Everyone knows that getting married means surrendering your freedom, losing independence, and dooming yourself to a life of limited career options, unsatisfying sex, and monotonous doldrums, right? Don’t most marriages end in divorce anyways? Why suffer the institution of a bygone era that cements you into a legal relationship?
Well, Brad Wilcox, a Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, is here to puncture those myths with his book Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization. The book is loaded with reams and reams of data that prove that:
Marriage is awesome
If you could consolidate all of the emotional, physical, financial, social, and familial benefits of marriage into a pill and sell it, you would be the richest person alive. For instance, those who report that they are in “very happy marriages” are “a staggering 545 percent” more likely to report that they are “very happy” with life in general, compared to their peers who are not married. And if your first thought is: Well, there must be very few people then who are in “very happy marriages,” you would be wrong. The majority of marriages—about 60 percent—describe their unions as “very happy,” and 36 percent as “pretty happy.”
Not only that…
In 2020, married mothers ages eighteen to fifty-five had a median family income of $108,000, compared to $41,000 for childless single women of the same ages…And as these married mothers head into retirement in their fifties, they’ve accumulated $322,000 in median assets, compared to $100,000 for their single, childless peers.
In 2021, 60 percent of married mothers ages eighteen to fifty-five reported that their lives were meaningful “most” or “all of the time.” Only 36 percent of single, childless women of the same ages said their lives were that meaningful.
…Looking again at women eighteen to fifty-five, 75 percent of married mothers reported in 2022 that they were either “completely” or “somewhat” satisfied with their lives, compared to 54 percent of single, childless mothers. (xi-xii)
Marriage creates healthy, resilient kids
[Children of divorce] are almost twice as likely to be suspended or expelled from school, 75 percent more likely to use drugs, and about half as likely to graduate from college. (xii)
When Harvard economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues looked at the factors driving economic mobility for poor children…they compared results from one local community to another, in locations across the United States. They found that “the strongest and most robust predictor [of children’s economic mobility] is the fraction of children [in the community] with single parents.” In other words, the best community predictor of poor children remaining stuck in poverty as adults was the share of kids in their communities living in a single-parent family. Not income inequality. Not race. Not school quality. Family structure was the biggest factor in predicting poor kids’ odds of realizing the American Dream in communities across the country. (xiv)
Children are awesome
Married couples who have children are more likely to report feeling happy, purposeful, and less lonely than their childless peers.
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All these benefits aside, the wider culture holds a fairly pessimistic view of marriage
One recent poll found that only 32 percent of young adults ages eighteen through forty think that marriage is essential to living a fulfilling life, compared to 64 percent who think education and 75 percent who think making a good living is crucial to fulfillment…In fact, a recent Pew poll found that 88 percent of parents believe that it is important for their kids to be financially independent, and the same share think it important that their kids have “careers they enjoy” when they are adults; only 21 percent said it is important that their kids get married, and only 20 percent believed it to be important that their kids have children of their own. (2)
Building your marriage on the idea of a “soulmate” is a surefire way to end it in divorce
Believing that marriage should consist of passionate feelings of love—finding a “soulmate” who will make you “feel happy…will be easy to love”—is a fragile foundation for marriage.
In the 2019 California Family Survey…which asked 918 husbands and wives in the Golden State to clarify their approach to marriage and family life. They had to pick whether they saw marriage as “mostly about an intense, emotional/romantic connection” with someone, or if they believed that marriage is “about romance but also about kids, money, [and] raising a family together.” The latter approach, the family-first model of marriage, still recognizes the importance of an emotional connection between husband and wife. But it goes beyond that connection by also stressing some of the classic goods of marriage, like having and raising kids, forging a strong financial foundation for your family, and giving support to and receiving it from kin.
The survey found that married men and women who embraced the “soulmate” model were more likely to report that their marriage might not last, compared to those who took the family-first view. After controlling for education, race, ethnicity, and gender, the survey found that husbands and wives who took the soulmate view were about 90 percent more likely to report doubts about the future of their marriage. Likewise, the 2022 State of Our Unions Survey found that husbands and wives across America following the soulmate model were twice as likely to report that they were divorcing or were likely to divorce in the near future, compared to those following the family-first model. (83-84)
Keeping money and identity separate is a bad idea
Regarding separate bank accounts:
One University of Colorado-Boulder study found that shared [bank] accounts “increase feelings of financial togetherness—making purchases and financial goals feel shared.” This same study also found that couples who pooled their money were the most satisfied in their relationships, compared both to couples who kept their accounts separate and couples who used both joint and separate accounts. Couples who only kept their money separate were more than 20 percent more likely to divorce or separate, compared to couples who pooled at least some of their money.
… A fascinating new study from Indiana University randomly assigned newly married couples to (1) joint checking accounts, (2) separate accounts, or (3) whatever they wanted to do, and then tracked them for two years.
Guess which couples thrived in what the study called the “connubial crucible”?
“After two years, couples in the Joint [checking accounts] Condition exhibited significantly greater relationship quality than couples” in the other two conditions, reported Jenny Olson, a professor of marketing at Indiana University, and her colleagues. She went on to speculate that”our intervention may have shifted couples from a more exchange view of their marriage (mine-and-yours) to a more communal view (ours), which is linked to greater marital quality.” (99-100)
Our YouGov survey found, for instance, that couples who share the same last name had a stronger sense of their identity as a family and were significantly more likely to be happily married and less likely to have plans for divorce. (100)
Religion is great for marriage
The more religious a married couple is, the more likely they are to report being “very happy” in their marriage, more satisfied with life in general, and also have significantly higher rates of marital stability. “One Harvard study found, for instance, that women who regularly attend church are about 50 percent less likely to divorce,” (176).
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It turns out, that religion isn’t only good for marriage in general, but for sex in marriage in particular:
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There is much, much more in the book I wish I could share—but you’ll just need to go buy a copy and read it yourself.