I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the prospect of marriage going extinct, whether it can be saved, and whether it deserves to be.
Contra the princess fantasies and cottagecore dreams of the wedding-industrial complex, marriage is becoming an endangered species in America. More and more American women are happily single, and fewer girls than ever say that marriage is their aspiration. Even in red states, divorce rates are rising.
The decline in marriage is the direct result of women recognizing that it’s a bad deal for them. All too often, married women end up working outside the home and bringing in an income, while also being expected to run the household, do all the chores and raise the children. The demands of modernity have increased, but the expectations of tradition and culture haven’t decreased to compensate. Top this sexist sundae with the cherry of more-conservative men doubling down on demands to limit women’s autonomy, and it’s no wonder that women are heading for the exits.
The good news is that men can still change this. But it won’t happen through cheap machismo or obnoxious preaching about what God wants. It will only happen when men learn to be better partners, husbands and fathers. Are we up to the challenge?
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:
All these factors converge on one result: increasingly, women are finding marriage unappealing. They see it as a ticket to second-class status where they’re expected to subordinate their own lives and dreams to the desires of men.
The data bears this out. According to a new poll, for the first time ever, 12th-grade girls are less likely than 12th-grade boys to say they want to get married. Significantly, the number of boys who aspire to marriage has been unchanged for thirty years, but the girls’ numbers are dropping.
Another poll finds that male conservatives now rate having children and being married as among their top priorities, while for progressive women, both of those have dropped to the bottom of the list.
More and more American women are staying single by choice. According to a Wall Street Journal article reporting on analysis by the Aspen Economic Strategy Group, over half of women ages 18 to 40 are single. And they’re happy that way: Pew data suggest only 35% of single women are looking for a relationship, versus 50% for single men.
“The good news is that men can still change this. But it won’t happen through cheap machismo or obnoxious preaching about what God wants. It will only happen when men learn to be better partners, husbands and fathers. Are we up to the challenge?”
(Ahem. Gay marriage is a thing)
If a man learns to be better wouldn’t that include accepting that a partner isn’t interested in marriage? Men should totally be better, but I don’t think that’s saving marriage
Marriage is fundamentally about controlling women and relationships, and no attempts to rebrand it as “love” or whatever will help. Getting married is involving the state and/or church in your relationships, and why would you if you don’t have to?
Hopefully this shit dies
Adam, you are being typically monocultural. Why did I marry my wife? Because it’s an international marriage and I needed a visa! For some reason, anti-marriage types never think of this.
Also: lets remember the a woman in a relationship with a man dramatically increases her risk of interpersonal violence. Choosing to date men is a dangerous choice
(Prompted by reading Vince C’s comment over on OnlySky. Men don’t protect us)
For a long time now, marriage has not had a good track record with women.
There have been studies for at least a couple decades that reliably get the same results: single women are the happiest, then married men, then single men, and the most unhappy are married women.
Tells you something.
Also, parents with children in the home aren’t all that happy either. In my experience, the best part of being a parent is seeing my child as an adult. (And I am so glad he lives close to me and is happy to see us on occasion.)
I know it’s not the topic, but it is related to the traditional messaging about what makes people happy.
There’s long been the argument that women need to marry men for “protection”. Even if we grant the presumptions behind that – a significant minority of men are predators and abusers, and we can not or ought not do anything about this, including empowering women to protect themselves. And also that “good men” will always protect their wives, which is sadly not borne out in the real world. But then we get to the whole “one man, one woman” thing, which leaves a significant number of women who are unprotected, either because they can’t find a “good” man to marry or they’re forced to marry a “bad” one to survive. When you add in some of the other common “traditional” premises about male/female social relations, more cracks start appearing, and it looks very much like a recipe for constant conflict and exposing women to greater dangers than if they were not “protected” rather than the “security and harmony” that tradcons insists that it promotes. The actual, practical purpose for most of this mess is to equip men with a variety of cudgels to enforce patrilineality, each of which can be used selectively and dismissed/ignored when they become inconvenient. Which is, in turn, the primary basis of patriarchy.
Today, the contradictions between those various premises are more obvious, and the ones which made some sense in a vacuum mostly no longer apply to the present-day world. Add in the fact that a large number (likely a majority) of the young men who are “going tradcon” are the “bad men” for whom “good women” are warned to avoid, and tradcons are now demanding that women to sacrifice themselves to those men for life as some sort of vague appeasement thing… it’s forcing people to reevaluate what marriage means to them, to society in general, and whether it’s personally worth it now that it’s not nearly as compulsory.
What dangerousbeans said @2 made me think, you know, it is really pretty odd that one of the most important personal relationships in one’s life is actually a legal contract between you, your partner, and the United States government .
Marriages, even ones carried out by religious leaders, can only be made by a legal process and can only be ended by a legal process. Because, it’s actually a contract.
Not too many other important (or unimportant) personal relationships that are contracts under the law, and especially, a contract in which the government is a party to. One does wonder what the reason or necessity for the contractual arrangement is?
Happily married these ten years. Some suggestions in answer to this:
1. to at least gesture at making people take it seriously. The fact that you can legally do it in minutes, with Elvis as the officiant, rather gives the lie to this, but I assume that’s a part of it at least in principle.
2. to prove you actually did it. Why do you need to prove it? Because at least some of the time, the government likes to encourage people to do it by giving them extra privileges (e.g. tax breaks) if they do. In order to qualify for those, you need to prove your qualification, hence the legal stuff.
What a negative way of expressing it. It’s not just that marriage is SOMETIMES a bad deal for SOME women. I think a more important factor is that over the course of my lifetime the alternative – being single – has become a much, MUCH better deal than it used to be.
One example: within my lifetime in the UK at least single women couldn’t get a mortgage. Not couldn’t afford a mortgage (that’s today…). Simply couldn’t get one – oh, you’re an unmarried woman? Sorry, don’t bother filling in the form, you don’t qualify, purely on the basis of your gender and marital status. No, we don’t care how much money you have for a deposit, how much you earn or how able you are to make the repayments – not relevant. No mortgage for you miss. Fiftieth anniversary this year of that changing.
I don’t think that it’s that marriage is or ever was a shit deal per se – it’s way more that being a single woman just keeps on getting better and more attractive as a proposition as society becomes a better and better place to be a woman (and a worse and worse place to be a single man).
@dangerousbeans, #2:
‘Getting married is involving the state and/or church in your relationships, and why would you if you don’t have to?’
Because it’s one of the many cases where actually having a government body involved to regulate things works better than just assuming that sorting it out between the individuals involved is going to have a better result. This is only the case where you have the kind of long-term relationship where your lives are entangled (stuff like owning a living place together, or depending on the other person’s pension, or having children together), but, if you have that, you’ve probably got substantially more rights as a spouse who wants to leave than as an unmarried partner who wants to leave.
An old friend of ours who was leaving a long-term cohabiting relationship was talking to my mother (who is a qualified lawyer with decades of experience) about the difficulties in getting him to sell the house they co-owned, and my mother was talking to me about it afterwards and commented on how it’s ironic that in fact if she had been married to him she would have had more rights and found the whole thing substantially difficult. Conversely, I’m in a similar position with trying to negotiate a financial settlement with the long-term partner to whom I *am* married, and it does give me more legal rights in terms of being able to push the issue of ‘yes, we are going to get this house on the market’. (It’s still an absolute pain dealing with an unco-operative person, but at least I’m doing so in the knowledge that I ultimately have the law behind me and so he can’t stall forever.) Meanwhile, if I were planning to stop him from getting a fair share of my pension fund (which he does deserve for the years he took out of his career to be a stay-at-home spouse) then he’d have more rights to fight me on that. Marriage gives us legal protections that we wouldn’t have in a long-term unmarried relationship.
This seems like a problem with the laws around cohabitation rather than an argument for marriage. Sure, letting the state get involved with your shit makes a lot of things easier, immigration for instance, but I’m not convinced that’s a good thing. The fact that something is easier if you’re married is an example of the problem
Not sure how you’d get better laws around cohabitation without the government getting involved; as far as I can see, the only way to have a valid protective structure here is for the government to get involved in some form.
By the way, all of this is also overlooking the human factor. One of the biggest reasons why people get married is simply because humans like to have a way of marking the important events in our lives with ritual and/or celebration.
I don’t, and I’m not actually a legume. Also celebrations don’t require marriage as a legal construct
If the government is getting involved then it should get involved in ways that treat people equally, regardless of their relationship status. Or do we want to create second class people because they’re not allowed to access marriage?
I see no good reason to keep marriage as a privileged legal situation, and without that it just becomes a thing some people do. That’s a poor situation for keeping it around as a major social institution
Not sure what you mean about people not being ‘allowed’ to access marriage? I mean, this is indeed one of the very strong arguments for allowing gay marriage, which I completely agree should be legal. But who do you feel is not allowed to access marriage?
For that matter, in what way do you feel anyone’s becoming a 2nd-class citizen as a result of not being married? I think it’s fair not just to give random perks to people because they’re married, but what I’m talking about here is the situation where two people have a long-term relationship with significant amounts of shared property, and what rights each of them have to said property should they split up. That’s where an official legal structure comes in handy. So people can choose whether or not to enter into that legal structure, but if you don’t, it can potentially cause problems with dividing stuff up if you do split up.
As for the ‘humans like’, that was meant as a general comment, not a ‘every single human likes this’. To rephrase: it is common and normal among humans to want some sort of official ceremony marking major events in life. I know it meant a lot to me to stand up in front of family and friends and exchange vows with my husband regarding our relationship, rather than simply having an agreement to go on living together. I still feel that way even now that I’m getting divorced, BTW.
Well, the only reason my partner and I are ever likely to consider getting married is if we feel the need to sort out a bunch of things like powers of attorney and inheritance rights… Sure, you can do all these things through other (and more bespoke) legal arrangements, but marriage packages them all up neatly and is often cheaper and easier.