One of America’s leading academic marriage experts, Brad Wilcox, professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, points out that Andrew Tate, “the biggest voice in the online manosphere today — with more than 12 billion views on TikTok alone — is no fan of marriage.” But Tate and his male followers are not alone in feeling apprehensive about lifelong commitment. Growing numbers of young women likewise want to decenter, even exclude, men from their lives. Others form partnerships only as long as they’re personally fulfilling. And more and more men and women experiment with varieties of coupling that include nontraditional configurations.
Appealing substitutes to marriage that emerged during the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s are proliferating today. Wilcox categorizes them as going solo, soulmatism and family diversity. They don’t require the level of commitment and sacrifice, or, in many cases, monogamy of matrimony and get promoted across social media by powerful influencers. The rewards of freedom, self-fulfillment and open options resonate with a generation largely ambivalent about the value of marriage. One recent national poll found that 55% of single women believe that they have happier lives than married women. (Only 22% of married women agree.)
Tate’s followers also believe single men are better off emotionally, sexually and financially. “Odds are that your wife will divorce you and you’ll end up on the hook for child support and rarely see your children,” one commenter on the first article of this series about the benefits of marriage points out. He echoes Tate’s adage that “there is zero advantage (to marriage) in the Western world for a man.” More and more seem to agree with him. (A representative sample of adult men, however, overwhelmingly reject the idea that single men are better off than married men.)
Before there was Andrew Tate, there was Roosh, a prominent manosphere figure advocating going solo and offering relationship advice many found offensive — including an older and wiser Roosh himself, who took down his popular website in 2023 and unpublished some of his books. He’d converted to Christian Orthodoxy, condemned extramarital sex, and begun a quest for a wife, children and not being alone for the rest of his life.
While one about-face, even one giving up millions of followers, may not give skeptics pause, perhaps it might to see decades of research showing the compelling benefits marriage provides emotionally, mentally and financially. Even more important may be conclusive studies showing that marriage alternatives not only don’t begin to approach the gifts of marriage, but also come with heavy and often hidden costs.
Wilcox describes these costs comprehensively in his recent book “Get Married.” The cold, hard data may come across as indifferent to the plight of young adults trying to find meaning and companionship in a confusing world overflowing with too many options. But the research also serves as a benevolent cautionary tale that the quest to keep options open can lead to opting out of profoundly better choices.
Going solo
The manosphere encourages staying single to avoid the difficult aspects of marriage like fidelity, financial pressure to provide, and the hazards of continuing monetary support after divorce. Conversely, the “decentering men” movement on the women’s side proffers its own reasons for going solo, replete with abundant videos, articles, and social media posts that many young women agree with. An emphasis on self-improvement, career advancement, friendship building, not to mention the untrustworthiness of many men, drives the call to drop men from women’s priorities, social circles and lives.
According to one of the more moderate proponents of decentering men, women should decide their lives belong to them, forget romance, and “be okay with being single ... forever.” Mantras of the related 4B movement, which started in South Korea and spread internationally, include the extremes of no dating men, no marriage, no sex with men and no children.
What’s not to like about a life centered on self-improvement, career success, friendship building and avoiding heartbreak? Well, asks a less enthusiastic onlooker, “Will ‘decentering men’ really fix all your problems?” She emphasizes the difficulty of growing older alone while the rest of society organizes in family units and focuses on children, pointing out that while people prioritize living near family, they rarely consider moving to be near friends.
This decentering men skeptic also brings up a preoccupation that many of the videos encourage, with a focus on self that gets to a compelling argument against going solo: extreme individualism. Happiness experts like Arthur Brooks echo spiritual sages of the past by highlighting research into well-being that correlates happy lives with four main areas: faith, family, friendship, and work, all of which involve the key “macronutrients” of meaning and purpose.
Wilcox’s best arguments against going solo in “Get Married” draw on the meaning, selflessness and contentment marriage and family life offer. Married Americans are much more likely, 60% vs. 38%, to report their lives being as purposeful and meaningful as their single, childless counterparts. Multiple studies factoring in differences like income, race and gender find that marriage is the biggest predictor of happiness, far more important than job and income, with married adults more likely to volunteer, attend church and hang out with friends.
Single, childless adults, Wilcox observes from the research, are twice as likely to feel lonely than the married; in fact, those married with children have a 48% decreased risk of suicide. Uninformed TikTok videos touting the joys of single womanhood aside, today’s dramatic increase in single living correlates with a rise in boredom, isolation and meaninglessness born out in the rise of addiction, alcohol-related illness and deaths by firearm.
These outcomes are especially pronounced for the working class. It’s one thing to be single, educated, in a fulfilling career and have lots of money, but another to live alone when struggling to make ends meet. Better-off influencers need to keep in mind that their emphasis on travel, romance and leisure time full of transient self-fulfillment is dramatically unattainable for a majority of American young adults.
Most men and women, according to the data, would be better off financially if they married. Married women are 80% less likely to be poor, and enjoy greater wealth in retirement, than single women. Married men tend to earn much more than single and cohabiting men, with, again, much greater wealth heading into retirement. Even sexually, married men and women are better off. A recent National Survey of Family Growth confirmed that one of the biggest drivers of declining sexual activity (sexlessness has doubled for young adult males in the last ten years, and for females has risen by 50%) is the decline of marriage rates, with married couples enjoying greater frequency and higher satisfaction sexually than those not married.
All of which isn’t to say that single, childless men and women can’t find great meaning, give to others, and enjoy purpose and satisfaction in their lives. Many obviously do. But to ignore the increased risks of loneliness for singles and the markedly better emotional and financial outcomes for married adults — including married 20-somethings who are 80% more likely to be happy than their single counterparts — deceptively influences impressionable young adults who don’t grasp the repercussions of a voluntarily solo path.
Soulmatism
While not inherently opposed to marriage, what Wilcox calls “soulmatism” nevertheless lands in the alternatives-to-marriage category for its reliance on personal feelings alone, rather than an outward, family-first commitment that, according to research, contributes to marital longevity and happiness. Wilcox defines soulmatism as the belief that marriage should be based upon intense romantic and emotional connection and only last as long as it’s personally fulfilling.
Born of something called “expressive individualism,” a term coined by theology professor Carl Trueman to describe an attitude that views anything challenging the self’s desires as oppressive, soulmatism eschews the idea of enduring periods of disappointment, boredom and adversity together as a couple to emerge stronger and more committed. Instead, the intense passion that brings a couple together must continue indefinitely; otherwise, why stay?
Elizabeth Gilbert asked herself that question before leaving her marriage. Her journey through exotic locales in a search for erotic and personal fulfillment became the memoir “Eat, Pray, Love,” a bestseller that obviously resonated with the reading public. According to polls, the vast majority of young adults, around 90%, consider emotional and romantic chemistry the most important ingredients of marriage — with finding a soulmate their biggest romantic priority even more than common values, religion and overall compatibility.
Wilcox uses Gilbert’s journey, post-book, to illustrate the instability of soulmatism, a mindset he describes as “so ubiquitous that many modern people don’t even realize that this wasn’t always the normal way of thinking about marriage.” Gilbert indeed finds a passionate soulmate in Bali, but divorces him in 2016 for a female best friend who later dies, then enters a relationship with a British photographer she later calls short-lived. In The New York Times, Gilbert confesses to careening “from one intimate entanglement to the next.”
Soulmatism comes with a lot of built-in instability, along with unrealistic expectations incapable of weathering the strains of family life. Wilcox rounds up multiple studies showing that divorce rose more than 50% when the soulmate ethos took off in the ’70s, that 90% of spouses with a soulmate view of love doubt the future of their marriages, and that couples with a soulmate model of marriage are twice as likely to divorce as those with a family-first view of marriage.
Those who tend to put their spouse and family’s happiness above their own (family first), the California Family Survey found, were 58% more likely to be satisfied with their marriages. The same survey also found that a heartening majority of couples, 73%, consider marriage primarily about money, children and raising a family, compared with 27% who still prioritize intense emotional/romantic connection.
Wilcox points out that contemporary psychology (aligned with those wise sages of the past) finds that altruism is good for individuals, marriages and families; he counters the myth of soulmatism with the paradox of marital happiness: Those who prioritize marital happiness over marital commitment and stability are the least likely to find it.
A greater focus on others can liberate us from a certain restlessness, discouragement and psychological fatigue inherent in the constant quest to create “my ideal me” (and post it on Instagram). By comparison, focusing on creating a happier life for someone else brings a real sense of satisfaction that comes from seeing someone you love flourish as a direct result of your sacrifices. Hearing a spouse gratefully attribute their progress to you takes that fulfillment to an even deeper level.
Family diversity
Another marriage substitute widely embraced and looked upon as a mark of moral progress, according to Wilcox, consists of family diversity that advocates for letting a thousand family forms bloom. From this view, kids just need love, money and attention; marital status is irrelevant. All family structures — single parenthood, divorce, nonmarital childbearing, multi-parent and cohabiting configurations — are equal as long as love, financial stability and attention are present in good measure.
It’s hard to argue against love, attention and tolerance, as Melissa Kearney, the Neil Moskowitz Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland, discovered. Despite Kearney’s expertise in income inequality, Princeton and MIT degrees and a plethora of academic publications, her recent book “The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind” received a lot of pushback. Although respected economists lauded Kearney’s data-driven expertise, with one calling it “the most important economics and policy book of the year,” others felt that her analysis of the overwhelming, even undeniable advantages that children of married parents enjoy denigrated other family configurations.
Not so, claimed Kearney at a recent lecture at Brigham Young University, where she expressed admiration for heroic single parents who, through no fault of their own, can’t fulfill obligations much more easily accomplished by two people. Yet this scholar also described receiving countless emails, messages and letters from those raised without this two-parent privilege, thanking her for telling the truth about their reality growing up.
The truth, according to Kearney’s years of research, is that details of family structure matters profoundly to children. Two married parents are structurally able to provide children with more love, more money, more attention and more of just about anything else than parents in other family forms. Those who grow up with married parents enjoy a host of benefits that include reduced stress, increased stability, better schools, safer neighborhoods and a future more likely to include educational, economic and relational success.
Conversely, children who grow up in single-parent or cohabiting households (in which relationships tend to be fleeting and sequential) experience greater instability that, particularly for boys, leads to disciplinary issues in school and increased chances of challenges in adulthood that include crime and unemployment.
As Kearney puts it, “a stable family life is one of the most reliable predictors of a child’s future success.” Data summarized by Wilcox is strongly in agreement. Children from intact families are twice as likely to get a four-year degree. Three-fourths of students at selective colleges come from a married-parent household. Children from intact families perform much better in school while those from non-intact families are more likely to misbehave, with young men twice as likely to go to prison (more likely, in fact, to go to prison, 21%, than college, 14%).
Wilcox himself is the son of a single mom and, like Kearney, admires single parents and knows that their efforts to provide love, attention and money go a long way and make a difference. Not being raised with married parents certainly doesn’t hold everyone back. But pretending that all family structures are equally advantageous endangers children in a vulnerable situation who need extra help.
The family diversity myth, Wilcox goes on, further ignores other realities and statistics. Violent crime and homicide flourish in neighborhoods with low marriage rates and absent fathers. Depression is 50% more likely for teens from non-intact families, and the most powerful predictor of child abuse is living with a stepparent or single parent with a partner; kids living with a cohabiting parent are 10 times more likely to be abused than those with married parents.
Which brings us to an alternate family formation which, according to Tyler Austin Harper in The Atlantic, has become the hyperfixation of Americans who’ve reaped the benefits of marriage and now declare monogamy passé and boring. In “Polyamory: The Ruling Class’s Latest Fad,” Harper analyzes one of a plethora of current books endorsing multi-partner family structure, “More: A Memoir of an Open Marriage,” by Molly Roden Winter. Harper describes the author as a wealthy Brooklynite whose interest in polyamory stems from a “turbocharged version of authenticity culture ‘therapeutic libertarianism’: the belief that self-improvement is the ultimate goal of life, and that no formal or informal constraints — whether imposed by states, faith system, or other people — should impede each of us from achieving personal growth.”
That personal growth, however, often comes not only at great cost to the children involved, but to the participants themselves. Even the open-marriage memoir author, Harper points out, seems unhappy in her quest of self-actualization, in her sexual experiences and with “the new partners who rarely treat her kindly.” A hypocritical sort of snobbery, according to Harper, enables those benefiting from a two-parent household to grow tired of the luxuries marriage bestows and “declare polyamory superior to monogamy,” especially when “this brand of ‘free love’ requires the disposable income and time ... that are foreclosed to the laboring masses.”
Those laboring masses, the research on alternative family structures shows, suffer without marriage and benefit immensely from it. Children from single-parent homes are four times more likely to be poor, and, demographically, the top predictor of child poverty in each state, over race, education, and state spending, is the share of married parents in that state. In fact, the biggest predictor of breaking out of poverty consists of growing up in an intact family; poor kids are 60% more likely to make it to the middle and upper classes with married parents and, interestingly, rich kids from single-parent homes are four times more likely to be poor in their 30s than rich kids from married homes.
The search for different countries
While research and statistics on unique risks and pitfalls of alternative family structures may feel insensitive, even callous, most humans understand the circumstances that motivate men and women to go solo or search for various forms of companionship. Valid reasons for divorce definitely exist and advocates for alternatives to marriage wouldn’t have so many followers if they didn’t offer ideas that resonated.
Difficulty with marriage, the institution everyone was expected to join until recently, has been a ongoing theme worldwide in stories from ancient times to today, with a recent Economist article on “Monogamy and its discontents” reviewing two new memoirs about polyamory and divorce that highlight the question, “Is this progress for women?”
Author Edith Wharton grappled with hard questions about marriage in the early 20th century, in her own life and in the lives of her characters. One of those characters, Newland Archer in “The Age of Innocence,” finds his marriage suffocating once he meets alluring Ellen Olenska and asks her to run away with him to another country, one where categories like infidelity don’t exist.
“Oh, my dear — where is that country? Have you ever been there?” she knowingly replies. “I know so many who’ve tried to find it; and believe me, they all got out by mistake at wayside stations.”
Countries other than traditional marriage have their appeal, but those setting off for them should read the travel brochures. Decades of research on marriage and its benefits to men, women, children and communities continue to show that, despite its constraints, or maybe because of them, marriage is still the most stable, fulfilling and safest country to live in.
This article is the second of a series on the future of marriage in America.