But by the mid-1990s, as SYM ranks swelled, marketers began to get their number. ![]() Historically, marketers have found this group an “elusive audience”-the phrase is permanently affixed to “men between 18 and 34” in adspeak-largely immune to the pleasures of magazines and television, as well as to shopping expeditions for the products advertised there. That adds up to tens of millions more young men blissfully free of mortgages, wives, and child-care bills. Census Bureau data show that the median age of marriage among men rose from 26.8 in 2000 to 27.5 in 2006-a dramatic demographic shift for such a short time period. And the percentage of young guys tying the knot is declining as you read this. Consider: in 1970, 69 percent of 25-year-old and 85 percent of 30-year-old white men were married in 2000, only 33 percent and 58 percent were, respectively. ![]() They’re particularly interested in single young men, for two reasons: there are a lot more of them than before and they tend to have some extra change. But that’s a question that ad people, media execs, and cultural entrepreneurs have pondered a lot in recent years. With them, adulthood looks as though it’s receding.įreud famously asked: “What do women want?” Notice that he didn’t ask what men wanted-perhaps he thought that he’d figured that one out. Single Young Males, or SYMs, by contrast, often seem to hang out in a playground of drinking, hooking up, playing Halo 3, and, in many cases, underachieving. Single women in their twenties and early thirties are joining an international New Girl Order, hyperachieving in both school and an increasingly female-friendly workplace, while packing leisure hours with shopping, traveling, and dining with friends. With women, you could argue that adulthood is in fact emergent. Some call this new period “emerging adulthood,” others “extended adolescence” David Brooks recently took a stab with the “Odyssey Years,” a “decade of wandering.”īut while we grapple with the name, it’s time to state what is now obvious to legions of frustrated young women: the limbo doesn’t bring out the best in young men. Decades in unfolding, this limbo may not seem like news to many, but in fact it is to the early twenty-first century what adolescence was to the early twentieth: a momentous sociological development of profound economic and cultural import. These days, he lingers-happily-in a new hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance. Not so long ago, the average mid-twentysomething had achieved most of adulthood’s milestones-high school degree, financial independence, marriage, and children. They come from everywhere: California, Tokyo, Alaska, Australia. In your spare time, you play basketball with your buddies, download the latest indie songs from iTunes, have some fun with the Xbox 360, take a leisurely shower, massage some product into your hair and face-and then it’s off to bars and parties, where you meet, and often bed, girls of widely varied hues and sizes. ![]() You live in an apartment with a few single guy friends. You’ve finished college and work in a cubicle in a large Chicago financial-services firm. Now meet the twenty-first-century you, also 26. For now, you’re renting an apartment in your parents’ two-family house, but you’re saving up for a three-bedroom ranch house in the next town. You’ve already got one kid, with another on the way. Either way, you’re married, probably have been for a few years now you met your wife in high school, where she was in your sister’s class. ![]() You have a factory job, or maybe you work for an insurance broker. It’s 1965 and you’re a 26-year-old white guy. About half of American males aged 18 to 34 play video games-and do so for over two hours a day.
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