Happily Ever After?
My seventh-grade English teacher liked to mix life advice into her lessons on sentence diagrams and Robert Frost. One day, she gave us a talk about the importance of choosing the right person to marry. “Marriage doesn’t change people,” she insisted. “If your girlfriend is rude to you, marriage won’t make that better. If your boyfriend drinks too much before your wedding day, he’ll drink too much after.” In other words, don’t marry someone because of who you hope they’ll become.
Her advice came to mind as I read two new books on the importance of the institution of marriage. In The Two-Parent Privilege, economist Melissa S. Kearney examines the decline in marriage and the rise in the number of children growing up without married parents in the United States. Single-parenthood is more common among people without a college degree, which means the benefits that accrue to children who live with both parents constitute a kind of “privilege” denied to people who are predominantly poor and working class. She argues for various programs and policies—from improving our social safety net to creating marriage-promotion programs—that will encourage the kind of healthy family formation that benefits kids. For Kearney, the problem, if not the solution, is simple: as her book’s subtitle puts it, “Americans stopped getting married and started falling behind.”
Sociologist Brad Wilcox’s Get Married makes a related but significantly different case. Wilcox claims that political, cultural, educational, and media elites have all spread the message that marriage and family are at best capstones on a successful life and at worst a distraction from what really matters: one’s career and financial success. This, he argues, is completely wrong. The most reliable path to happiness is family life. As his book’s subtitle puts it, we must “defy the elites, forge strong families, and save civilization.”
Wilcox and Kearney both claim that we should be concerned about the decline of marriage because only marriage can create healthier, happier families and stronger communities. But is marriage itself really the critical factor here, rather than, say, income or education? The evidence presented in these two books that marriage itself causes health and wealth—rather than just being correlated with them—is inconclusive.
Of course, it may seem perverse to argue against the benefits of marriage. I don’t need troves of studies to conclude that a good marriage is something to treasure. But it’s only a good marriage—not just any marriage—that is likely to deliver benefits for adults, kids, and communities. The main difference between Kearney’s argument and Wilcox’s is that Kearney seems to recognize this fact and Wilcox does not. Kearney is also careful to say that promoting marriage shouldn’t require nostalgia for a past in which a woman’s only hope for financial security was to marry a man, or in which husband-as-breadwinner and wife-as-homemaker were the ideal. Wilcox is less careful, and I fear that’s because he isn’t worried enough about what a return to that model of marriage would mean for women.
Kearney and Wilcox agree in their description of the problem. Marriage rates have declined in the past fifty years, particularly among the poor and the working class, and this has led to bad economic and social outcomes for both adults and children. Wilcox observes that today, fewer than half of American adults are married, compared to 75 percent in 1960. This collapse in marriage rates, he argues, is a catastrophe for both individuals and society. We are shifting away “from marriage and all the fruits that follow from this most fundamental social institution.”
Kearney focuses on how decreasing marriage rates affect the percentage of children raised in single-parent households—almost always by a single mother. In 2019, 63 percent of children in the United States lived with married parents, down from 77 percent in 1980. But this decline has been more dramatic among mothers without a college degree. In 1980, 83 percent of children whose mothers had a high-school degree or some college education grew up in a household with married parents; in 2019, it was only 60 percent. By contrast, there has been little change in the family structure of children whose mothers have a four-year degree—a decrease of only six percent in the same time period. In 2019, almost half the children in the United States were born to unmarried mothers; in 1960 that number was just 5 percent. Kearney notes that the increase in the number of children being raised in a single-parent household is due not to an increase in divorce but to a rise in the number of parents who were never married—another trend more common among mothers without a college degree.
What, the reader may ask, is wrong with fewer people getting married and more kids growing up in single-parent households? Kearney argues that some children—mostly ones who are wealthy to begin with—enjoy a “two-parent privilege” over children who grow up with a single mother. “Study after study suggests that a married-parent family tends to confer benefits to children in the form of greater resources during childhood, and that these increased resources then translate into better opportunities and greater educational attainment, among other outcomes,” she writes. Most importantly, the relationship between family structure and these benefits for children is at least partly causal rather than merely correlative. It’s true that two parents pooling their resources tend to have a higher household income than one parent alone, and that higher income can account for some of the differences in children’s outcomes. There are also some less quantifiable benefits: two parents can pool not only their money but also their time and attention. The effect of all these two-parent advantages, which are today concentrated among the college-educated, is to perpetuate a class divide that compounds with every new generation, as the privileged offspring of married, college-educated couples pair off with one another.
Wilcox sees the decline in marriage and fertility rates in the United States in slightly different terms: as symptoms of the “closing of the American heart.” He thinks we have become unwilling and unable to make the commitments to marriage and family life that lead to personal fulfillment and healthy communities; instead, we opt to work longer hours and make more money. He argues that elites in politics, business, media, and education “have advanced ideas that devalue and demean marriage”—ideas like polyamory and open marriage—and “cast aside the normative guardrails that forge strong families.” Nor do these elites practice what they preach. While they’re uncomfortable promoting a two-married-parents norm, in their own lives they are much more likely than non-elites to be part of two-married-parent households.
How exactly are people missing out by choosing not to marry? First, Wilcox argues, marriage is good for people in material ways. Married women enjoy larger household incomes than unmarried women; married men make more money than unmarried men. Marriage “maximizes the prosperity and financial security of men, women, and children,” and shapes adults into productive and virtuous citizens. It “increases the likelihood that children are raised well, flourish in school, avoid incarceration, and become productive members of our society.” Children raised in single-parent households are upwards of four times more likely to be poor than children raised by married parents. Young men without both of their parents at home are more likely to go to prison than to graduate from college. Even when controlling for factors like family income and race, young men from unmarried families are twice as likely to be incarcerated than young men from families with two married parents.
There are also, of course, non-material benefits to marriage. As a sociologist, Wilcox is more comfortable attempting to measure things like love, happiness, and life satisfaction than Kearney is. One of his most significant claims about the value of marriage is that it makes people happy. Married people are twice as likely to report being happy with their lives as unmarried people, even when controlling for income, education, and other demographic factors. Marriage helps people avoid loneliness and gives their lives meaning and purpose. It is, Wilcox writes, a “much more powerful predictor of happiness” than both work and money. Having a job increases your chances of being happy by 50 percent. An above-average income increases your odds by 88 percent. Marriage, meanwhile, increases them by 151 percent.
In view of all these benefits, it may seem odd that fewer people are now choosing to get married. Both Kearney and Wilcox point to a “marriageability crisis” that has made young men, particularly those without a college education, unappealing marriage partners. This explains why fewer women choose to marry the fathers of their children. Today, 15 percent of men between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-four are not in the workforce. According to Kearney, it’s no coincidence that in the same decades when marriage rates declined, the average wages of men without a college degree also declined, while those of women and the college-educated held steady or increased. She cites several studies that suggest a causal relationship between men’s decreased fortunes and lower rates of marriage. “To make progress closing class gaps in parenting resources—and childhood environments—will require strengthening families and bringing more fathers into the family fold,” Kearney concludes.
Similarly, Wilcox argues that changing economic conditions in the United States, as well as the enticements of “limbic capitalism”—porn, alcohol and drugs, video games, and gambling—have made men unattractive partners for women. Higher education is out of reach for many men, and most men who work in trades make a lot less money than men who “sit in front of a screen all day.” Working-class men are more likely to struggle with depression and die “deaths of despair” (e.g., from suicide or accidental overdose). The upshot is a generation of wayward, undesirable men who don’t contribute to family life. This means that women must do the majority of both work and childcare. Wilcox again blames the elites, who have often benefited from the new economic conditions that have undermined family formation.
This brings us to questions at the heart of this debate: Are people made wealthy by getting and staying married, or do people who would be wealthy anyway get married? Do kids have better life outcomes because their parents were married, or because their parents were wealthy? Kearney is admirably careful in distinguishing between correlation and causation, and she succeeds in demonstrating that having married parents makes a big difference for kids, independent of income.
Wilcox’s argument is weaker. He quotes Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project, who argues in the American Prospect that people like Wilcox have the causality backwards. “Married people are less impoverished because people who are not impoverished are more likely to get married,” Bruenig writes. “With marriage, you have an institution that attracts and retains more economically secure and stable people, not an institution that creates them.” Wilcox includes this quote in his book by way of contrast with his own view, but he never really refutes Bruenig’s claim. Instead, Wilcox offers an anecdote about Doug, a man who had few ambitions and lived in his parents’ basement. Once Doug got married and had kids, he became more serious about his career so that he could provide for them. Wilcox claims that marriage encourages men like Doug to “work harder and smarter,” and that this is why married men make more money than their unmarried peers. He recognizes that there is a scholarly debate about whether marriage causes the men to make more money or whether this effect is due to a selection bias, but he offers little in the way of hard evidence for his own view. Similarly, when Wilcox points out that married people are twice as likely to report being happy as unmarried people, he assumes a causal relationship. The study he cites as evidence reports that the difference in marriage rates accounts for about half of the “happiness deficit” between working-class and upper-class people, but the study’s author explicitly warns that we cannot infer causality from her study.
That said, I suspect that Wilcox and Kearney are right that marriage does cause some good outcomes. As Wilcox argues, marriage gives people a role that encourages them to be productive and responsible. It seems obvious, too, that having a regular companion generally makes people feel less lonely. As Wilcox puts it, “Sharing meaningful experiences—like raising a child—is often a lot more happiness-inducing than experiencing them on your own.” Kearney’s central claim that children, rich or poor, do better with married parents in the house also seems like common sense. Being around more people who love you and want to take care of you is generally beneficial to kids.
Kearney insists that we are in a “new social paradigm” that cannot be reversed with economic policies alone. We must “work to restore and foster a norm of two-parent homes for children,” which will “require addressing the social changes that have fostered the normalization of the widespread separation of marriage from the act of raising children.” She proposes a national campaign in support of marriage, though she admits that such campaigns under the George W. Bush and Obama administrations were less than successful. For his part, Wilcox calls for teaching children the “success sequence”—the optimal order for making life choices: first get a high-school diploma; then work full-time; finally, wait until marriage to have children.
But both Kearney and Wilcox acknowledge that, while policy alone can’t solve the marriage problem, it can at least help. Kearney advocates a straightforward progressive program of spending, including a “massive infusion” of federal resources to public universities, community colleges, and vocational training. She insists that strengthening the social safety net, particularly for children, would help everyone, as would “safe housing, adequate health care, nutritious food, and high-quality early-childhood education.” Wilcox is in favor of increasing and expanding the child tax credit and removing the penalties that make marriage a costly decision.
One might reasonably wonder whether other family structures might deliver the same good outcomes for kids. Kearney is at pains to argue that the permanently-unmarried-but-cohabiting family structure so common in Europe has not been widely adopted here in the United States, and so marriage is the only long-term structure we have. But why is it more common in Europe, and why wouldn’t someone with Kearney’s priorities want to encourage it here? If the point is to make sure children receive more attention from adults in stable homes, then why not also promote the kind of multigenerational household that is more common in other parts of the world? Though Kearney presents herself as a value-neutral economist, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that she has smuggled in her own preference for the nuclear family.
Still, she is careful to note that, even if having married parents translates to good outcomes for kids, “the answer is not nearly as straightforward as simply declaring that more parents should get married.” We shouldn’t encourage people to believe that getting married will fix them. On this, she and my seventh-grade teacher would agree. And Kearney says several times that we shouldn’t be working to return to a time when women had to get married to have a stable future, or when men were the breadwinners and women stayed at home with the kids.
Wilcox has no qualms about telling individual people to dive into marriage because it will be good for them, their communities, and “civilization.” Marriage is “an institution that transforms people, bonding men and women to a particular person, to a whole way of life…. [I]t endows their lives, day in and day out, with more meaning, prosperity, stability, and solidarity, all of which typically boost the sense of satisfaction that men and women take from their lives after they enter our civilization’s most fundamental institution.” Like Kearney, he concedes that “not everyone can or should marry. Nor stay married.” But he doesn’t say much about who shouldn’t get or stay married, so this qualification has the air of a throwaway line. “[M]ost marriages are happy—not all, but most of the time,” he writes. I suppose the fact that 60 percent of marriages do not end in divorce means that most marriages are at least tolerable. But the fact that 40 percent do end in divorce suggests that Wilcox’s blanket prescription of marriage as the cure for all that ails us is probably too simplistic.
Marriage can indeed make you a better person, if you let it. But it’s also true that a selfish person can get married and persist in his or her selfishness. Nothing is automatic, and no two marriages are exactly alike. What’s clear is that just expecting marriage to shave down people’s rough edges and shape them into loving people is probably unwise and puts more weight on the institution than it can reasonably be expected to bear. If he drinks too much before the wedding, he’ll drink too much after.
Wilcox treats marriage not only as all-powerful, but also as all-absorbing. He thinks marriage and family life should receive most if not all of one’s attention and care, and criticizes the prevalent idea that married people should make sure they “have ‘me’ time [and] a personal hobby” and “do not lose [their] individuality.” At one point, he approvingly quotes a husband who says he doesn’t engage in hobbies that would take him away from the home. This makes marriage sound like a sentence in a very comfortable prison.
Wilcox never says outright that he thinks men and women should have different roles within a marriage, but there are many hints to that effect. In a chapter on the nature of attraction in a healthy marriage, Wilcox analyzes the results of a study he conducted into what traits straight men and women find desirable in their partners. When asked what they find attractive about the men in their lives, women answered that they prefer men with traditionally masculine traits: “Ambitious. Good provider. Strong. Protective. Safe.” Men, on the other hand, admired women who were “respectful,” “sexually responsive,” and “loving.” Wilcox also claims that marriages in which men rated their wives high on “feminine” traits and women rated their husbands high on “masculine” traits reported greater happiness. These findings, he writes, give the lie to “the notion that classic masculine and feminine virtues—not to mention the gender roles of yesteryear—have no appeal for today’s woman, including in marriage.”
Elsewhere, Wilcox criticizes the mainstream-media narrative that women leaving the workforce during Covid set them “ten years back” in their careers. This, Wilcox writes, is just another signal from the elites that “[n]othing could be worse than being stuck at home with your children, away from the thing that matters most: your job.” He criticizes proposals for universal daycare because they are “workist”—encouraging people to spend more time working and less time with family. He speaks approvingly of people who think that “divorce should be more difficult” and highlights the ways that “easy divorce…poses a risk for men.”
What this all seems to add up to—although, again, it’s never explicit—is a particular vision of the nuclear family in which men are mostly working outside the home and women are mostly taking care of kids. Women’s freedom to work full-time or to get a divorce is treated as a threat to marriage and thus to civilization as a whole. This vision would lead to a world of fewer women pursuing careers outside the home, more women marrying only for financial security, and more remaining in abusive marriages. No doubt Wilcox would say this isn’t what he has in mind. But while Kearney makes it very clear that she doesn’t want to go back to the norms of a previous era, Wilcox does not.
Wilcox’s book is strongest when it catalogs the ways that our media and popular culture encourage a vapid kind of self-fulfillment that is inhibited by marriage and family life. “The modern dream of success is measured merely in dollar signs and ‘free’ time,” he writes. We are encouraged to grow our careers and pursue leisure activities like travel because those are the things that will make us happy. Wilcox is not wrong that this attitude is in the air these days. And he is surely right to remind us that “[m]arriage and family life are often more important for our sense of meaning, direction, and happiness than the degree on our wall, the place we punch a clock, or our ability to maximize our autonomy.”
Still, it is dangerous to instrumentalize marriage in the way that Wilcox does. The message “get married to be happy” can be construed as just another way to optimize yourself—to treat marriage as mainly a fix for your loneliness or lack of direction. But approaching marriage as a self-improvement project is a recipe for disappointment and frustration. At their best, marriage and parenthood teach us, men and women both, how to focus on someone else—first on our spouse, then on our children. Whatever self-improvement results is mostly an unconscious side effect of that. Instead of trying to convince the resolutely single that marriage will make them richer, happier, and generally more successful in life, it is probably wiser to concentrate on removing as many material impediments to marriage and parenthood as possible. That is already a tall enough order.
The Two-Parent Privilege
How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind
Melissa S. Kearney
The University of Chicago Press
$25 | 240 pp.
Get Married
Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization
Brad Wilcox
Broadside Books
$32 | 320 pp.
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