In 1975, the most common way to be a 25-to-34-year-old American was to have already moved out, gone to work, married, and had a child. All four, 45 percent of the age group. In 2024, fewer than a quarter had done the same. Marriage did not disappear; it got resequenced to the back of the line. Andrew Cherlin called it the capstone, something you do to announce you have already made it, marriage that "used to be the first step into adulthood, but now it is the last." The bar is money, and it sorts by class: the first-marriage rate for Americans with a master's degree or more is more than double the rate for those with a high school diploma. The order changed. The open question is whether we built a sequence most people can actually walk.