It’s been a little more than two years since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to make same-sex marriage a right nationwide, but it seems that young gay men aren’t quite ready to tie the knot just yet.
Results from the 2017 LGBTQ Wedding Study, conducted by The Knot and Q.Digital (the parent company of Queerty), revealed that the average marrying age for LGBTQ men is 46 (compared to 36 for LGBTQ women).
Seeing as same-sex marriage was illegal in most of the United States until the Supreme Court ruling, this number doesn’t seem much of a surprise. It will be interesting to see what the average marrying age is on the tenth and twentieth anniversaries of marriage equality…
The study also revealed that female couples tend to spend more on their engagement rings, while male couples spend more on the wedding:
How about we take this to the next level?
Our newsletter is like a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.
- Average Wedding Cost (excludes honeymoon): Men, $18,049; Women, $17,341
- Average Engagement Ring Spend: Men, $2,226; Women, $3,185
Do you have your sights set on tying the knot at any point in the future? How much do you think you’ll spend? Leave your thoughts in the comments below and take a quick second to answer our poll:
RELATED VIDEO: Love Marches On – Celebrating Marriage Equality
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Heywood Jablowme
I guessed 45, hey I almost won!
$18K for a wedding??? Average??? Wow, I guess marriage really IS for rich people. Don’t they save any money because of all the homophobic bakers, they can’t get a cake anywhere? – lol
dinard38
LOL!!!!! Yeah not too many bakers sell gay cakes. God would strike them down instantly.
BOB K
Yes it will be interesting to see the average age of marriage in a few years because we’re just barely through using up the backlog of people have been together forever who decide to get married now.
…. It’s not a shock that women spend more on engagement Rings because they tend to like a diamond solitaire and men tend not to do that
Orgoglio Masch
Also factor in that a lot of gay men aren’t even interested in serious relationships until they’re past 40 (when they aren’t turning heads like they used to, can’t pull all the young hotties they used to, aren’t getting let in/invited to the group sex parties they used to frequent, etc.). Once you’ve done everything under the sun, only thing left to do is get married.
Dinodogstar
I LOVE the smart, poignant, last point, so well said…
crazyoldman
I was 64 when I tied the knot with my love of 12 years at the time. We will be married two years in Oct.
CMarks
My husband and I were both 69 (together 39 years) when we were finally legally allowed to marry. Total cost of our “wedding”, with the exception of the fee for the license, was ZERO. We married in our kitchen, officiated by our friend and neighbor who happens to be the city mayor.
Dinodogstar
Because the anonymity of a on-screen name offers, it’s then pretty freeing to feel you can say pretty much what you like, with little consequence afterwords… So on that….
On gay men alone–the generalizations and stereotypes are too narrow for considering the topic-in-question so broadly. So, expect random, disjointed points thrown out there, and go with it:
I think most anyone honest would agree, because gay men ARE men, men act like dogs, and it’s understood, though never a proper excuse, when we’ve chosen to dog around, and the lifestyle that is. We also have not been raised to view marriage as applying to us, nor the idea of what a 40 year-old man should be, when the typical nuclear family image was blown-up when we first imagined our future lives , and not reflecting our parents, usually, straight people. There’s been NO MODEL of how a gay man CAN be in a relationship or marriage, in the popular culture, until the recent decade dared to allow that in the pop-culture-driven media. There ARE exceptions, but we don’t tend to think, the moment a ‘gay’ man ‘comes out’, that they will then marry a guy, then or later. The old-school, 70s gay male culture hardly celebrated or even agreed-on old-romantic We have seen gay men ‘come out’, and i GUESS Andrew Garfield is one, though with all the intentional ambiguity these days behind previously pretty-narrowly defined labels, a Cooper, Cohen, and when there are solid relationships–i’m thinking here, Frank Ocean, But again, i guess Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka, married with children, made Harris & Burtka, stereotype-Buster Boys if there ever really was one. Whatever sort of ”lifestyle” a gay guy chooses, at any or all part of his life, the sub-culture notion of sexual freedom from the early “Make Love Not War” days were squelched by AIDS, at least temporarily : It both freed gay men, intentionally or not, to be seen, heard, acknowledged and taken seriously and have our lives valued and celebrated. But it was only done so by even more pain and struggle than gay men had experienced. We gay men–here, I think I should narrow-down the focus group to be middle-class White gay men–we both had went-along, to get-along, and NOT challenge the White Male Privilege we had, and relied on really. AIDS taught us in the 80s, that we could no longer edit our lives out, and be “gay’ from dusk to dawn. The label OF “GAY” now one we could no longer ignore or laugh-off really. (It’s STILL the take on this criticized-closeted-crowd. Our closets were so full of bones they couldn’t close. And when a degree of kindness and acceptance came from the AIDS early years, the freedom of economic constraints the middle and upper class enjoyed then, we were more free to be fully human and consider love and marriage as an option, one that never was a round hole for our bent peg, so to speak. And i think gay men themselves, taken as a whole {Again, sorry; puns make writing fun! ) –at least as in theory, wanted more, and more CHOICE in the game, not being sort of relegated to an allowed time between sunset to sunrise, and in certain tolerated spaces. We didn’t always WANT our lives to be ghetto-ized into some iffy socio-political neighborhood with an unescapable park-view. We WANTED to have the option,both from outside AND more so, from WITHIN the gay male culture. that freedom of choice. It’s sad, and MY experience, though it’s pretty well said from the start of the attempt, gay men stray, because they can, the spaces exist to do so, and the still lukewarm wish to model hetero-normative ideals and behavior. In effect, i’m sure no one would roll their eyes over Harris and Burtka these days, or laugh at their perceive, staged conformity to a norm that does not accept or even recognize gays as “normal” to begin with. In a sad way, there IS perhaps a scant few benefits from the still storming, hostile-lgbtqi environment : we’ve learned to take better care of ourselves and each other, and stopped treating ourselves and other gay men, as objects. We don’t, I THINK, still compartmentalize other gay men as the fuzzy-imagined, “cop” or the “construction worker” from he Village People, well, unless that’s the kink you type-in in your internet search that night. It does FEEL less-hostile, BOTH inside the gay-male-subset culture, and from outside, and whenever I catch a clip of “The Boys in the Band”, if we’ve lost the bitchhy attitude, funny as it could be, that MUST be a good thing. I SAY LL that, despite what is the reality, where we now more than ever., are reduced to numbers, inches, ages, colors, types, and stats, that only serve to dehumanize ourselves and each other, and reflect the parallel oppression women have faced from the straight, male patriarchal world forever. I am no longer ‘gay’ for more than one hour or one night, here-and-there, and most importantly we are no longer ONLY, disproportionately, writing and composing the romantic expression we felt locked-out of ourselves. That is, unless you don’t WANT to be locked-up, then, by all means, go for it. we fought it. stronger and better afterwards, I hope. We have BOTH lost and gained freedom, but the lessening of the sort of LIFESTYLE of the “70s Gay Man” , has really only shifted to connecting in a virtual cruising ground, replacing the places we had been placed in to place ourselves. I hope none of this was too out of place, and personally, as now over 40, where the sex-act-allowance is removed from public spaces, the same-sex intimacy is then almost forced upon us, when it had been the complete opposite before AIDS changed the game and the goal. And please, don’t fall into the easy trap of the new tolerance for gay men in the corporate, middle-class world, to let you forget how it was, and how it CAN change and should, and NOT solely to suit our own wants either. Margaret Cho, a decade ago :” I believe a government that would deny gay men the ability to register for their marriage, is a fascist state.” Remember :Trump and his ilk ALL made overturning the SCOTUS marriage ruling for lgbt people a stated priority, part of the campaign of HATE they ran on, and Trump STILL is trying to carry-out daily. Don’t let them win, and somebody, for Gods sake, give me a g*ddamn ring!
Dinodogstar
After I rambled on, trying and failing to impress anyone, including myself, this was reported on the local news station just now. I DO NOT have the families’ permission to post this, but because this was a publicly-reported news story, the couple out and proud, i wanted to share it. ( I may remove it, if asked.) The couple, who i did not know, about 10 years older than me, were just celebrating their 14th year anniversary together.
The midwest is a nice and friendly place for the most part, but St. Louis is still crippled by the race-based, police brutality riots of Ferguson, MO, 2014. This is also the location where the Jewish cemetery was desecrated, and remains unsolved, as far as i’ve heard or read. The Black man shot inside a car with his daughter and girlfriend, that was live-streamed on-line, was from St. Louis as well, Mr. Philando Castile. The city itself is said to be more violent than Chicago, and this weekend we had five people shot to death, four injured. No, this has little to do with the topic, but if i’m going to speak, i always TRY to say something important. This all is. It would be too easy to simply blame Trump for this hateful and abusive climate, but for whatever reason, it feels as racist and divided as it was in the late 70s, as I recall. It’s pretty well understood too. As lgbtqi people, it is our personal and civic responsibility to witness and speak about, for those ignored. We CAN relate, and MUST try. The intersections of bias and bigotry cross and connect all of us, and they are intrinsically connected and dependent on each other. We did NOT win the ability to get legally married by SOLELY our words and efforts, or ANY significant advancement for our cause, and we must carry that on, and respond empathetically in like kind to others, for others. See something-Say something. Say it less verbose than me, but say something.
Dinodogstar
This is the town within the St. Louis metro area, on the east side, where the crazy guy was from who shot the Republican Senator and three others. ….I posted this separate from the commentary, if it is not acceptable to post for whatever reason.
http://www.kmov.com/story/35839486/2-men-killed-in-belleville-wrong-way-crash-identified