The decline in American fertility is connected to the decline in the number of Americans getting married. If we want more dads to celebrate on Father’s Day, the best way to get them is to encourage marriage. Yet young Americans are being bombarded with messages telling them to avoid marriage. This is a very bad sign for America and for the holiday we celebrate today.
Thankfully, for those who have encountered these anti-marriage messages, University of Virginia professor and National Marriage Project Director Brad Wilcox’s wonderful new book, Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization, gives all the tools one could need to show why America would be better if our marriage culture were stronger. Even if marriage is not for everyone, the truth remains: marriage is one of the best paths for human beings to find financial and personal stability, meaning, love, and happiness. A culture with stable, happy, loving people whose lives have meaning will indeed save civilization.
Wilcox notes from the outset that American young people are pinioned between two anti-marriage messages. Elite left-liberal culture tells young women that marriage is a bad deal for them. Young women should focus instead on building careers and making money. And on the right, the “red-pill” and “manosphere” voices are telling young men that marriage is too risky: marriage will only lead to unhappiness. Better to focus on career, money, and enjoying a promiscuous lifestyle, say voices such as the influencer Andrew Tate. You’ll be much better off not marrying, they all say.
The problem with both the anti-marriage left and right is that they are wrong. All the best social science data shows that, on the contrary, married women and men are indeed, on average, in much better shape than the never-married singles or the divorced.
Let’s take the money question. Married mothers, Wilcox tells us, have a median income 2.5 times greater than childless singles. So, too, men. “Stably married men heading into retirement, for instance, have a staggering ten times more assets than their divorced or never-married peers.”
As with money, so too with meaning and happiness. Married mothers are nearly twice as likely (60%) to say their lives are meaningful than are single women (36%). Married men are twice as likely to say they are “very happy” as unmarried men (40% to 20%). That may well be because, despite the hype about the sexually free life of singles, marriage is connected to more and better sex. In his chapter, “The Flying Solo Myth,” Wilcox provides a host of other statistical data showing that marriage is correlated strongly with happiness—and that there are good reasons to attribute causation to the relationship. It’s not just that happy people with purpose and financial skills are more likely to get married. Marriage itself seems to enhance all these traits in both men and women.
That “Flying Solo Myth” is the biggest one holding people back from tying the knot in the first place. But there are plenty of other myths out there that are distorting the marriages that do end up happening. The chapter titled “The Soulmate Myth” treats the idea that marriage is best when it’s pursued on a contingency basis as only good as long as it feels good. It’s the “till death do us part” aspect that makes things work in the long run. Every married couple will discover that the glow of romantic love wears off at some point. It’s when the couple pursues commitment that real love starts to show.
To do that, couples need to avoid the “Maybe I Do” mentality, in which husband and/or wife hedge their bets on the marriage. While prenuptial agreements are not all bad, Wilcox shows that they often have the effect of convincing the partners that the marriage is itself a conditional affair. Similarly, the chapter titled “We Before Me” refutes the myth that husband and wife will be happier when they focus on themselves. And “The Parent Trap” exposes the myth that kids make you miserable. While there is plenty of evidence that having kids is very hard work—and sometimes puts stress on a marriage—the gains in meaning and long-term happiness more than make up for the difficulties. Beside which, the idea that not having children means having no problems is itself a myth.
The final myth Wilcox addresses is the devastating one that just any kind of grouping of people in a “family” will provide good results. When we look at how children fare with married parents versus single or divorced parents, we see that it’s not just the adults who benefit from marriage. Kids need those married moms and dads to truly thrive, and the data is not even close. Those who’ve read the work of figures such as Charles Murray, Kay Hymowitz, Mary Eberstadt, and others will have seen this before, but it’s important to keep repeating it. Wilcox’s chapter “The Family Diversity Myth” rehearses the ever-growing data that show married moms and dads living together produce the best results for children in every statistical category.
As is obvious, Wilcox doesn’t just break down bad ideas about marriage. He shows why marriage is a good and how to strengthen individual marriages. As with the best social science writing, Wilcox’s text isn’t just a rehearsal of statistics and abstractions. The results of interviews with dozens of couples from different backgrounds, different religious and political profiles, and different marital stories are included to deflate the myths and put flesh on the truths. At 249 pages of text, the book has both plenty of charts and plenty of stories to keep the sheer volume of data from being overwhelming.
Among those Wilcox interviews are members of four groups who have notable success at marriage: Strivers (upwardly mobile, college educated), Asians, the Faithful (practicing religious people), and political conservatives. (These groups can, of course, overlap.) Wilcox explains the cultural reasons for each group’s collective success at marriage, but he doesn’t over-egg the pudding when discussing these groups. Asians (especially Indians) have the most stable marriages but not always the happiest. Conservatives are more likely to get married but have less protection against divorce. And while regular attendance at church, synagogue, or even mosque is a strong factor in stability and happiness, it is no guarantee of a happy ending.
If there is a problem with the Strivers, it may well be that they are much more likely to be part of the elite who don’t “preach what they practice,” as Charles Murray pointed out in his 2011 book, Coming Apart. Conservative in the sheets, too many of the Strivers are shouting out the family diversity myth and other nonsense in the streets.
Decline in marriage is, Wilcox argues, a cultural problem and a political problem that has not truly been addressed, despite the fact that the trend began in the Carter Administration. Whereas Democratic policies are often “workist” and “elitist,” catering to Strivers who think full-time work and professional daycare is the summum bonum of human life, Republicans too often have no policies for families. The problem on the right, he argues, is that too many “wrongly assume tax cuts, deregulation, and higher GDP growth will fix all the problems ailing American families.”
While politics can’t create a marriage culture out of whole cloth, Wilcox argues that policies that help get more men working, financially support families, eliminate marriage penalties in law, expand school choice, and promote the success sequence (graduate from high school, get full-time work, and then get married before having children) will be successful. Readers will probably vary in their agreement about the potential success of Wilcox’s various policy proposals, but there is no doubt that these economic and structural realities do play some role in clearing the way for new marriages and helping out those already formed.
As one who teaches young college students, this writer has encountered more students lately who have listened to the siren songs of feminists and manosphere types. They tell him that marriage is too dangerous and too constricting, that it will keep them from happiness. It’s a worrisome sign, for as Wilcox observes, “the future of the American way of life—our lives, our liberty, and the pursuit of our happiness, rightly understood—depends upon making strong and stable marriages possible for all those who wish to open their hearts to lifelong love—and to the children who arise from that union.”
This father will be using Wilcox’s book to teach his skeptical students and his own children what used to be obvious but isn’t anymore: marriage is a good for kids, for moms, for dads, and for the country.
David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.