>It appears that one major hurdle to marriage is finding a suitable partner with adequate financial resources.
To me, it looks like a problem of women having unrealistic standards, and keeping them until they're past their prime and marriage becomes hard.
In poorer countries women have children because they can't afford not to. In rich countries women have no children because they can't "afford to." Be that opportunity cost, e.g. working part time to take care of / deprioritizing your career for your child, or actual cost as in paying for childcare.
[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FE.ZS?most_...
I don't think any rich countries have figured out a good solution to the modern problem that boils down to "having kids used to be a EV positive, and is now EV negative" due to a confluence of factors of - needing 2 income households, paying off your own student debt, high housing costs, high childcare costs, and then high college costs for those kids.
People used to have a lot of kids to help in the home/farm/etc and to offset high childhood mortality rates to ensure they had some surviving descendants. Even after people moved off the farms, say WW1~WW2 era, kids were at least seen as sort of EV neutral, grandma watched them during the day and then they were out of the house and off the balance sheet by 18.
Now even people who truly want children are calculating how many they can afford and if that number is 1 or 2. I think a lot of people thinking "I'll just have 1 so at least there will be someone to look after me" will be disappointed with the % that end up too estranged/distant to truly be helpful in that manner later.
This problem is even more troubling because I think we almost put too much expectation on middle/upper class parents to do all these things to support their children well into their mid-20s, to the point that birth rates in US are inversely correlated with income & social class. That is - the people least able to care for their own kids, in need of the most state aid, are the ones having more of the kids.
Meanwhile the middle/upper class construct more and more levels of cost & time requirements on themselves for child rearing.
A woman who marries in Japan generally winds up taking care of both sets of (generally long lived) parents as well as the household and the children.
That's a ferocious amount of work with very little social support.
Countries keep complaining about women not having children but do absolutely nothing to make having children not suck.
However for women, the later years life satisfaction never catches up to men. Caring for both kids, parents, and eventually your own husband are huge factors here.
As people live longer, and children manage to remain under the partial care of their parents longer, the miserable middle age gets longer and more miserable.
I was remarking to my wife how, due to the wide age range of my siblings, my parents were dealing with children in the home & mothers in declining health for a total of 32 years! For 10 of those years they were dealing with BOTH kids at home & 1-2 mothers in declining health. With children & mothers spread across up to 5 states.
Suddenly at age 60 they found themselves empty nested & without parents to care for either. They are clearly much happier than they'd been in a long long time.
Right now they are in good health, but statistically it's the men whose health fails first, which would put my mom back in the caregiver stage for 1..2..10 more years, who knows.
In Japan, it's a common belief held by men that if a woman is over 30, she's done as a potential mate and wife.
Fancy wedding, fancy car, their own house(not rented), etc.