Y Not Love? >BY Helene Stapinski

American Demographics, Feb, 1999

Ryan K. has searched all his life for his soul mate, and when he finally finds her, he will romantically propose marriage, rather than living together. He will have sex with his bride for the first time on their wedding night. He has no respect for women who sleep around. But that doesn't stop him from wearing Between the Sheets cologne.

On a recent date with a potential mate, Ryan (cologne liberally applied) wore a suit and took Bachelorette No. 1 on a traditional night out-dinner and a play. He almost bought her flowers, but then thought twice about it, figuring it would be awkward for her to lug a bouquet around all night. When he's feeling a bit more adventurous, he might take a date to play miniature golf or even go bowling.

Though he fits the profile of the classic male of the 1950s, Ryan is not from the Ozzie-and-Harriet generation.

He is a 19-year-old snowboarder from Vail, Colorado, a college freshman majoring in business at Georgetown University who is looking for love in all the right places. And in many ways, he's more idealistic than his baby boomer parents ever were, at least when it comes to matters of the heart-and more conservative, too. Picture Eisenhower, but with a pierced eyebrow.

"The soul mate thing is so huge," Ryan says. "I still believe there's one person out there that you're meant for. It sounds naive. But this generation kind of has a trust in fate. When I talked to my mom about it, she told me she could have married seven or eight different people, that my father was the best choice at the time. Not 'He was my true love.' I was like, 'Oh, thanks.'"

With Ryan and his cohorts in mind, market analysts are predicting a values shift for Gen Y lovers-whose dating, mating, and child-rearing habits may be more like those of their grandparents than like the cast of Melrose Place.

"One of the macro-trends we're seeing is neotraditionalism," says Kirsty Doig, vice president of Youth Intelligence, a market research and trend forecasting group based in New York City. "These kids are fed up with the superficialities of life. They have not had a lot of stability in their lives. It's a backlash, a return to tradition and ritual. And that includes marriage. It's all about finding 'the right one'-as opposed to sleeping around."

Though census data has yet to reflect the trend-marriage and childbearing have continued to occur at later ages, and living together is still on the rise-the pundits all agree: We're headed for a second coming of family values. And with it, boosted sales of white wedding gowns, subscriptions to bridal magazines, and perhaps a future surge in sales of Pampers.

"This generation is very much into the spirituality of love," says Doig. "They're much more optimistic than Generation X...They know they'll find their soul mate."

Last year, when asked if they would get married if they found the right person, 80.5 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds answered a resounding "Yes!" Only 69 percent of Gen X-the 25-to-34-year-olds-held the same romantic view, according to the General Social Survey of the University of Chicago.

Rather than base their lives on people like Sylvester Stallone-whose daughter was nine months old when he and mom, Jennifer Flavin, wed in 1997-Generation Ys are more likely to follow the example set by young Macaulay Culkin, the Home Alone star raised in a turbulent, common-law marriage, who tied the knot with his 17-year-old girlfriend last year.

People like Culkin-and even snowboarding business majors like Ryan-are what marketing consultant Liz Nickles of Chicago-based Nickles & Ashcraft calls the early adopters: opinion and style leaders who set the trends. "They don't show up on the government charts," she admits, "but the rest of the population follows them."

Nickles, who's been conducting surveys with partner Laurie Ashcraft for the past 18 years, predicts a surge in teen marriage and a trend toward bigger families, whether because of the threat of AIDS or simply as a rebellion against what their free-lovin', baby boomer parents did in the '60s. Or perhaps more importantly, what Mom and Dad did in the '80s.

"[Gen Y's] role models were mothers focused on their careers," says Nickles. "But today you can have a career and your first priority can still be your home. For these young women, their heart is in the home."

In their latest survey, "The New Millennium Woman," Nickles and Ashcraft found that 82 percent of 20-to-24-year-olds thought motherhood was the most important job in the world, compared to 72 percent in the more jaded 25-to-34-year-old Gen X category.

Sociologist Linda Waite, codirector of the Alfred P. Sloan Center on Parents, Children and Work at the University of Chicago, says that because children usually rebel against their parents, it makes sense that Generation Y may get hitched earlier. "Part of the women's movement," she explains, "was involved in trying to make sure women weren't trapped in bad marriages. Certainly some marriages are bad, but marriage has its advantages, too."