How to Think—and Talk—About Marriage Today
New data and new debates about an institution that is still evolving.
SHOULD YOU GET MARRIED? Should you stay married? Should the government do more to promote marriage?
Most of us don’t raise these questions in polite company. We don’t want to make our friends or family uncomfortable, and politically, marriage has become part of the culture wars. When conservatives bring it up, liberals worry that single women and gay people will be targeted.
It’s just the kind of topic, in other words, that belongs at the Faith Angle Forum.
Several times a year, the forum, a program of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, brings together scholars and journalists to talk about social and religious issues. Many of the topics discussed are controversial. But the spirit of the forum, unlike debates in Congress or on cable TV, is open-minded and constructive. It’s literally about good faith. And year after year, it produces a confluence of insights from the center, left, and right.
That’s what happened last week when the forum convened to discuss marriage.
THE SESSION’S OPENING SPEAKER, Brad Wilcox, runs the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. He brought data to show that by nearly every measure, from depression to crime to college graduation, children who grow up in intact, two-parent families do better, on average, than children who grow up with a single parent.
Wilcox also argued that married people are happier than unmarried people. Here, the pattern and the reasons are less clear. In the General Social Survey (GSS), married women with kids are much more likely to say they’re happy than are unmarried women or childless married women. But if you take kids out of the equation and just look at childless women, the gap between those who are married and those who aren’t, in terms of self-reported happiness, is only about 3 to 8 percentage points in favor of marriage.
Why would married people be happier than unmarried people? Wilcox mentioned several good reasons. A healthy marriage can ground you. It can make you more financially secure. It can help you feel accompanied and loved.
Wilcox describes himself as conservative, and some of what he brought to the table was hard for my liberal ears to hear. But that’s part of why I go to these forums: Smart people from the other side will tell you truths that your side won’t. Wilcox argued that two dispositions common to liberals and progressives—favoring personal freedom and welcoming cultural change—make many left-leaning people reluctant to advocate marriage. Liberals like me are happy to talk about the importance of getting an education, but we don’t like to preach about forming a family.
At the same time, Wilcox acknowledged truths that some folks on his side don’t want to hear. He noted that structural changes in the economy have stranded a lot of working-class men and that this has made it harder for many young women to find good marriage partners. He said churches should do more to welcome and incorporate single parents. He praised the trend toward more sharing of tasks, decision-making, and parenting within marriage. “I’m not hoping to go back to 1955,” he said.
Wilcox also talked about an emerging pathology on the right: anti-marriage sexism. “I never would have anticipated that I would be getting pushback against marriage from people on the right,” he confessed. But that’s what he’s seeing now from demagogues, such as Andrew Tate, who tell men to pursue machismo instead of commitment. Wilcox called this mindset “misogynistic” and criticized its “cartoonish model of masculinity.”
WILCOX’S COUNTERPART on the panel was Isabel Sawhill, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who has done pioneering work on family issues. She, too, brought data to illustrate the advantages of growing up in a married household. She outlined some of the reasons for that advantage: two incomes, two parents giving their time, two parents providing emotional support.
Sawhill, a left-of-center moderate, connected marriage to progressive values. She pointed out that it has become part of class stratification, with college-educated people forming stable couples and reaping the rewards. She explained how declining marriage rates among the poorest Americans have canceled out the effects of public assistance. A low-wage second earner in a household might bring in $30,000 a year, far more than taxpayers are willing to replace. “We shouldn’t think the only thing we can do for children is change education or the safety net,” Sawhill told the assembled journalists. “The family is an incredibly important institution for raising children.”
But Sawhill also articulated a more critical view of traditional marriage. She pointed out that a lot of past marriages were bad, so it’s good that nowadays fewer women have to put up with that. The “primary driver” behind the decline of marriage, she contended, is that “women now have the ability to support themselves.” Sawhill called this the “independence effect.” She also praised the liberalization of divorce laws, which has made it easier for women to escape bad marriages.
Wilcox has a simple message, distilled in the title of his new book: Get Married. But Sawhill wants a more flexible message. The goal doesn’t have to be marriage, she argued; it just needs to be stable, healthy relationships, with a consensual sharing of authority and responsibility. One key to successful parenthood, she proposed, is to “get into a committed relationship—which Brad would like to be marriage” but in her view could be something else. She explained:
We’re always going to be going through transitions. Society isn’t static. And we’re going to be exploring, experimenting with different kinds of families, different kinds of living arrangements. . . . So I’m a little more willing to accept that change has to happen, is going to happen. We will adjust to it. Some of it will be good; some of it will not be so good. And hopefully we’ll sort it out in a good way.
The guiding principles of family policy, in Sawhill’s view, should be deliberateness and planning. “The old norm was: Don’t have a child outside of marriage,” she observed. “The new norm needs to be: Don’t have a child until you and your partner are ready and want to have a child.” To that end, she devoted much of her talk to something Wilcox didn’t mention: birth control. In particular, she called attention to the increasing use of long-acting reversible contraceptives, which have contributed to a big decline in unintended pregnancies.
WHEN THE PANELISTS FINISHED, the journalists dug in. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times asked whether the ideological gap found in surveys—conservatives are more likely than liberals to say they’re happy—might be due, in part, to a reluctance among some progressives to express contentment in a troubled world. Meridith McGraw of Politico asked how dating apps have affected marriage; Wilcox said the apps often make things worse by steering users to people who have surface appeal but aren’t good long-term partners. Responding to a question from Matthew Watkins of the Texas Tribune, Wilcox added that the “not enough good men” problem is, in part, self-perpetuating: Good marriages in one generation beget good marriages in the next, by increasing the supply of young men who grew up with, and know how to be, good husbands and fathers.
The trickiest questions focused on which aspects of marriage are causes and which are effects. In his presentation, for example, Wilcox noted that among college-educated Americans in the GSS, a big gap has opened on sexual morality: Liberals are now far less likely than conservatives to say infidelity is always wrong. Wilcox argued that this tolerance is worrisome in part because “people who endorse the notion that infidelity is always wrong are markedly happier in their marriages than Americans who don’t endorse that idea.” But does saying infidelity might not always be wrong make you more likely to have an unhappy marriage? Or does having an unhappy marriage make you more likely to say infidelity might not always be wrong?
Matt Lewis of the Daily Beast pressed Wilcox on a particularly hard question: Is the current happiness gap between married and unmarried people a result, in part, of changes in marriage over the last half-century? Have the trends celebrated by Sawhill and other progressives—fewer teen pregnancies, fewer shotgun marriages, easier divorce laws, and more economic independence for women—increased the ratio of happy to unhappy marriages?
Wilcox offered some evidence that marriage, per se, tends to increase happiness and flourishing. He cited research that followed people through their lives and found better emotional outcomes, on average, among those who married than among those who didn’t. He also referred to a study of identical twins that found, in his words, that “coupled adults, both cohabiting and married,” were “markedly less likely to engage in problematic drinking behavior.” But he conceded that the study only addressed drinking behavior, that it didn’t show a gap between married people and cohabiting people (an apparent gap disappeared when confounding factors were accounted for), and that more twin studies are needed to clarify to what extent marriage causes the good outcomes with which it’s associated.
As to changes in marriage over the last fifty years, Wilcox noted that the GSS has been around since the early 1970s and has always found a happiness gap between married and unmarried people. But he acknowledged that the gap has widened in recent years, consistent with Lewis’s question. And although Wilcox lamented the decline of marriage overall, he added: “The good news is that marriage and childbearing are much more selective, much more voluntary, much more chosen” than they used to be. As a result, he concluded, “our kids today are more likely to be raised—slightly, compared to 2012—in stably married families.”
THIS IS THE WAY we ought to talk about difficult issues: challenge one another, listen, accept the most persuasive arguments, and incorporate them into our thinking. The goal isn’t to beat the other side; it’s to synthesize and learn. In the course of their discussion, Wilcox praised Sawhill for leading a successful campaign to reduce teen pregnancy, and Sawhill praised Wilcox for proving that two-parent families are better for kids.
The conversation established lots of common ground, but it also clarified a shared threat: the emerging misogynistic right. One product of the decline of marriage, Wilcox warned, is a cohort of young men who don’t connect to young women, have turned against the values of family and domesticity, and are susceptible to “a more macho style of politics that speaks to . . . their fears and their sense that they’ve been sidelined.” These men are being cultivated and targeted by demagogues like Tate and—though nobody said these words out loud—Donald Trump.
To meet this threat, we need to depolarize the marriage debate. We need an alliance between conservatives who care about the family and progressives who care about women and children. Both panelists at the Faith Angle session acknowledged the partisan rift and talked about healing it. Wilcox thanked Sawhill for helping to “depolarize the issue” by “flying the flag for marriage and the two-parent family.” Sawhill, in turn, endorsed faith-based organizations and other civic institutions as a way to bring people together and dissolve the “tribalism and the polarization that we’re facing politically.”
Listening to one another is hard. But the alternative is worse. As I left the conference, I thought about a slogan that has become dangerously popular in our country: “national divorce.” That’s where we could be headed if we don’t at least try to repair our national marriage.