Young Swedes marry early

The number of young newly weds increased with almost 25% over the last eight years. 

  • Younger people are getting married in Sweden today, setting a new trend.

  • More and more young people are getting married in Sweden. In eight years, the number of newly weds between the ages 20 and 24 has increased with almost 25%, according to statistics from Statistiska centralbyrån (Sweden Statistics).

  • The performing arts network based in Malmö, Sweden, called the Potato Potato Group staged an Internet-broadcast make believe wedding simultaneously with the real Royal Wedding in Stockholm in 2010... except this one had a built-in instant divorce. Photo: Maja Qvarnström

  • “There’s an increasingly marked wish to be a twosome among the young,” says Eva Knuts, ethnologist at Göteborg University. “It has been so much focus on cozy evenings at home, and feeling safe.” Knuts has studied hopes and dreams about marriages, and according to her the increase in marriages of people under the age of 25, is that they want to get married before they have children. “At the end of the 60's and early 70's getting married and having a wedding was a nearly forgotten old custom that might well disappear. But in recent years, we see a return to a middle-class, more moralistic attitude,” she says. Anders Parment, PhD at Stockholm University, draws parallels to the 80’s-baby boomers’ grandma and grandpa’s generation.

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”There is a trend among young to settle down early, and I think it will continue. The generation born in the 80’s is not at all like those of the 70’s, who had as their ideal to go to Australia on surf trips and who as 38 - 
year olds still were bachelors,” Parment says. He adds that the couple trend and a stay-at-home-wife ideal are washing over the young in Sweden. 
”Popular culture has a major impact on how we view marriage. It is most evident among younger people born in the 80’s.” The number of newly married among younger people over the past nine years:
    2001: 5651
    2002: 5703
    2003: 5639
    2004: 5891
    2005: 5702
    2006: 6469
    2007: 6958
    2008: 7183
    2009: 7015