On a quiet Sunday morning, Noelle and Jeremy Shorenstein shared a picnic — grilled-vegetable pizza with homemade dough — at Makapuu Beach. It was one of her late father’s recipes, Noelle said, from his restaurant, Pizza Bob’s, in Haleiwa.

“Making food and eating it here is one of Jeremy’s and my favorite things to do together,” she said.

“I’ll go bodysurf and she’ll hang out on the beach and read a magazine,” Jeremy said. On weekdays, he added, one of their “couple things” is a midmorning coffee at The Curb. “When I say I’m meeting my wife for coffee, people don’t realize I’m driving all the way from downtown to Kaimuki,” he said with a laugh.

As they relaxed, sheltered from the wind by banks of naupaka, the Shorensteins — Noelle, 27, is a property manager in Kaimuki, and Jeremy, 29, is an associate in an investment firm — resembled the many young, hardworking Honolulu couples seen enjoying unstructured time outdoors.

They’re different, however, because they’re married. Among American millennials, those born between 1982 and 2000, marriage rates have been steadily trending down. Nationwide, 27 percent of millennials were wed in 2014, compared with more than 40 percent of baby boomers at that age, Gallup recently reported.

From 2000 to 2015, the number of millennials ages 20 to 34 who had never married increased sharply, by 56 percent nationally, according to Stateline, an initiative of the Pew Charitable Trusts, based on census data. In Hawaii, 62 percent of millennials in the age group had never married as of 2015, up from 54 percent in 2000.

“That’s a large percentage jump,” said Jenjira Yahirun, an assistant professor at the Center on the Family at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Yahirun, 36, who considers herself a Gen Xer — the generation wedged between baby boomers and millennials — said she agreed with reasons given in the Stateline report.

“They’re pursuing more higher education and facing more economic instability,” she said.

SHALLOW SOCIAL MEDIA HOOKUPS

In Hawaii these trends are exacerbated by a high cost of living and a lack of housing, she said. Some students in her “Intimacy, Marriages and Families” class work two to three jobs, Yahirun observed.

And weddings are expensive, which may be contributing to the increase in nonmarital cohabitation for this age group: The share of households including unmarried millennial partners increased to 16 percent from 12 percent since 2000, Stateline reported.

Asked why they thought their generation wasn’t keen on marrying, a sampling of Hawaii millennials gave the same reasons as Yahirun while adding others. Several blamed the trend of meeting online through social media and dating sites and apps.

Social media encourages shallow, temporary relationships, said Daniella Lau, 20, a student in Yahirun’s class.

“We’re called the hookup generation, but people are trying to deal with being lonely,” she said. “You have multiple friends but not friends you’re so close to.”

Rather than being introduced by friends who’ve known them for years, people are dating strangers, said Lau, who just ended an eight-month relationship with a man she met on the dating app Tinder.

“You’re just jumping into relationships and they just keep failing.”

Vicky Liu, 24, a student at Kapiolani Community College, has been with her boyfriend for almost six years and told him not to propose when, recently, his best friend got engaged. They currently live with his mother; Liu doesn’t want kids and he does. She wants a career in audio engineering and, having grown up baby-sitting her three younger siblings for her single, working mother, Liu said she fears that children would tie her down.

PERSONAL GROWTH A PRIORITY

For many in this generation, achieving financial security and career satisfaction — and finding themselves through travel and pursuit of other pleasures — have taken precedence over tying the knot.

“Growing up, we’re told to pursue other things as a means to defining our self-worth, our lives,” said Ming Tanigawa-Lau, 24, an East Honolulu native who majored in music and peace and justice studies at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. After graduation she traveled and taught music in South America before coming home; she works as a child advocate for Parents and Children Together, a local nonprofit organization.

Perceptions of marriage are evolving, said Tanigawa-Lau, who has been dating her current boyfriend for about nine months.

“I think maybe people have gotten disillusioned with the idea,” she said, citing the 50 percent divorce rate among boomers and changes in the definition of marriage as between a man and a woman. Her generation has been questioning that institution, she said. (Seventy-one percent of millennials support same-sex marriage, compared with 46 percent of boomers, the Pew Research Institute reported last year.)

Noah Phillips, 31, traveled through China and Europe after graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in history from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He also earned a law degree and master’s degree in business administration from the university’s Richardson School of Law and Shidler College of Business, respectively. He wants to marry someday, but “I’m still figuring my own self out personally,” he said.

“I just want to make sure that I do it the right way, do it once,” Phillips said.

That includes having the financial means to support a family, he explained. While he has been dating his girlfriend for a little over two years, being single let him feel free to pursue his entrepreneurial dreams, recently leaving a job at a bank for an opportunity with a startup enterprise.

The Shorensteins, who met as students at the University of San Francisco, had been dating for four years when Noelle’s father died and she moved back to Honolulu to settle his affairs, including the eventual closure of the family restaurant.

“That kind of sped up the process of deciding this was somebody I want to spend the rest of my life with,” said husband Jeremy.

He proposed and they married in 2014.

Most of their college friends remain unmarried, although some are in committed relationships, they said.

“A lot of our friends have student loans they’re paying off; that’s one reason a lot of people are waiting,” Noelle said.

Jeremy mentioned that an unmarried colleague recently had a baby, which she and her co-workers viewed as positive and not unusual.

A MARRIAGE GAP

Asked about the potential societal impacts of fewer or later marriages among the millennial generation, Yahirun cautioned that it’s too early to say whether the trend will hold.

“Millennials haven’t aged out of marriage,” she said.

She said it’s uncertain that birthrates will be affected, since attitudes about marriage as a prerequisite for starting a family also have changed.

One thing that’s clear, Yahirun said, is that marriage is “increasingly privileged,” meaning those with college degrees or higher are most likely to eventually marry after delaying to secure their financial status.

“You have a situation where the most privileged people in society are postponing marriage and passing these advantages on to their own children,” she said. “Andrew Cherlin, a family demographer at Johns Hopkins University, calls this the ‘marriage gap.’”

People without a college education may be delaying marriage because it is too expensive or they haven’t found a stable job.

“If these cohabiting couples do have children, they are more likely to separate, leading to unstable situations with negative consequences for children,” Yahirun said.

Many millennials, married or not, do value the importance of strong family relationships: Ming Tanigawa-Lau is working on behalf of children, while Daniella Lau, Yahirun’s student, not only hopes to marry and have children someday, but plans to be a marriage and family counselor.