Some thing else happened in the 1960's. The advent of the "pill". Prior to that, sex was a high risk event for women. Women (and society) viewed sex as something that the man had to pay a high price to get. (Commitment, marriage, stability). When the sexual revolution happened, the price that men had to pay to get sex went way down.
High cost for sex is an evolutionary strategy, and many species females require males to pay a high cost to get it. When the price men had to pay went down, so did marriage and single parenting went up.
Thank you! I can’t believe the pill was not mentioned! People sleep with people they will never marry in the words of Dave Chappell, you don’t get a TV from sex you get a baby!
The point you made about the decline starting in the 1960s rather than the 1980s is brilliant!
I’m wondering though, for the fracking not leading to an increase of marriage rates. My hypothesis is that this is because money is actually a proxy for status. So the fact that they simply got more money didn’t actually make them more attractive.
This is just my bias, but I get the impression that women would consider a New York Times writer who makes 80,000 a year more economically attractive than a plumber who makes $120,000 a year. Even though, strictly speaking in terms of paycheque this would be false.
> I get the impression that women would consider a New York Times writer who makes 80,000 a year more economically attractive than a plumber who makes $120,000
Yeah, I definitely agree that often it’s status that’s more important than actual income. But prior to that study, income seemed to be sufficient to predict marriage rates. I think that gradually around 1985 and after, a college degree became increasingly a status symbol, and women want their partner to have a degree, whether it’s led to a high paying field or not. I also wonder if some men are withdrawing from marriage as well and it’s unrelated to income.
I think the “status” angle was big in the 80s when there were “good” jobs (doctor, lawyer, stock broker) that paid well and “bad” jobs (mostly the trades) that may have paid well but were undesirable. I think societal feelings towards the kind of work one does versus the amount of money one makes doing it have changed a LOT since then. Today, it seems that people care more about the absolute dollars earned than HOW they are earned, especially when choosing someone as a life partner.
Also, fracking money isn't stable money. It comes and goes. And it's not indicative of a unique human talent so much as willingness to do a dirty job in an inconvenient location.
As a primary caretaker of children and home, I know first hand that raising a family takes many hours of unremunerated labor that usually falls upon women. Currently I am not earning an income which makes me dependent and without access to economic power and opportunity. All these pro-life government people need to acknowledge and fix that. Har har.
Traditional gender roles create a class of unpaid labor (women) to support those with access to economic and professional power (men). Christian Nationalist movements are all about this. Brainwash a class of people that it is to their benefit and absolute privilerdge to not have any personal agency because they are able to raise the children of the person they are dependent on.
That isn't remotely what the comment above said. It says raising a family is very difficult and women are usually doing the unpaid work men won't. Traditionally, before the Pill and the 60s, women had to get married in order to eat and live in a house, so they got married. It is not surprising that marriage rates would fall once women were allowed to get their own checking accounts.
Sure, but the comparative advantage to both parties is supposed to be a loving mutual relationship supporting children in the best way possible. Which means both parents do the parenting. Men who substitute overtime for parenting often regret it later in life.
Actually if you look at the "Men's Marriage Rates by Education" graph, marriage is steadily declining for men with degrees, too.
I've long been curious about a break-out of marriage rates by income-or-asset-percentile, too, because I have a pet theory that for men (or women) with high assets, marriage is a colossal mistake with the current legal precedents and framework.
Why? Because marriage is a gigantic, one-sided trap for people.
For both genders: if you have any assets whatsoever, you immediately sign half over. Vintage-level divorce rates are ~42%, then "mutually unhappy" results in marriage are probably half-again that number, for 60%-66% of marriages net unhappy. Prenups don't hold up in court for the most part.
For men: they're more likely to have assets, AND 70% of divorces are initiated by women. Do you really want to bet half your assets on something with a 2/3 failure rate, where 70% of the time, you didn't even want to split?? Also, in a split, the woman ends up with the kids much more often, and ends up spending a lot more time with them. You won't see your kids as much, or be able to influence their childhoods as much.
For women: the reason 70% of divorces are initiated by women is that men suck, and are basically giant babies who want to be taken care of just like a kid. You do the majority of the housework and cleaning and child-rearing, even if you have a career and income too. Not just that, but in the event of divorce, most women are worse off financially and standard of living wise, and men don't have a penalty on that front nearly as big. Oh, and if you have assets, you're going to end up giving away half of them to get rid of the chump in that 70% case.
Marriage's main result, empirically, is to increase net misery-years by making it harder and more friction-ful to break up, and for people with assets, to make you bet half of them on a gamble with an absolutely massive failure rate. Would you start a 4 year Phd program with a 60% chance of failure? Of course not! Why would you bet half your assets on a marriage, then??
> for men (or women) with high assets, marriage is a colossal mistake with the current legal precedents and framework
Yeah, I think you’re right that there are some real problems with marriage. But Kearney makes a convincing argument that having married parents is really important for kids. I think unless we find ways to make marriage better and address some of those legal precedents for people it’s going to keep declining.
Or put God back in marriage and family. Being committed to my marriage and family is a choice I make every day, even the days it is hard. And I chose a spouse who was equally committed and who I knew would be a committed father. 18.5 years in, we have had good times and bad. We can look back on the hard parts and see how it made us stronger because we stayed committed. Our children have 100 percent benefitted. Good thought provoking article. Thanks.
There's nothing wrong with marriage itself. It's how people do it. Saying we need to reform marriage because lots of people aren't doing it and many of those who do it are doing it badly is like saying we need to reform fresh fruit and vegies and going for a walk because so many people are eating processed food and sitting on the couch all day.
This is so bleak. Whatever happened to the quaint notion of loving someone and wanting to build a life with them, which often includes children, and persevering through hard times (that whole “for better or worse” stuff)? Perhaps American culture has so fetishized self-actualization that it no longer sees the personal benefit to finding a person to whom one commits, which leads to people either choosing to never marry or to leave a marriage at the first whiff of “unhappiness”. I think the bigger question might be: at what point did people in the US begin to believe that happiness was their birthright and any unhappiness was a sign of either personal or societal failure?
I can answer that! Here is EXACTLY what happened: A lot of us thought we were entering into that kind of marriage, but the other party did not hold up his part, at all, and we ended up fucked over and poor and struggling and missing our children when they were at the other parent's house, and after a lot of suffering we realized, "You know, my kids and I would have been much better off if I'd decided to parent alone," and after young women see this play out a few times and hear older women tell their stories, they realize they don't want to be in that vulnerable position -- because you CANNOT count on your spouse to be there for you.
Sounds like you had a bad experience. I married a little later in life and so had the opportunity to kiss a few frogs. When I married it was for love, but I also chose someone whose values and life outlook was similar to mine. I worry that our culture has romanticized what marriage “should” be and downplayed what it really is: two imperfect people attempting to navigate life together and support each other through its inevitable ups and downs. I worry that kids these days think that marriage is a “zero sum game” situation as opposed to a “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” situation. And if our kids don’t want to get married, as the author of this article implies, that won’t be good for our grandkids.
Let me stop you right there. Your assumptions are way off. I chose someone with similar values (or so I thought) who had a similar background. We were both from small towns with married middle-class parents. We went to the same university. We were engaged for two years. We agreed about kids, money, lifestyle, etc. I did not run off with the first cute bad boy I came across or some such bullshit. I had every reason to think I was making a choice based not just on love (that existed, too) but a very pragmatic choice. You can do everything "right" and still have a divorce come out of nowhere and fuck you right up. We were married 15 years and had two kids, a house and a dog. And then, with no warning, everything ended. It was very, very hard on our children -- he deliberately set off a bomb that harmed them (and me). I did remarry and have been married to my second husband 17 years. He is literally from another country (the Netherlands) but we have the same world view so it works very well. NOBODY should ever think that they are immune to divorce because they were so damned smart about who they married or because they are a good partner. I believed that with all my heart. I thought I was safe because I'd been careful. I could not have been more wrong. I would advise young women NOT to legally marry a man. It's especially upsetting when you stay home and put your career on hold so you can dedicate yourself to nurturing your children while he works on his career -- the laws now generally tilt toward 50-50 custody, meaning the ex-wife/SAHM or former SAHM may not have much of a career, and now gets little or no child support. That wasn't what happened to me, but it's happening to a lot of moms now.
I’m sorry you thought I assumed you didn’t do those things. I didn’t intend to imply that. I was merely talking about my personal experience. I’m curious, since you’ve now been married 17 years, why you’d caution young women against marriage. Seems like your first marriage didn’t work because that husband went bananas, but the second one is working out okay. And, for all the reasons you mentioned it’s important for women to always have their “own money”.
Because I married someone from another country, marriage was required in order for him to come on the fiance visa. I'd otherwise have considered just living together. But also, I was 40 when I remarried, and we didn't have children together, so it was a different situation.
Just that he was willing to destroy everything we’d worked for suddenly, without warning, for no reason that I could ever discover. I finally made peace with it, but for years I really struggled to understand what happened. I’ll never know.
I mean, the whole idea of being able to accurately predict how people are going to evolve or change over 20-70 years is silly to begin with. And 20 years is pretty much the minimum you have to consider if you want to have kids with that person.
How much have *you* changed, vs you 20 years ago? Why wouldn't you expect your spouse to change that much, AND you to change that much, in the next 20-70 years? It doesn't matter how many frogs you've kissed, or how much you love them when you start - I promise, the great majority of everyone in that 66% were in love when they got married, and didn't think they'd get divorced or be miserable.
And what if those changes aren't compatible? What do you think the odds are of that? Taking the outside view, it's the ~66% I was talking about - people divorce or are miserable in a marriage typically because they and/or their spouse have changed. And sure, it sounds plausible that about 2/3 of the time, people would change enough over 20-70 years to no longer be compatible.
Then we get to the fact that as marriage is currently structured, if you have assets, the legal system wants you to literally bet half that you and your spouse aren't ever going to do this - materially change or drift apart over the next 20-70 years. It's madness.
That's a *really* bad bet! I mean, even with no money on it, I wouldn't bet that.
Do kids do better with two parents and financial support? Absolutely, fully agree. If you split up, should the kids be supported by child support? Definitely yes. Kids are expensive, they need school and clothes and ipads and whatever, that takes money.
But should you have to bet literally millions (or whatever amount) that you AND your spouse are *never* going to change enough to be incompatible over the next 20-70 years?? That's crazy.
I’m interested, if you don’t mind telling me, in how old you are. My attitudes about and expectations of marriage appear to be very different from yours and I’m wondering if it has to do with the “age” in which I grew up. I’m a late-stage boomer/Gen X. Just turned 60.
I don't think age or generation really matters, everything I've been saying has been even more true in the past, when the vintage divorce rates were higher than today's 42%, and when the prevalence of net-miserable marriages was probably higher than today, too. Marriages have been a likely >50% bad decision for a loooooong time, even when divorce was rarer because it was essentially illegal, because you can still be miserable even if you can't divorce.
Divorce rates were indeed lower before no-fault divorce laws became prevalent, because they were essentially illegal / impossible to get. Then they shot up when no-fault divorce became common in the late sixties - this was undoubtedly because there was huge latent demand for divorces from all the net-miserable marriages. Then the divorce rate cruised around in the 50's before eventually settling to where they are today. This argues to me that marriage was just as bad a bet back in the 50's-80's too.
Remember "mommy's little helper?" Fifties housewives literally doping themselves out of their minds with Amphetamines, Xanax, and Valium, to endure the horrifying banality of their existences and miserable marriages?
People just didn't talk about it back then. Prevailing cultural mores portrayed a picture of marriage as being successful and nuclear families as the ideal. But that doesn't mean that's what was true, and indeed, we see how much misery there was, hidden behind that social facade, when no-fault divorce became common and suddenly everyone began divorcing to get out of their miserable marriages.
fwiw I am Gen X (and my parents are still together!) and I very much share your perspective. it’s literally a terrible deal prima facie and we do it anyway mostly because the social script tells us it’s the default/conventionally right life model so surely it can’t possibly not be the safe way to go? well!
one of the reasons the script is the way it is is that it is better for the children. Which undeniably still holds true today.
I’d argue that a second reason the script is the way it is is because historically it was better for most women. Reasonable people can argue whether or not this is true today. But no doubt at minimum the calculus on this point has shifted enormously.
The third reason for the script is that it was better historically for less powerful men (than the alternative of the tribal leader(s) getting all of the women. While the calculus is not identical, and indeed is no longer true in terms of men getting sex, I’d argue that for the pursuit of happiness it’s still net true.
Do you have a source? Because mine is: Stevenson, B., & Wolfers, J. (2007). Marriage and Divorce: Changes and their Driving Forces. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 21(2), 27–52. doi:10.1257/jep.21.2.27
They have a lot of great graphs and tables.
Here's First Marriages Ending in Divorce, by age cohort:
Within the limits of the data, post no-fault divorce, they all steadily climb into the 40-50% range. The latest cohort in the graph hasn't gotten there yet, because of the date of publication / data, but it's tracking the other curves extremely closely, and we'd expect it to.
Divorce dot com cites:
"The divorce rate regarding second marriages in the US is 60% compared to 40-50% for the first marriages and 73% for third ones"
You're right that college-educated people divorce at slightly lower rates, but this is also confounded by race and income - asians and whites have the lowest divorce rate by far and always have, higher incomes have lower divorce rates because you're punished by losing half your assets, etc.
Vintage divorce rates can be tricky because most statistics are given in X per 1000 rather than in vintage.
But hey, let's assume you're right, and it's 30% instead of 42%. With the "net miserable but non-divorced" marriage rate, that's STILL waaayyyyy too high for my own risk appetites. But, you do you - I think risk taking is a part of life and people don't do enough of it. If they want to spend that risk taking via getting married, more power to them!
I'm just trying to frame the problem in a way that can actually display the pretty significant risk involved to people who haven't thought about it before, and might just be following a social script, with my posts here.
The law actually does not require you to hand over half your premarital assets. It requires you to split the assets gained during the marriage. Assets that you had going into it are considered separate property. And if the default rule still makes you uncomfortable, you can do a prenup to make that point abundantly clear. It is not true that prenups regularly don't hold up. They hold up just fine as long as you took the time to both get lawyers in advance.
It what you said was true about assets, I would completely agree with you. But it isn't, a person with assets can absolutely protect them. I have a prenup and honestly I think they should be the default or a requirement, to make sure people know what they're getting into and actually agree on what will happen in a divorce. Mine says if we divorce, we both keep our own assets, our own debt, and our own retirement accounts, and any shared asset we acquired or developed during the marriage (like a joint bank account or piece of real property) will either be split 50/50 or one of us will buy out the other one. Pretty simple.
As for everything else you said, I think it's a bad idea to get married before 30 because people really do change a lot and are too restless to be with one person forever starting at such a young age. Later in life people honestly don't change that much.
And you're really leaving out the kid situation. Marriage is much better for kids. It's most of the point.
I'm not really advocating for or against marriage as I've been single, divorced, single again, and now married again, and I don't think one is better than the other, I was/am happy both single and married. But I don't have kids...if you do, marriage is very obviously vastly superior.
The financial stuff can all be sorted with prenups, and if your partner won't sign one that's a clear indication you're not on the same page anyway. Many men ask, she's says no or gets upset, and then they do it anyway, so that's their fault for being dumb if it ends.
The real risk is for women who rely on their husband economically after having kids. Most divorced are caused by the husband cheating. Yes, the wife is the one that files bc most cheating men don't want to leave their wife for the woman or women they're cheating with...they want to have their cake and eat it too and are usually lying to both. So it's up to the wife to decide if she wants to have zero dignity and stick with a lying cheating man who supports her family and stay together for the kids, knowing he will probably keep doing it, or keep her dignity intact but face being poor by divorcing him. If you check online forums for divorced women that is the actual story of what happened the majority of the time. Not always but it's the most common reason.
"the whole idea of being able to accurately predict how people are going to evolve or change over 20-70 years is silly to begin with."
How you evolve over time is up to you. And how someone who you spend every day with evolves over that time is something you can influence, too. You're not a passive observer to your lives together.
>How you evolve over time is up to you. And how someone who you spend every day with evolves over that time is something you can influence, too. You're not a passive observer to your lives together.
But I don't think it is - you can have accidents and debilitating life changes, in both physical and mental health. People get depressed, or bipolar, or schizophrenic, and they don't choose that. Your child can die, and you can both handle the grief differently enough that it drives you apart. You may start a business, and the stress and reduced time spent together can strain your relationship to a breaking point.
A lot of things in life ARE not under your control, and are NOT choosable, particularly when it comes to other people. You might choose to handle grief or stress or adversity in a productive way, but your partner may not, and you can't affect that much.
I actually think you and a few of the other "good marriage" folk here chiming in are simply in the privileged position of being in that minority of ~30% of marriages that actually worked out and are net beneficial. I'm genuinely happy you're in that position - but that isn't necessarily the case for the majority of people.
I have no particular reason to think that I'm so great my choice will be vastly better than the average person, so I stay away from marriage, as I see it having at least a 2/3 failure rate and imagine I'd be in that 2/3. I'm glad that wasn't true for you, and that it worked out.
"you can have accidents and debilitating life changes, in both physical and mental health"
Of course. Thus the clause in many people's marriage vows, "in sicknesss and in health." The vows anticipate that there will be changes, many of them stressful - but that you'll stay true to each-other regardless.
Now, in modern secular society the idea of an oath being kept is considered quaint. But in fact society is built on people keeping promises even without a formal oath before some religious or civil official. Consider something as simple as my going to the bakery to get a pie. The usually-unspoken contract is, "I will give you $5 and you will give me a pie." If I give the baker $5 and don't get a pie, or if the baker gives me a pie and I don't pay him, we have a problem. The relationship is broken because one of us chose for it to be broken, and I don't go to or won't be welcome at the bakery again.
But sometimes it's not a matter of choice of one of us, but something's happened. Perhaps the baker's assistant sold the last pie to someone else. Perhaps the oven broke down. Perhaps I realise I only have $4 in my pocket. Now, if this is a one-off interaction, we simply shrug and move on. But if we know each-other and have a series of kept promises behind us, then today he offers me a pastie instead, or a larger pie for dinner later, or says $4 will be fine today.
Our lives are full of trivial interactions like that where there is a promise to be kept. And those who keep those promises tend to be respected, and people want to have more interactions with them. People who fail to keep their promises others want to avoid.
Society is built on kept promises, and if you have an ongoing relationship, someone being unable to fulfill their end of things today can be set aside.
As for stresses such as you describe, the point of a marriage - as with a friendship or the like - is that you share those stresses. Stresses can also be good events, like the birth of a child. My wife commented, "I think having a baby makes a good marriage better, and a bad marriage worse." And she's exactly right.
In my work as a trainer I see this physiologically. The point of physical training is to impose a stress on the system sufficient that the system adapts so that it is no longer a stress. If you're able to just squeeze out 10 pushups, then if you do 8-10, your body says, "well that was stressful, I don't want to be stressed, I'd better develop the ability to do 12, that way when he does 10 again it won't be a stress." Your body doesn't actually want to be able to do 12 pushups, it just doesn't want 10 to be stressful. And you proceed in this way, this is how progressive resistance training works - do a little more every time, your body adapts - but guess what, it's always going to be stressful.
Likewise, the point of a marriage is not to never be stressed. The point of a marriage is to impose a stress on the marriage sufficient that the marriage adapts so that it is no longer a stress, the marriage becomes stronger. "You have cancer and can't work now? We'll figure out a way, honey."
Over many years as a trainer I have kept statistics on my trainees. Gender, age, height, weight, previous training and injury history, and so on. I looked to match this data with the results they got and see trends. And by far the dominant factor in their results is: do they show up?
Yes, women don't get as strong as men, older people don't get as strong as younger, and so on. But a 70yo woman who shows up 3 times a week for four years ends up stronger than a 30yo man who comes three times and then never again and four years later isn't training at all.
Keep showing up, keep your promises, and good things happen. The stress isn't an unfortunate relationship-destroying thing, the stress is what makes a marriage strong.
But over 70% of the West are overweight or obese, Australia has around 20,000 deaths due to obesity, 20,000 due to alcohol, 12,000 due to smoking, and 4,400 amputations due to obesity-caused type II diabetes annually. Most Westerners are lazy and avoid discomfort, avoid any stress - and as debilitating as this is for their bodies, it's worse for their relationships.
"I have no particular reason to think that I'm so great my choice will be vastly better than the average person"
It's not your choice in spouse so much as it is your choices every day with that spouse. I'd like to believe I'm a good trainer, however far more important than how good I am at teaching a squat or suggesting dietary changes is that the people keep showing up. Likewise with a spouse.
I'd like to thank you for a good exchange. I agree with you and see that you're pointing at something very valuable, in terms of the actions and mindset needed to build a good, mutually beneficial, and healthy relationship.
I'm still a marriage skeptic, because you can have these healthy-dynamic, mutually beneficial, healthy and honest relationships without marriage just as easily. They may not last for life, I agree - but empirically, the majority of marriages don't last for life, either.
The delta, as a I perceive it is: with somebody like me, a relationship can founder more easily when a given stress come up, and with somebody like you, you are more likely to dig in and ride out the "bad parts" downswing and still come out the other side with an intact relationship. I think both are valid approaches, and the data argues that the majority of people live by my approach.
I feel like you're arguing "the only way to have an enduring relationship that can handle the worst ups and downs the world can throw at you is unbreakable-vow marriage," and I'm arguing "Empirically, if we look at the data, more than 50% of people don't perform to this standard. AND the worst ups and downs the world can throw at you can literally obliterate who you or your spouse IS, and you have zero power over that."
So then I suppose the answer is you need to find one of those people who is not in the majority, to whom their vows mean something and are unbreakable, even under the most harshest, life-and-mind-destroying conditions. I...don't know how to find anyone like that.
I'm not sure I've ever known anyone like this outside of family, and even within family it's rare. Even for those family members it took decades to actually see it in action, for the world to throw large enough downswings for it to be a real test. I don't know what the signs or portents would be, for you to be able to accurately judge that this person in front of you, that you've known for a few months, is so adamant and so deeply moral they will never break a vow, no matter what fresh hells the world throws at you or them.
So if you have any advice on that front, I'd be happy to hear it. Otherwise, thanks again for a great exchange.
Speaking as someone married for 30 years, a long-lasting marriage is mostly luck, and anyone who says differently is trying to sell you something. I got lucky and I know it.
It's written into your country's "ethos" so to speak: the values that the USA promotes are "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Therefore everyone is entitled to #3 in that phrase.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find studies that came close to examining those issues, if not doing so outright. However, those studies would be conducted and reported in the behavioral sciences, not economics.
For most of my relatives and me, the chance of divorce is close to zero (on my dads side, four divorces across five generations with over 200 family members, and 3 of the 4 divorces from all three men in one family line).
I honestly think that literally a majority of modern western people have a spiritual sickness (characterized by materialism, hedonism and conformity) and are completely unmoored and unable to resist or even reflect on the values being propagated through media/social media.
Ha! This is a great point, I actually didn't know this, kudos for bringing it up.
Back when I was in grad school doing research, I actually did fail to finish my Phd because I'd started my first business and I decided to do focus on that as likely having more impact in the world. But I think even Phd failure, like in my case, is still better than marriage failure, because you at least come out with a masters.
This site here cites a ~15% "dropped out / got a masters" and ~4% "didn't pass quals or defense" for the EU and UK, or an ~81% Phd completion rate:
So broadly, 16 years ago in the US, you'd expect a 36%-50% failure rate, depending on your discipline. That IS a pretty high failure rate, and indeed you have succeeded in convincing me that I should advocate against embarking on Phd's with about 50%-66% of the ardor I advocate against marriage. Thank you for bringing this up!
I'd simply add that "gamble" implies that you cannot change the outcome, like rolling the dice. Whereas it's more like chess - the moves you make affect the outcome. And if rather than playing an adversarial game like chess you choose to play a co-operative game, then you recognise that when you win, you both win, and when you lose, you both lose. So you should co-operate to win.
"For both genders: if you have any assets whatsoever, you immediately sign half over. Vintage-level divorce rates are ~42%, then "mutually unhappy" results in marriage are probably half-again that number, for 60%-66% of marriages net unhappy. Prenups don't hold up in court for the most part."
This is not true. The other spouse is entitled to appreciation and income from an asset, but the asset itself remains with the spouse that brings it into the marriage.
Also: "For women: the reason 70% of divorces are initiated by women is that men suck, and are basically giant babies who want to be taken care of just like a kid." 2 points: 1) you have a really jaded world view. 2) Men are the only group you could make such a horrible claim about and nobody corrects you. The writer of the article even liked your post.
Basically your opinion about why men should get married is based on a misunderstanding of law and your opinion on why women shouldn't get married is because you think an entire gender 'sucks.'
Reading through this, my impression is that some men have personal problems(drug addiction, alcoholism, criminal records, unemployment, history of domestic violence, mental illness) that make it difficult or impossible to ever get married, but other men internalize the idea that they're not worthy of getting married, even when they make a decent amount of money, lets say $50,000, and just simply stop trying. This lines up with a larger male retreat from the physical world, exemplified by lower college graduation rates, and less participation in the labor force, especially during prime working years.
Thanks for the link, I’m familiar with Nicholas Eberstadt’s work, but haven’t read his book yet. At some point, I’d like to dig into it as deeply as I did with Kearney’s.
> This lines up with a larger male retreat from the physical world
Yeah, I think boys and men are definitely withdrawing culture-wide. I’m curious what you think is driving that retreat?
Lots of young men who are struggling either have their parents supporting them, similar to the hikkomori in Japan, are getting disability payments, whether or not they're truly legitimately disabled, or they're participating in the black market, selling drugs for instance to make money. This leads honestly to a chicken or an egg problem imo. Are young men playing video games excessively, getting high, betting on sports or watching online porn because they view their prospects(educationally, socially, romantically) as dismal, or are their prospects dismal because they're doing these things instead of other things that would be more beneficial?? I think the biggest problem facing men is just male underachievement in K-12 schooling. This isn't anything new, because girls have had better grades than boys at school for a long time, but there used to be lots of jobs that men could get with or without a high school diploma. Today, that's just not the case. I'd love to see more apprenticeship programs for the 60% of young men who will never set foot on a college campus, who probably weren't great students in school, and Richard Reeves has spoken about this, but K-12 schooling is a big problem as well. A lack of male teachers, especially at the elementary school level, means that many boys see doing well in school as something girls do. With a lack of men in education, the curriculum dosen't favor the kind of reading material that boys and men are more likely to enjoy (horror, man's struggle against elements/nature, sports, science fiction, comic books, war novels, etc). I'm thinking of material like Moby Dick, Cormac Mccarthy's Blood Meridian, Eugene Sledge's With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa or even a novel for young adults like Gary Paulsen's novel Hatchet. Biology also plays a role, because the girls are done with puberty about a yr or two earlier than the boys, which means they act and behave more and more like young women earlier, with differences in cognitive development, and skills like planning ahead, being future oriented, which puts boys/young men on average at a real disadvantage. All of this also occurs during a pivotal 4 year period of high school. The boys narrow the gap by 16-17 as they become young men, but by that point, it's almost too late to do anything about college. Scott Galloway also had a really good article on this topic, I'll post it below.
These sorts of discussions always treat men as some sort of malfunctioning widget that is displeasing women.
Society has deliberately emasculated men in the name of feminism for the past 50 years. This is the direct (albeit unintended) consequence of social engineering.
Another thing that happened in the 60s: Creation of the Great Society and government programs that disincentivized marriage, pay women to have children out of wedlock, exclude fathers from what would have been a two-parent home.
Nobody was paying women to have children out of wedlock. We were giving mothers an absolute pittance to help them support the children the piece-of-shit impregnator abandoned.
Right. You have the cause and effect backward. Reality reflects that the PsOS were required to stay out of the home for the woman to receive her pittance. From 1890 to 1950, black women had a higher marriage rate than white women. And in 1950, just 9% of black children lived without their father. Strong black families used to be the norm. But come the Great Society, by the mid-1980s, black fatherlessness skyrocketed. Today, only 44% of black children have a father in the home. The rate of black out-of-wedlock births went from 24.5% in 1964 to 70.7% by 1994, roughly where it stands today. So pittance or not, government policy caused this epidemic of fatherless children. I also find interesting your assumption that women have no control over when they have sex, and with whom. You have been brainwashed.
If you're on medicaid and going to public schools, that is hardly a pittance. With two kids that is easily over $50k a year in assistance, not including other welfare.
"piece-of-shit impregnator abandoned"
The woman knew who was impregnating her and did it anyway.
Unfortunately, this take fails to explain why women would embrace onerous paperwork or a hostile and indifferent bureaucracy as opposed to staying with a loving and supportive spouse.
Short answer is that they are losers who have sex with losers. They never had a loving and supportive spouse in the first place, but they went ahead and bred.
One major factor that seems to have been ignored in this piece is the huge subsidy given to many single mothers by the government, with all the programs available to support children.
Also, the sexual revolution completely sundered the relationship between marriage and having children. Sex became a recreational activity, and if children appeared, they might be accepted by the mother or killed by her. Since the father wasn't married to her, he had no say.
With the idea that marriage is supposed to be a grand romantic ideal between two soul mates came impossible expectations - contrary to pre-1960 ideas that marriage was good, but challenging, and the field of possible mates much smaller.
Many factors have been at work. Meanwhile, stable two-parent families will produce stable children with good potential for work and relationships.
Love the commentary and data here. I do wonder why there isn't some discussion of the concentration of single parenting families in the rural South as shown on the US map graphic. Might the national data be driven by events that are actually focused mostly in the non-urban South?
I cannot be 100% positive of this, only about 99%, but… the map form of showing the single parent data is highly misleading, since by absolute numbers in terms of population, far more of this is in large cities, but those take up very little area on a map of the whole country.
Why is it not a "single-parent family defect"? I'm tired of every advantage considered priveledge in the modern negative sense rather than the opposite defect.
A lot of impoverished single mothers are such because the fathers of their children are physically abusive, addicted to or selling drugs, or in prison, and better off not being around kids. It's a bit cringy to describe this as women just not wanting men around for not providing. The War Against Drugs is probably a much bigger factor in this problem than anyone is willing to look at.
My mother chose to be a single mother (I wish she hadn't) because her own parents were so incredibly toxic and abusive and they wouldn't divorce. They were working class and not college educated. I went to college. I never married. I would have married a non-colleged educated man, but none were interested. The idea of this all being female choosiness always cracks me up, as if men are standing in line for marriage. Since I never married, I chose not to have kids, though my mother pressured me to do so.
“ There are a lot of people talking about how America has bifurcated into two societies. People in the upper middle class have college degrees and own their own homes, and working class Americans do not.”
Charles Murray wrote in great deal about this in Coming Apart a decade ago. I make the comment not to slight the author but rather to thank the author for continuing to focus attention on an important topic that gets too easily ignored.
I would like to read a discussion comparing the decline of religious beliefs and the decline of the family. People who adhere to strong religious beliefs tend to follow the teachings that support traditional families. Religious texts, whether the Bible, Torah, or Quran, promote the family structure with a father and mother. As we have moved from a faith-based to secular society, we have seen our moral compass shift. This shift has affected every aspect of society, family, education, vocation, government, entertainment, etc.
Religious people are more likely to be in abusive marriages. Sometimes, women are strongly urged/prevented from leaving men who beat them. This is not a good thing. And don't even try to argue that religion=moral compass. In the U.S., evangelical Christians overwhelmingly support Trump -- enough said!
So I guess you are not interested in productive discussion and evaluating ideas/opinions other than your own. I welcome the data proving your point about abusive marriages. I suspect that the data will show that unmarried women with children are the most likely to stay in abusive relationships. Yes, people who are married are more likely to be in abusive marriages than people who are not married.
I believe the article was about the performance of children from single parent households. I suspect there is an increase in single parent households converse to the societal participation in religion. I think it would be interesting to see the data. I think it is important to understand the factors related to the increasing rate of single-parent households since it appears to have a detrimental effect on children. Your feelings about Christians or political candidates is irrelevant.
I'll be frank: I'm not feeling very positive about religion these days, because it seems to be causing serious problems in society without actually helping in any way. Again, it's the evangelical Christians who are Trump's base. Matthew 7:15-20.
I don’t have the detailed numbers at hand, but the percentage of people who claimed to be religious was only very slowly dropping in the U.S. until the last 10-20 years or so, so it’s highly unlikely that that is a *main* explanatory factor, though I have no doubt at all it is a contributory one.
Selection bias. People who get married and people who don’t are dissimilar in ways besides getting married or not. People select into marriage, they aren’t randomized into it.
Because it's harder for low income women to improve rather than harm their overall financial picture through marriage given mate market realities and assortative mating. People choosing marriage are the people who get more benefits than costs given their tradeoffs.
I agree with this, and that you have a point on selection bias. However, a big part of the reason for that different financial picture for low income women is the Great Society changes in government money for single parents.
Thats a canard conservatives (not that you are one) love but government money for single parents did not destroy marriage in the bottom half in the income distribution. Loss of decent paying manufacturing jobs did. If you want to dunk on liberals, a much better thing to dunk on is the idea of education and college as a replacement for decent hourly wage jobs for men and blindness to a cognitive distribution that makes education a poor plan for helping the poor/working class. I fail to see even now precisely who the woman earning maybe 35k a year in a health related or other booming semi-skilled labor job is supposed to marry that won't lower rather than improve their financial prospects as we decided male semi-skilled work is better done overseas. Of every factory in China was in the US paying, marriage rates would be much higher. Don't blame of welfare or liberals (or patriarchy or whatever if you are liberal) what is better explained by mate markets.
I don't know, working women don't get many benefits, and it's hard to get out of the "pink collar ghetto," especially in small towns where the only places to work are the public schools, day cares, and hospitals. Those places are infamous for paying women poorly and offering no chance of advancement.
For both men and women barely getting by, marriage can be a curse or a blessing financially. It seems to me like both men and women are looking for a partner not in debt, and the pickings there are slim.
I'm not really disputing your point about working women not getting many benefits (depending on their exact situation). But that was not my primary point.
The main point was that "low-income" women before the Great Society did not have the option to neither work nor marry. One or the other was simply essential to survival. Paying the rent as a single woman not all that easy, and far fewer women shared apartments with unrelated female roommates.
With the advent of the Great Society and all its (however well-intended) financial benefits for poor single mothers, being unmarried and jobless became an actual option. And so the incentives to marry a low-income man were a lot lower. And that's independent of any other details (drunkenness, abuse, drug addict, chance of being in prison) of any potential male partner.
Because dads are no longer holding a shotgun to the man's head when he gets her pregnant. A huge proportion of marriages in the first half of the 20th century occurred bc the woman was pregnant, and you were essentially booted out of society if you didn't get married when that happened. That's no longer the case and you'll no longer be disowned.
I recently separated from my husband and I am sure beyond a shadow of doubt, that my two kids are going to have a better life than if I'd stayed with their abusive father in an unhappy marriage.
I grew up with parents who fought continuously, and I know for a fact that it was not healthy for me to be exposed to constant conflict.
I've saved my kids from a life of seeing suitcases packed and unpacked, days out ruined as an argument between them broke out, hiding under my bed to escape the shouting.
I work my ass off taking my kids to all the after school clubs, I volunteer in school, at weekends we have days out or travel. I'm pretty sure I see more of my kids, and have a better relationship with them, than many two parent households where both parents are working and kids spend most of their time in breakfast clubs, after school clubs, childminders or with grandparents.
There are many more single parents like me, whose kids are wonderfully cared for and have the exact same opportunities as those in two parent households.
Another clear marker: What this fails to note, is the access to reliable birth control with the introduction of the PILL in the 60s. Once this hit, it catalysed the sexual revolution, where sex with enormously reduced risk of pregnancy, made for a freedom never before held by women. Who stated that “Women need men, like fish need a bicycle”? Men have become mere sperm doners, as women in the workforce can make enough money to manage life as a single parent. Children have suffered immeasurably..
Some thing else happened in the 1960's. The advent of the "pill". Prior to that, sex was a high risk event for women. Women (and society) viewed sex as something that the man had to pay a high price to get. (Commitment, marriage, stability). When the sexual revolution happened, the price that men had to pay to get sex went way down.
High cost for sex is an evolutionary strategy, and many species females require males to pay a high cost to get it. When the price men had to pay went down, so did marriage and single parenting went up.
Thank you! I can’t believe the pill was not mentioned! People sleep with people they will never marry in the words of Dave Chappell, you don’t get a TV from sex you get a baby!
Hi, John, I have echoed your comment above from a woman's perspective.
Excellent post!
The point you made about the decline starting in the 1960s rather than the 1980s is brilliant!
I’m wondering though, for the fracking not leading to an increase of marriage rates. My hypothesis is that this is because money is actually a proxy for status. So the fact that they simply got more money didn’t actually make them more attractive.
This is just my bias, but I get the impression that women would consider a New York Times writer who makes 80,000 a year more economically attractive than a plumber who makes $120,000 a year. Even though, strictly speaking in terms of paycheque this would be false.
> I get the impression that women would consider a New York Times writer who makes 80,000 a year more economically attractive than a plumber who makes $120,000
Yeah, I definitely agree that often it’s status that’s more important than actual income. But prior to that study, income seemed to be sufficient to predict marriage rates. I think that gradually around 1985 and after, a college degree became increasingly a status symbol, and women want their partner to have a degree, whether it’s led to a high paying field or not. I also wonder if some men are withdrawing from marriage as well and it’s unrelated to income.
I think the “status” angle was big in the 80s when there were “good” jobs (doctor, lawyer, stock broker) that paid well and “bad” jobs (mostly the trades) that may have paid well but were undesirable. I think societal feelings towards the kind of work one does versus the amount of money one makes doing it have changed a LOT since then. Today, it seems that people care more about the absolute dollars earned than HOW they are earned, especially when choosing someone as a life partner.
I’ll take the plumber please.
Also, fracking money isn't stable money. It comes and goes. And it's not indicative of a unique human talent so much as willingness to do a dirty job in an inconvenient location.
As a primary caretaker of children and home, I know first hand that raising a family takes many hours of unremunerated labor that usually falls upon women. Currently I am not earning an income which makes me dependent and without access to economic power and opportunity. All these pro-life government people need to acknowledge and fix that. Har har.
Traditional gender roles create a class of unpaid labor (women) to support those with access to economic and professional power (men). Christian Nationalist movements are all about this. Brainwash a class of people that it is to their benefit and absolute privilerdge to not have any personal agency because they are able to raise the children of the person they are dependent on.
And you've just spotlighted the #1 reason I never married. I had no intention of ever being a man's unpaid domestic servant.
Yep.
That isn't remotely what the comment above said. It says raising a family is very difficult and women are usually doing the unpaid work men won't. Traditionally, before the Pill and the 60s, women had to get married in order to eat and live in a house, so they got married. It is not surprising that marriage rates would fall once women were allowed to get their own checking accounts.
Sure, but the comparative advantage to both parties is supposed to be a loving mutual relationship supporting children in the best way possible. Which means both parents do the parenting. Men who substitute overtime for parenting often regret it later in life.
This is nonsense.
Oops, see my comment above.
Actually if you look at the "Men's Marriage Rates by Education" graph, marriage is steadily declining for men with degrees, too.
I've long been curious about a break-out of marriage rates by income-or-asset-percentile, too, because I have a pet theory that for men (or women) with high assets, marriage is a colossal mistake with the current legal precedents and framework.
Why? Because marriage is a gigantic, one-sided trap for people.
For both genders: if you have any assets whatsoever, you immediately sign half over. Vintage-level divorce rates are ~42%, then "mutually unhappy" results in marriage are probably half-again that number, for 60%-66% of marriages net unhappy. Prenups don't hold up in court for the most part.
For men: they're more likely to have assets, AND 70% of divorces are initiated by women. Do you really want to bet half your assets on something with a 2/3 failure rate, where 70% of the time, you didn't even want to split?? Also, in a split, the woman ends up with the kids much more often, and ends up spending a lot more time with them. You won't see your kids as much, or be able to influence their childhoods as much.
For women: the reason 70% of divorces are initiated by women is that men suck, and are basically giant babies who want to be taken care of just like a kid. You do the majority of the housework and cleaning and child-rearing, even if you have a career and income too. Not just that, but in the event of divorce, most women are worse off financially and standard of living wise, and men don't have a penalty on that front nearly as big. Oh, and if you have assets, you're going to end up giving away half of them to get rid of the chump in that 70% case.
Marriage's main result, empirically, is to increase net misery-years by making it harder and more friction-ful to break up, and for people with assets, to make you bet half of them on a gamble with an absolutely massive failure rate. Would you start a 4 year Phd program with a 60% chance of failure? Of course not! Why would you bet half your assets on a marriage, then??
> for men (or women) with high assets, marriage is a colossal mistake with the current legal precedents and framework
Yeah, I think you’re right that there are some real problems with marriage. But Kearney makes a convincing argument that having married parents is really important for kids. I think unless we find ways to make marriage better and address some of those legal precedents for people it’s going to keep declining.
Or put God back in marriage and family. Being committed to my marriage and family is a choice I make every day, even the days it is hard. And I chose a spouse who was equally committed and who I knew would be a committed father. 18.5 years in, we have had good times and bad. We can look back on the hard parts and see how it made us stronger because we stayed committed. Our children have 100 percent benefitted. Good thought provoking article. Thanks.
There's more to life than cash. About when did marriage and raising a family become "oppressive"?
Oppressive may be the wrong word.
Historically for many, especially for women, marriage was, or is, about economic survival.
Absent economic coercion, it may be in error to assume that everyone wants to be partnered.
It's an assumption that being unpartnered is natural and normal. It's not. And many of the people in that condition are deeply unhappy.
And many are just fine and happy as a clam. To say anything more substantial here, we need cites and figures.
Agreed. Men have been calling marriage a ball and chain for a long time.
There's nothing wrong with marriage itself. It's how people do it. Saying we need to reform marriage because lots of people aren't doing it and many of those who do it are doing it badly is like saying we need to reform fresh fruit and vegies and going for a walk because so many people are eating processed food and sitting on the couch all day.
This is so bleak. Whatever happened to the quaint notion of loving someone and wanting to build a life with them, which often includes children, and persevering through hard times (that whole “for better or worse” stuff)? Perhaps American culture has so fetishized self-actualization that it no longer sees the personal benefit to finding a person to whom one commits, which leads to people either choosing to never marry or to leave a marriage at the first whiff of “unhappiness”. I think the bigger question might be: at what point did people in the US begin to believe that happiness was their birthright and any unhappiness was a sign of either personal or societal failure?
I can answer that! Here is EXACTLY what happened: A lot of us thought we were entering into that kind of marriage, but the other party did not hold up his part, at all, and we ended up fucked over and poor and struggling and missing our children when they were at the other parent's house, and after a lot of suffering we realized, "You know, my kids and I would have been much better off if I'd decided to parent alone," and after young women see this play out a few times and hear older women tell their stories, they realize they don't want to be in that vulnerable position -- because you CANNOT count on your spouse to be there for you.
Sounds like you had a bad experience. I married a little later in life and so had the opportunity to kiss a few frogs. When I married it was for love, but I also chose someone whose values and life outlook was similar to mine. I worry that our culture has romanticized what marriage “should” be and downplayed what it really is: two imperfect people attempting to navigate life together and support each other through its inevitable ups and downs. I worry that kids these days think that marriage is a “zero sum game” situation as opposed to a “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” situation. And if our kids don’t want to get married, as the author of this article implies, that won’t be good for our grandkids.
Let me stop you right there. Your assumptions are way off. I chose someone with similar values (or so I thought) who had a similar background. We were both from small towns with married middle-class parents. We went to the same university. We were engaged for two years. We agreed about kids, money, lifestyle, etc. I did not run off with the first cute bad boy I came across or some such bullshit. I had every reason to think I was making a choice based not just on love (that existed, too) but a very pragmatic choice. You can do everything "right" and still have a divorce come out of nowhere and fuck you right up. We were married 15 years and had two kids, a house and a dog. And then, with no warning, everything ended. It was very, very hard on our children -- he deliberately set off a bomb that harmed them (and me). I did remarry and have been married to my second husband 17 years. He is literally from another country (the Netherlands) but we have the same world view so it works very well. NOBODY should ever think that they are immune to divorce because they were so damned smart about who they married or because they are a good partner. I believed that with all my heart. I thought I was safe because I'd been careful. I could not have been more wrong. I would advise young women NOT to legally marry a man. It's especially upsetting when you stay home and put your career on hold so you can dedicate yourself to nurturing your children while he works on his career -- the laws now generally tilt toward 50-50 custody, meaning the ex-wife/SAHM or former SAHM may not have much of a career, and now gets little or no child support. That wasn't what happened to me, but it's happening to a lot of moms now.
I’m sorry you thought I assumed you didn’t do those things. I didn’t intend to imply that. I was merely talking about my personal experience. I’m curious, since you’ve now been married 17 years, why you’d caution young women against marriage. Seems like your first marriage didn’t work because that husband went bananas, but the second one is working out okay. And, for all the reasons you mentioned it’s important for women to always have their “own money”.
Because I married someone from another country, marriage was required in order for him to come on the fiance visa. I'd otherwise have considered just living together. But also, I was 40 when I remarried, and we didn't have children together, so it was a different situation.
Curious what “bomb” first husband set off, if you are willing to share.
Just that he was willing to destroy everything we’d worked for suddenly, without warning, for no reason that I could ever discover. I finally made peace with it, but for years I really struggled to understand what happened. I’ll never know.
That was a bizarre tangent…
I mean, the whole idea of being able to accurately predict how people are going to evolve or change over 20-70 years is silly to begin with. And 20 years is pretty much the minimum you have to consider if you want to have kids with that person.
How much have *you* changed, vs you 20 years ago? Why wouldn't you expect your spouse to change that much, AND you to change that much, in the next 20-70 years? It doesn't matter how many frogs you've kissed, or how much you love them when you start - I promise, the great majority of everyone in that 66% were in love when they got married, and didn't think they'd get divorced or be miserable.
And what if those changes aren't compatible? What do you think the odds are of that? Taking the outside view, it's the ~66% I was talking about - people divorce or are miserable in a marriage typically because they and/or their spouse have changed. And sure, it sounds plausible that about 2/3 of the time, people would change enough over 20-70 years to no longer be compatible.
Then we get to the fact that as marriage is currently structured, if you have assets, the legal system wants you to literally bet half that you and your spouse aren't ever going to do this - materially change or drift apart over the next 20-70 years. It's madness.
That's a *really* bad bet! I mean, even with no money on it, I wouldn't bet that.
Do kids do better with two parents and financial support? Absolutely, fully agree. If you split up, should the kids be supported by child support? Definitely yes. Kids are expensive, they need school and clothes and ipads and whatever, that takes money.
But should you have to bet literally millions (or whatever amount) that you AND your spouse are *never* going to change enough to be incompatible over the next 20-70 years?? That's crazy.
I’m interested, if you don’t mind telling me, in how old you are. My attitudes about and expectations of marriage appear to be very different from yours and I’m wondering if it has to do with the “age” in which I grew up. I’m a late-stage boomer/Gen X. Just turned 60.
I don't think age or generation really matters, everything I've been saying has been even more true in the past, when the vintage divorce rates were higher than today's 42%, and when the prevalence of net-miserable marriages was probably higher than today, too. Marriages have been a likely >50% bad decision for a loooooong time, even when divorce was rarer because it was essentially illegal, because you can still be miserable even if you can't divorce.
Divorce rates were indeed lower before no-fault divorce laws became prevalent, because they were essentially illegal / impossible to get. Then they shot up when no-fault divorce became common in the late sixties - this was undoubtedly because there was huge latent demand for divorces from all the net-miserable marriages. Then the divorce rate cruised around in the 50's before eventually settling to where they are today. This argues to me that marriage was just as bad a bet back in the 50's-80's too.
Remember "mommy's little helper?" Fifties housewives literally doping themselves out of their minds with Amphetamines, Xanax, and Valium, to endure the horrifying banality of their existences and miserable marriages?
People just didn't talk about it back then. Prevailing cultural mores portrayed a picture of marriage as being successful and nuclear families as the ideal. But that doesn't mean that's what was true, and indeed, we see how much misery there was, hidden behind that social facade, when no-fault divorce became common and suddenly everyone began divorcing to get out of their miserable marriages.
fwiw I am Gen X (and my parents are still together!) and I very much share your perspective. it’s literally a terrible deal prima facie and we do it anyway mostly because the social script tells us it’s the default/conventionally right life model so surely it can’t possibly not be the safe way to go? well!
I’m not usually a social conservative, but…
one of the reasons the script is the way it is is that it is better for the children. Which undeniably still holds true today.
I’d argue that a second reason the script is the way it is is because historically it was better for most women. Reasonable people can argue whether or not this is true today. But no doubt at minimum the calculus on this point has shifted enormously.
The third reason for the script is that it was better historically for less powerful men (than the alternative of the tribal leader(s) getting all of the women. While the calculus is not identical, and indeed is no longer true in terms of men getting sex, I’d argue that for the pursuit of happiness it’s still net true.
Do you have a source? Because mine is: Stevenson, B., & Wolfers, J. (2007). Marriage and Divorce: Changes and their Driving Forces. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 21(2), 27–52. doi:10.1257/jep.21.2.27
They have a lot of great graphs and tables.
Here's First Marriages Ending in Divorce, by age cohort:
https://imgur.com/a/sTI8V6N
Within the limits of the data, post no-fault divorce, they all steadily climb into the 40-50% range. The latest cohort in the graph hasn't gotten there yet, because of the date of publication / data, but it's tracking the other curves extremely closely, and we'd expect it to.
Divorce dot com cites:
"The divorce rate regarding second marriages in the US is 60% compared to 40-50% for the first marriages and 73% for third ones"
https://divorce.com/blog/divorce-statistics/
You're right that college-educated people divorce at slightly lower rates, but this is also confounded by race and income - asians and whites have the lowest divorce rate by far and always have, higher incomes have lower divorce rates because you're punished by losing half your assets, etc.
Vintage divorce rates can be tricky because most statistics are given in X per 1000 rather than in vintage.
But hey, let's assume you're right, and it's 30% instead of 42%. With the "net miserable but non-divorced" marriage rate, that's STILL waaayyyyy too high for my own risk appetites. But, you do you - I think risk taking is a part of life and people don't do enough of it. If they want to spend that risk taking via getting married, more power to them!
I'm just trying to frame the problem in a way that can actually display the pretty significant risk involved to people who haven't thought about it before, and might just be following a social script, with my posts here.
The law actually does not require you to hand over half your premarital assets. It requires you to split the assets gained during the marriage. Assets that you had going into it are considered separate property. And if the default rule still makes you uncomfortable, you can do a prenup to make that point abundantly clear. It is not true that prenups regularly don't hold up. They hold up just fine as long as you took the time to both get lawyers in advance.
It what you said was true about assets, I would completely agree with you. But it isn't, a person with assets can absolutely protect them. I have a prenup and honestly I think they should be the default or a requirement, to make sure people know what they're getting into and actually agree on what will happen in a divorce. Mine says if we divorce, we both keep our own assets, our own debt, and our own retirement accounts, and any shared asset we acquired or developed during the marriage (like a joint bank account or piece of real property) will either be split 50/50 or one of us will buy out the other one. Pretty simple.
As for everything else you said, I think it's a bad idea to get married before 30 because people really do change a lot and are too restless to be with one person forever starting at such a young age. Later in life people honestly don't change that much.
And you're really leaving out the kid situation. Marriage is much better for kids. It's most of the point.
I'm not really advocating for or against marriage as I've been single, divorced, single again, and now married again, and I don't think one is better than the other, I was/am happy both single and married. But I don't have kids...if you do, marriage is very obviously vastly superior.
The financial stuff can all be sorted with prenups, and if your partner won't sign one that's a clear indication you're not on the same page anyway. Many men ask, she's says no or gets upset, and then they do it anyway, so that's their fault for being dumb if it ends.
The real risk is for women who rely on their husband economically after having kids. Most divorced are caused by the husband cheating. Yes, the wife is the one that files bc most cheating men don't want to leave their wife for the woman or women they're cheating with...they want to have their cake and eat it too and are usually lying to both. So it's up to the wife to decide if she wants to have zero dignity and stick with a lying cheating man who supports her family and stay together for the kids, knowing he will probably keep doing it, or keep her dignity intact but face being poor by divorcing him. If you check online forums for divorced women that is the actual story of what happened the majority of the time. Not always but it's the most common reason.
"the whole idea of being able to accurately predict how people are going to evolve or change over 20-70 years is silly to begin with."
How you evolve over time is up to you. And how someone who you spend every day with evolves over that time is something you can influence, too. You're not a passive observer to your lives together.
>How you evolve over time is up to you. And how someone who you spend every day with evolves over that time is something you can influence, too. You're not a passive observer to your lives together.
But I don't think it is - you can have accidents and debilitating life changes, in both physical and mental health. People get depressed, or bipolar, or schizophrenic, and they don't choose that. Your child can die, and you can both handle the grief differently enough that it drives you apart. You may start a business, and the stress and reduced time spent together can strain your relationship to a breaking point.
A lot of things in life ARE not under your control, and are NOT choosable, particularly when it comes to other people. You might choose to handle grief or stress or adversity in a productive way, but your partner may not, and you can't affect that much.
I actually think you and a few of the other "good marriage" folk here chiming in are simply in the privileged position of being in that minority of ~30% of marriages that actually worked out and are net beneficial. I'm genuinely happy you're in that position - but that isn't necessarily the case for the majority of people.
I have no particular reason to think that I'm so great my choice will be vastly better than the average person, so I stay away from marriage, as I see it having at least a 2/3 failure rate and imagine I'd be in that 2/3. I'm glad that wasn't true for you, and that it worked out.
"you can have accidents and debilitating life changes, in both physical and mental health"
Of course. Thus the clause in many people's marriage vows, "in sicknesss and in health." The vows anticipate that there will be changes, many of them stressful - but that you'll stay true to each-other regardless.
Now, in modern secular society the idea of an oath being kept is considered quaint. But in fact society is built on people keeping promises even without a formal oath before some religious or civil official. Consider something as simple as my going to the bakery to get a pie. The usually-unspoken contract is, "I will give you $5 and you will give me a pie." If I give the baker $5 and don't get a pie, or if the baker gives me a pie and I don't pay him, we have a problem. The relationship is broken because one of us chose for it to be broken, and I don't go to or won't be welcome at the bakery again.
But sometimes it's not a matter of choice of one of us, but something's happened. Perhaps the baker's assistant sold the last pie to someone else. Perhaps the oven broke down. Perhaps I realise I only have $4 in my pocket. Now, if this is a one-off interaction, we simply shrug and move on. But if we know each-other and have a series of kept promises behind us, then today he offers me a pastie instead, or a larger pie for dinner later, or says $4 will be fine today.
Our lives are full of trivial interactions like that where there is a promise to be kept. And those who keep those promises tend to be respected, and people want to have more interactions with them. People who fail to keep their promises others want to avoid.
Society is built on kept promises, and if you have an ongoing relationship, someone being unable to fulfill their end of things today can be set aside.
As for stresses such as you describe, the point of a marriage - as with a friendship or the like - is that you share those stresses. Stresses can also be good events, like the birth of a child. My wife commented, "I think having a baby makes a good marriage better, and a bad marriage worse." And she's exactly right.
In my work as a trainer I see this physiologically. The point of physical training is to impose a stress on the system sufficient that the system adapts so that it is no longer a stress. If you're able to just squeeze out 10 pushups, then if you do 8-10, your body says, "well that was stressful, I don't want to be stressed, I'd better develop the ability to do 12, that way when he does 10 again it won't be a stress." Your body doesn't actually want to be able to do 12 pushups, it just doesn't want 10 to be stressful. And you proceed in this way, this is how progressive resistance training works - do a little more every time, your body adapts - but guess what, it's always going to be stressful.
Likewise, the point of a marriage is not to never be stressed. The point of a marriage is to impose a stress on the marriage sufficient that the marriage adapts so that it is no longer a stress, the marriage becomes stronger. "You have cancer and can't work now? We'll figure out a way, honey."
Over many years as a trainer I have kept statistics on my trainees. Gender, age, height, weight, previous training and injury history, and so on. I looked to match this data with the results they got and see trends. And by far the dominant factor in their results is: do they show up?
Yes, women don't get as strong as men, older people don't get as strong as younger, and so on. But a 70yo woman who shows up 3 times a week for four years ends up stronger than a 30yo man who comes three times and then never again and four years later isn't training at all.
Keep showing up, keep your promises, and good things happen. The stress isn't an unfortunate relationship-destroying thing, the stress is what makes a marriage strong.
But over 70% of the West are overweight or obese, Australia has around 20,000 deaths due to obesity, 20,000 due to alcohol, 12,000 due to smoking, and 4,400 amputations due to obesity-caused type II diabetes annually. Most Westerners are lazy and avoid discomfort, avoid any stress - and as debilitating as this is for their bodies, it's worse for their relationships.
"I have no particular reason to think that I'm so great my choice will be vastly better than the average person"
It's not your choice in spouse so much as it is your choices every day with that spouse. I'd like to believe I'm a good trainer, however far more important than how good I am at teaching a squat or suggesting dietary changes is that the people keep showing up. Likewise with a spouse.
Read this:- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14142.The_Art_of_Loving
I'd like to thank you for a good exchange. I agree with you and see that you're pointing at something very valuable, in terms of the actions and mindset needed to build a good, mutually beneficial, and healthy relationship.
I'm still a marriage skeptic, because you can have these healthy-dynamic, mutually beneficial, healthy and honest relationships without marriage just as easily. They may not last for life, I agree - but empirically, the majority of marriages don't last for life, either.
The delta, as a I perceive it is: with somebody like me, a relationship can founder more easily when a given stress come up, and with somebody like you, you are more likely to dig in and ride out the "bad parts" downswing and still come out the other side with an intact relationship. I think both are valid approaches, and the data argues that the majority of people live by my approach.
I feel like you're arguing "the only way to have an enduring relationship that can handle the worst ups and downs the world can throw at you is unbreakable-vow marriage," and I'm arguing "Empirically, if we look at the data, more than 50% of people don't perform to this standard. AND the worst ups and downs the world can throw at you can literally obliterate who you or your spouse IS, and you have zero power over that."
So then I suppose the answer is you need to find one of those people who is not in the majority, to whom their vows mean something and are unbreakable, even under the most harshest, life-and-mind-destroying conditions. I...don't know how to find anyone like that.
I'm not sure I've ever known anyone like this outside of family, and even within family it's rare. Even for those family members it took decades to actually see it in action, for the world to throw large enough downswings for it to be a real test. I don't know what the signs or portents would be, for you to be able to accurately judge that this person in front of you, that you've known for a few months, is so adamant and so deeply moral they will never break a vow, no matter what fresh hells the world throws at you or them.
So if you have any advice on that front, I'd be happy to hear it. Otherwise, thanks again for a great exchange.
Speaking as someone married for 30 years, a long-lasting marriage is mostly luck, and anyone who says differently is trying to sell you something. I got lucky and I know it.
It's written into your country's "ethos" so to speak: the values that the USA promotes are "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Therefore everyone is entitled to #3 in that phrase.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find studies that came close to examining those issues, if not doing so outright. However, those studies would be conducted and reported in the behavioral sciences, not economics.
For most of my relatives and me, the chance of divorce is close to zero (on my dads side, four divorces across five generations with over 200 family members, and 3 of the 4 divorces from all three men in one family line).
I honestly think that literally a majority of modern western people have a spiritual sickness (characterized by materialism, hedonism and conformity) and are completely unmoored and unable to resist or even reflect on the values being propagated through media/social media.
To address your tangent- don’t phd program actually have high failure rates? Casual googling actual does put it in the 40-60% range
Ha! This is a great point, I actually didn't know this, kudos for bringing it up.
Back when I was in grad school doing research, I actually did fail to finish my Phd because I'd started my first business and I decided to do focus on that as likely having more impact in the world. But I think even Phd failure, like in my case, is still better than marriage failure, because you at least come out with a masters.
This site here cites a ~15% "dropped out / got a masters" and ~4% "didn't pass quals or defense" for the EU and UK, or an ~81% Phd completion rate:
https://www.discoverphds.com/advice/doing/phd-failure-rate
And this one here cites a 2008 study to declare that 10 year Phd completion rates are this by discipline in the US:
64% completed Phd Engineering
63% Life Sciences
56% Social Sciences
55% Mathematics
55% Physical Sciences
49% Humanities
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6355122/
So broadly, 16 years ago in the US, you'd expect a 36%-50% failure rate, depending on your discipline. That IS a pretty high failure rate, and indeed you have succeeded in convincing me that I should advocate against embarking on Phd's with about 50%-66% of the ardor I advocate against marriage. Thank you for bringing this up!
Harsh but fair.
I'd simply add that "gamble" implies that you cannot change the outcome, like rolling the dice. Whereas it's more like chess - the moves you make affect the outcome. And if rather than playing an adversarial game like chess you choose to play a co-operative game, then you recognise that when you win, you both win, and when you lose, you both lose. So you should co-operate to win.
"For both genders: if you have any assets whatsoever, you immediately sign half over. Vintage-level divorce rates are ~42%, then "mutually unhappy" results in marriage are probably half-again that number, for 60%-66% of marriages net unhappy. Prenups don't hold up in court for the most part."
This is not true. The other spouse is entitled to appreciation and income from an asset, but the asset itself remains with the spouse that brings it into the marriage.
Also: "For women: the reason 70% of divorces are initiated by women is that men suck, and are basically giant babies who want to be taken care of just like a kid." 2 points: 1) you have a really jaded world view. 2) Men are the only group you could make such a horrible claim about and nobody corrects you. The writer of the article even liked your post.
Basically your opinion about why men should get married is based on a misunderstanding of law and your opinion on why women shouldn't get married is because you think an entire gender 'sucks.'
Reading through this, my impression is that some men have personal problems(drug addiction, alcoholism, criminal records, unemployment, history of domestic violence, mental illness) that make it difficult or impossible to ever get married, but other men internalize the idea that they're not worthy of getting married, even when they make a decent amount of money, lets say $50,000, and just simply stop trying. This lines up with a larger male retreat from the physical world, exemplified by lower college graduation rates, and less participation in the labor force, especially during prime working years.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/scarred-boys-idle-men-family-adversity-poor-health-and-male-labor-force-participation
Thanks for the link, I’m familiar with Nicholas Eberstadt’s work, but haven’t read his book yet. At some point, I’d like to dig into it as deeply as I did with Kearney’s.
> This lines up with a larger male retreat from the physical world
Yeah, I think boys and men are definitely withdrawing culture-wide. I’m curious what you think is driving that retreat?
Lots of young men who are struggling either have their parents supporting them, similar to the hikkomori in Japan, are getting disability payments, whether or not they're truly legitimately disabled, or they're participating in the black market, selling drugs for instance to make money. This leads honestly to a chicken or an egg problem imo. Are young men playing video games excessively, getting high, betting on sports or watching online porn because they view their prospects(educationally, socially, romantically) as dismal, or are their prospects dismal because they're doing these things instead of other things that would be more beneficial?? I think the biggest problem facing men is just male underachievement in K-12 schooling. This isn't anything new, because girls have had better grades than boys at school for a long time, but there used to be lots of jobs that men could get with or without a high school diploma. Today, that's just not the case. I'd love to see more apprenticeship programs for the 60% of young men who will never set foot on a college campus, who probably weren't great students in school, and Richard Reeves has spoken about this, but K-12 schooling is a big problem as well. A lack of male teachers, especially at the elementary school level, means that many boys see doing well in school as something girls do. With a lack of men in education, the curriculum dosen't favor the kind of reading material that boys and men are more likely to enjoy (horror, man's struggle against elements/nature, sports, science fiction, comic books, war novels, etc). I'm thinking of material like Moby Dick, Cormac Mccarthy's Blood Meridian, Eugene Sledge's With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa or even a novel for young adults like Gary Paulsen's novel Hatchet. Biology also plays a role, because the girls are done with puberty about a yr or two earlier than the boys, which means they act and behave more and more like young women earlier, with differences in cognitive development, and skills like planning ahead, being future oriented, which puts boys/young men on average at a real disadvantage. All of this also occurs during a pivotal 4 year period of high school. The boys narrow the gap by 16-17 as they become young men, but by that point, it's almost too late to do anything about college. Scott Galloway also had a really good article on this topic, I'll post it below.
https://open.substack.com/pub/ofboysandmen/p/we-need-more-apprenticeships?r=1sw82d&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
https://www.profgalloway.com/boys-to-men/
The bigger question is how is this retreat from the world being enabled?
These sorts of discussions always treat men as some sort of malfunctioning widget that is displeasing women.
Society has deliberately emasculated men in the name of feminism for the past 50 years. This is the direct (albeit unintended) consequence of social engineering.
Which of course is the elephant in the room.
Another thing that happened in the 60s: Creation of the Great Society and government programs that disincentivized marriage, pay women to have children out of wedlock, exclude fathers from what would have been a two-parent home.
Nobody was paying women to have children out of wedlock. We were giving mothers an absolute pittance to help them support the children the piece-of-shit impregnator abandoned.
Right. You have the cause and effect backward. Reality reflects that the PsOS were required to stay out of the home for the woman to receive her pittance. From 1890 to 1950, black women had a higher marriage rate than white women. And in 1950, just 9% of black children lived without their father. Strong black families used to be the norm. But come the Great Society, by the mid-1980s, black fatherlessness skyrocketed. Today, only 44% of black children have a father in the home. The rate of black out-of-wedlock births went from 24.5% in 1964 to 70.7% by 1994, roughly where it stands today. So pittance or not, government policy caused this epidemic of fatherless children. I also find interesting your assumption that women have no control over when they have sex, and with whom. You have been brainwashed.
"giving mothers an absolute pittance"
If you're on medicaid and going to public schools, that is hardly a pittance. With two kids that is easily over $50k a year in assistance, not including other welfare.
"piece-of-shit impregnator abandoned"
The woman knew who was impregnating her and did it anyway.
Ah, another "all sex was by consent" person. I wish you were right!
Unfortunately, this take fails to explain why women would embrace onerous paperwork or a hostile and indifferent bureaucracy as opposed to staying with a loving and supportive spouse.
Short answer is that they are losers who have sex with losers. They never had a loving and supportive spouse in the first place, but they went ahead and bred.
Well said
One major factor that seems to have been ignored in this piece is the huge subsidy given to many single mothers by the government, with all the programs available to support children.
Also, the sexual revolution completely sundered the relationship between marriage and having children. Sex became a recreational activity, and if children appeared, they might be accepted by the mother or killed by her. Since the father wasn't married to her, he had no say.
With the idea that marriage is supposed to be a grand romantic ideal between two soul mates came impossible expectations - contrary to pre-1960 ideas that marriage was good, but challenging, and the field of possible mates much smaller.
Many factors have been at work. Meanwhile, stable two-parent families will produce stable children with good potential for work and relationships.
Love the commentary and data here. I do wonder why there isn't some discussion of the concentration of single parenting families in the rural South as shown on the US map graphic. Might the national data be driven by events that are actually focused mostly in the non-urban South?
I cannot be 100% positive of this, only about 99%, but… the map form of showing the single parent data is highly misleading, since by absolute numbers in terms of population, far more of this is in large cities, but those take up very little area on a map of the whole country.
Thank you, Andy!
Why is it not a "single-parent family defect"? I'm tired of every advantage considered priveledge in the modern negative sense rather than the opposite defect.
A lot of impoverished single mothers are such because the fathers of their children are physically abusive, addicted to or selling drugs, or in prison, and better off not being around kids. It's a bit cringy to describe this as women just not wanting men around for not providing. The War Against Drugs is probably a much bigger factor in this problem than anyone is willing to look at.
My mother chose to be a single mother (I wish she hadn't) because her own parents were so incredibly toxic and abusive and they wouldn't divorce. They were working class and not college educated. I went to college. I never married. I would have married a non-colleged educated man, but none were interested. The idea of this all being female choosiness always cracks me up, as if men are standing in line for marriage. Since I never married, I chose not to have kids, though my mother pressured me to do so.
“ There are a lot of people talking about how America has bifurcated into two societies. People in the upper middle class have college degrees and own their own homes, and working class Americans do not.”
Charles Murray wrote in great deal about this in Coming Apart a decade ago. I make the comment not to slight the author but rather to thank the author for continuing to focus attention on an important topic that gets too easily ignored.
I would like to read a discussion comparing the decline of religious beliefs and the decline of the family. People who adhere to strong religious beliefs tend to follow the teachings that support traditional families. Religious texts, whether the Bible, Torah, or Quran, promote the family structure with a father and mother. As we have moved from a faith-based to secular society, we have seen our moral compass shift. This shift has affected every aspect of society, family, education, vocation, government, entertainment, etc.
Religious people are more likely to be in abusive marriages. Sometimes, women are strongly urged/prevented from leaving men who beat them. This is not a good thing. And don't even try to argue that religion=moral compass. In the U.S., evangelical Christians overwhelmingly support Trump -- enough said!
So I guess you are not interested in productive discussion and evaluating ideas/opinions other than your own. I welcome the data proving your point about abusive marriages. I suspect that the data will show that unmarried women with children are the most likely to stay in abusive relationships. Yes, people who are married are more likely to be in abusive marriages than people who are not married.
I believe the article was about the performance of children from single parent households. I suspect there is an increase in single parent households converse to the societal participation in religion. I think it would be interesting to see the data. I think it is important to understand the factors related to the increasing rate of single-parent households since it appears to have a detrimental effect on children. Your feelings about Christians or political candidates is irrelevant.
I'll be frank: I'm not feeling very positive about religion these days, because it seems to be causing serious problems in society without actually helping in any way. Again, it's the evangelical Christians who are Trump's base. Matthew 7:15-20.
Yeah, while they are of course a portion of his base, your statement is actually not true, and this has been well documented in the years since 2016
I don’t have the detailed numbers at hand, but the percentage of people who claimed to be religious was only very slowly dropping in the U.S. until the last 10-20 years or so, so it’s highly unlikely that that is a *main* explanatory factor, though I have no doubt at all it is a contributory one.
Selection bias. People who get married and people who don’t are dissimilar in ways besides getting married or not. People select into marriage, they aren’t randomized into it.
Now this is interesting! But it begs the question: why are fewer low-income couples selecting marriage?
Because it's harder for low income women to improve rather than harm their overall financial picture through marriage given mate market realities and assortative mating. People choosing marriage are the people who get more benefits than costs given their tradeoffs.
I agree with this, and that you have a point on selection bias. However, a big part of the reason for that different financial picture for low income women is the Great Society changes in government money for single parents.
Thats a canard conservatives (not that you are one) love but government money for single parents did not destroy marriage in the bottom half in the income distribution. Loss of decent paying manufacturing jobs did. If you want to dunk on liberals, a much better thing to dunk on is the idea of education and college as a replacement for decent hourly wage jobs for men and blindness to a cognitive distribution that makes education a poor plan for helping the poor/working class. I fail to see even now precisely who the woman earning maybe 35k a year in a health related or other booming semi-skilled labor job is supposed to marry that won't lower rather than improve their financial prospects as we decided male semi-skilled work is better done overseas. Of every factory in China was in the US paying, marriage rates would be much higher. Don't blame of welfare or liberals (or patriarchy or whatever if you are liberal) what is better explained by mate markets.
I don't know, working women don't get many benefits, and it's hard to get out of the "pink collar ghetto," especially in small towns where the only places to work are the public schools, day cares, and hospitals. Those places are infamous for paying women poorly and offering no chance of advancement.
For both men and women barely getting by, marriage can be a curse or a blessing financially. It seems to me like both men and women are looking for a partner not in debt, and the pickings there are slim.
I'm not really disputing your point about working women not getting many benefits (depending on their exact situation). But that was not my primary point.
The main point was that "low-income" women before the Great Society did not have the option to neither work nor marry. One or the other was simply essential to survival. Paying the rent as a single woman not all that easy, and far fewer women shared apartments with unrelated female roommates.
With the advent of the Great Society and all its (however well-intended) financial benefits for poor single mothers, being unmarried and jobless became an actual option. And so the incentives to marry a low-income man were a lot lower. And that's independent of any other details (drunkenness, abuse, drug addict, chance of being in prison) of any potential male partner.
Because dads are no longer holding a shotgun to the man's head when he gets her pregnant. A huge proportion of marriages in the first half of the 20th century occurred bc the woman was pregnant, and you were essentially booted out of society if you didn't get married when that happened. That's no longer the case and you'll no longer be disowned.
That's how it seems to me.
I recently separated from my husband and I am sure beyond a shadow of doubt, that my two kids are going to have a better life than if I'd stayed with their abusive father in an unhappy marriage.
I grew up with parents who fought continuously, and I know for a fact that it was not healthy for me to be exposed to constant conflict.
I've saved my kids from a life of seeing suitcases packed and unpacked, days out ruined as an argument between them broke out, hiding under my bed to escape the shouting.
I work my ass off taking my kids to all the after school clubs, I volunteer in school, at weekends we have days out or travel. I'm pretty sure I see more of my kids, and have a better relationship with them, than many two parent households where both parents are working and kids spend most of their time in breakfast clubs, after school clubs, childminders or with grandparents.
There are many more single parents like me, whose kids are wonderfully cared for and have the exact same opportunities as those in two parent households.
Another clear marker: What this fails to note, is the access to reliable birth control with the introduction of the PILL in the 60s. Once this hit, it catalysed the sexual revolution, where sex with enormously reduced risk of pregnancy, made for a freedom never before held by women. Who stated that “Women need men, like fish need a bicycle”? Men have become mere sperm doners, as women in the workforce can make enough money to manage life as a single parent. Children have suffered immeasurably..