given the barriers the fact that young people overwhelmingly want to marry, Dr Benson argues, shows that marriage is not a dying institution but very much alive and kicking, and policy makers must do more to enable free and unfettered access – as he points out, when you look at our political leaders, the vast majority are married, because they understand the benefits, so why won’t they extend these to all people regardless on income or background?

A question that has taken on more significance in a Europe where both marriage and birth rates are falling, and where the demographic time bomb is ticking of falling workers to those dependent on the state.