Marital breakups loom large in Midstory Magazine articles, so much so that the editors run online workshops about “writing divorce.” Stories of self-discovery and adventure describe freedom from compromise, like the time writer Steph Sprenger and kids became “pajama-clad sloths” during a weekend “with nobody to chastise us or toss sidelong glances laden with silent criticism.”
But the writers are too perceptive to ignore complexities and trade-offs. Sprenger acknowledges breaking down in “quintessential post-divorce” storms of “housework combined with transporting children to various locations at logistically impossible times.” And she worries—about kids’ mental health, appliance repairs, and “the sting of back-to-school night, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas [and] the daily rituals that disappeared in a blink.”
Writer Anne Turnbow left her husband of 18 years for a female friend, but admits to grieving “like a lunatic” about the losses of divorce monthly. These losses include family unity, her relationship with his family, her kids rarely in the presence of both parents, calling her ex-husband at work to ask dumb questions, and “feeling his arms engulf me, his rough hands in mine.”
Even in an ever-growing array of 21st Century alternatives to marriage, from divorce to polyamory to the lure of going solo (in the manosphere) and of de-centering men (in the womensphere), marriage keeps reemerging. As a safe haven, and source of economic security, familial bonding, and love, marriage merits the sacrifices it demands, according to one of America’s foremost sociologists on marriage and family relationships, Princeton-and-Yale trained Bradley Wilcox, Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia.
Himself the son of a single mom, Wilcox and his many publications appear in academic journals and show up in influential magazines and newspapers. His work combines long term, wide-ranging, statistically sound evidence into a convincing case for traditional marriage. It also forms the basis of “Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization,” a book explaining how marriage benefits its practitioners economically, emotionally and sociologically.
Marriage and money
Wilcox highlights media headlines throughout his book to illustrate the ways in which dominant ideas about marriage collide against statistical reality. A piece in Bloomberg titled, “Women Who Stay Single and Don’t Have Kids Are Getting Richer” exemplifies journalistic tendencies to idealize single-life options, but it’s a perspective untethered by real world evidence.
Married mothers are much better off financially, with a median family income of $108,000 in 2020, twice as much as the $41,000 for childless single women. They head into retirement with over three times as many assets than single peers. And even factoring in controls for variables like children, education, and race, married women’s household incomes are 45% larger than their unmarried peers. All in all, married women are 80% less likely to be poor while single moms are six times more likely.
Married men, Wilcox likewise argues, “work harder, smarter, and more successfully” than their single peers. A Harvard study found them much less likely to be fired, and other research finds that married men earn 10% to 20% more than single men with similar backgrounds; even among identical twins, the married twins make 18-26% more than the unmarried.
Married thirty-something men’s household income hovers around $95,000 while cohabiting men average $68,000, and singles average $42,000. Even controlling for factors like race, education and age, married men have 40% more household income than unmarried men and are 55% less likely to live in poverty.
While impacts of family instability on women are well known, such as a much higher likelihood of poverty and the economic challenges of raising kids alone, single men also end up paying child support and find covering housing costs for two or more family configurations difficult. However, married men with children are three times more likely to attain middle class or higher status, and four times more likely to avoid poverty. They also retire with 10 times more assets than their unmarried peers.
Given these research findings, Wilcox bemoans a recent Pew Research Center poll revealing “pervasive modern assumptions about the purpose of life,” with 88% of parents saying financial independence and careers are most important for their children, while only about 20% consider marriage and children most important. Ironically, what correlates well with financial independence is marriage and children. And marriage and children also correlate with other aspects of life more important than money, such as happiness, meaning and fulfillment.
Marriage, happiness and well-being
A New York Times’ review of Miranda July’s immensely successful novel “All Fours” stimulated thousands of comments on Facebook. July’s book begins with a woman leaving her husband and child for a road trip only to end up spending the entire time with a lover in a motel. The plot concludes with the returning wife and her husband opening up their marriage to other lovers. “Sublime, fearless, exhilarating, and intensely pleasurable” sum up the adjectives fans use to describe July’s story of perimenopausal desire and search for meaning.
But a few comments on the review push back. “People with the privilege of stability are always taking it for granted. Imagine having everything and saying no I want more,” wrote one. “Meh, selfish self destruction and destruction of your family’s life and child abuse via hedonistic neglect is pretty fashionable,” wrote another.
Which side is right? Do rugged individualism and untethered freedom bestow happiness and meaning, or do self-sacrifice and commitment?
Social science research, according to Wilcox, and decades of it, doesn’t leave the answer to this question ambiguous. Over and over, marital status — which most often implies more sacrifice and commitment — is found to be the best predictor of happiness, more important than education, work, money, race and gender. “Marital quality is, far and away, the top predictor I have run across of life satisfaction in America,” writes Wilcox. “Specifically, the odds that men and women say they are ‘very happy’ with their lives are a staggering 545 percent higher” for those who are happily married.
According to the General Social Survey, the married are 151% more likely to say they are very happy than the unmarried. The famous Harvard Study of Adult Development found that those with strong marriages and relationships with family and friends had the best physical and emotional health in old age.
The well-being associated with marriage transcends personal feelings of contentment and extends into communities. Wilcox quotes Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich’s observations about marriage being “the most primeval of human institutions,” promoting human flourishing, maintaining social order and providing ideal conditions for raising children.
Neighborhood safety correlates with high marriage rates: higher-income enclaves are 80% two-parent married families while in lower-income communities, parents are 50% single. “Over the last half century,” writes political scientist Charles Murray, “marriage has become the fault line dividing American classes.”
Child well-being is strongly associated with living in a two-parent married family. Wilcox quotes Yale sociologist Nicholas Christakis observing that “deep and abiding pair bonds are an ‘optimal reproductive strategy.’” Marriage offers children the investment of both parents that correlates with better health, academic success, and avoidance of destructive behaviors.
While marriage certainly provides no elixir for the vicissitudes of life and, indeed, creates its own set of challenges, those who embrace the difficulties of commitment and selflessness ironically find life more meaningful, happy and fulfilling.
Commitment and well-being
Wilcox’s summary of marriage’s undeniable benefits includes some caveats about just what constitutes a happy marriage, the kind that confers well-being, contentment and flourishing. Because attitudes and perspectives greatly affect marital quality, Wilcox first offers historical context.
In the “me decade” 1970s, rising individualism and the women’s liberation movement contributed to the demise of a marriage-as-permanent sentiment. Divorce rates dramatically increased until in the early 1980s, half of first marriages ended in divorce.
However, as Wilcox points out, children of the 70s divorce course-corrected, so much so that articles like “How Divorce Lost Its Groove” feature left-leaning parents like Claire Dederrer saying that “We made up our minds, my brother and I, and so many of the grown children of the runaway moms, that we would put our families first and ourselves second. ... We would stay married, no matter what.”
According to Wilcox’s research, divorce has dropped 25% since the 1970s. A majority of current college-educated parents now reject the divorce ethos they lived through and are raising their children, 90% of them, in intact, married families. Wilcox refers to them as “strivers.”
Despite the downward trends in divorce that now hover at around 40%, however, the ’70s permissive approach to marriage persists and continues to impact marital quality for the worse. Attitudinal hangovers like the following correlate with diminished marital quality: only stay married if it’s always personally fulfilling, take a lax view of lesser and greater infidelities and view divorce as a favorable option.
Interestingly, as marriage became more permissive over the years, the percentage of men and women reporting themselves happily married diminished. Although some academics argued fervently that the more flexible, optional and open marriage became, the happier it would be, the data does not bear this out.
Conversely, a large and important study performed by more than 80 international scholars analyzing over 11,000 couples paralleled the results of a YouGov survey in 2022, finding that commitment and classic fidelity norms are the strongest predictors of marital quality. Completely committed husbands and wives, those viewing marriage as permanent and willing to undergo periods of difficulty to stay together, are five times more likely to be happier and four times less likely to divorce.
Other studies confirm that commitment is the strongest predictor of marital quality, with one showing that wives and especially husbands are much happier when ascribing to high commitment attitudes, including marriage-is-for-life. Commitment brings with it trust, emotional security, fidelity and the willingness to overcome present difficulties for a future together. As Scott Stanley, a leading marriage psychologist, observes, “good fences make good marriages.”
Lifetime benefits
While some of Midstory Magazine’s “Writing Divorce” stories contain no regrets, guest writer Linda McCauley Freeman’s poem entitled “Letter to My First Husband” evinces a few. In it, she asks “Do you ever pause when picking up fishing tackle and think about all the fish you brought home to me?” When she encounters a neighbor who tells her what a nice guy her ex-husband is, she writes, “I don’t tell him how much I would love to see you, how I never turned to not caring.”
Maybe none of Midstory’s writers, even those still caring, would actually return to their first marriage. But the story of Nazanin Rafsanjani’s parents, who actually did, is telling. In an episode of “This American Life,” Rafsanjani describes her Iranian mother leaving a marriage in which she felt unloved, only to undergo an epiphany on a plane two years later. Looking at an elderly couple, the mother reflects on the benefits of growing old with a spouse, even an imperfect one, with a shared history, shared children, shared life together. And she remarries her husband.
Stories like these don’t show up in the data, but evoke the subtle gifts of what Brad Wilcox calls “our most important institution,” one that affects every aspect of our communities and individual lives — whether or not you’re currently married. As confirmed by the research, this ancient institution offers a path to growth and security unmatched by the alternatives.
This article is the first of a series on the future of marriage in America.