Here’s what America’s marriage crisis looks like: In 1960, nearly 70% of adults were married. Today, only half are. In 1978, 59% of 18 to 34-year-olds were married. Today, just 29% are. The latter is a particularly striking drop in a relatively short period of time, and it has everything to do with the messages the elites sell about marriage.
These messages are pernicious, yet they have no effect on the elites themselves. As Janet Adamy and Paul Overberg write this past weekend in the Wall Street Journal, in an article entitled “Marriage Is Becoming More Like a Luxury Good in U.S.,” “The middle three-fifths of U.S. earners have experienced the sharpest declines in marriage rates over the past four decades compared with people at the bottom of the income ladder and those at the top.”
In other words, the elite manage to ignore their own propaganda about men, women, and marriage, all the while ruining relationships and families for America’s middle class.
It is true that economics plays a role in the marriage crisis, but cultural attitudes and norms must shift first. Adamy and Overberg rightfully point out that “stagnant wages and lost manufacturing jobs have eroded the financial security that helped previous generations of working-class Americans form married households” — something President Trump is trying to resurrect, by the way — but the real problem lies with our modern marital mindset.
Until recently, marriage and family were not only viewed as a singular unit but often seen as the ultimate goal and purpose of life. It was not our jobs or our careers that mattered most in life but our families. Today, marriage and family is viewed as a possible (but not vital) accompaniment to an otherwise fulfilling life. It’s something that happens, if it happens at all after people get their lives in order.
But in the past, men and women got their lives in order together, as couples. They didn’t start out rich; they built wealth together. Indeed, marriage is a great wealth builder.
Second, neither men nor women need to be married anymore to have sex or to have status or to even have children. Did we honestly think we could loosen these norms with no residual effects? They existed for a reason, and it wasn’t (despite the popular culture insisting otherwise) to hold people down and back. It was to create a structure in which people do best and can flourish.
The “no sex before marriage” ship may have sailed, but it’s not too late to value and prioritize the needs of children over the needs of adults. That’s a choice any one of us can make.
The third, and in my opinion most significant, reason marriage for the young and the middle class has nosedived is precisely what the authors wrote: “The diminished economic power of men makes them less likely to marry.” And the flip side is also true: Men are less motivated to work precisely because they aren’t married.
As unpopular as it may be to admit, men need work in a way women do not. Plus, women don’t want to marry unemployed or underemployed men. This phenomenon has been disastrous for marriage and families.
That so many men today are unemployed and underemployed is, in part, what has led to the rise in cohabitation. Yet that’s hardly the answer, despite millennials’ propensity to do so. “Among people ages 25 to 34, the median wealth of married couples is four times [emphasis mine] that of couples who live together but aren’t married,” wrote Adamy and Overberg.
So what’s the solution to the marriage crisis?
For starters, since we can’t count on culture, we’re left with parents. They can do their part by emphasizing marriage as much as they do education and career. One of the reasons young people put marriage on the back burner is because they weren’t raised to prioritize it. Their parents told them not to worry about getting married, because they can always do that later. While parents didn’t say, “You can just date for years and have sex with whoever and even live with people in the meantime,” they might as well have. Because if marriage isn’t prioritized, what does one do in the meantime? It’s one thing to tell your kids not to marry too young (that’s good sense) and quite another not to give them an alternative plan.
Next, both parents and educators can shift their definition of success away from the idea of landing six-figure jobs (which is not realistic for most people), and instead, underscore noncollege pathways that produce stable jobs, which in turn allows people to build families. The idea that everyone must go to college and that it’s normal to go into debt for a degree is what’s causing people to avoid marriage and to “shack up” instead.
Finally, as a society, we must embolden men and boys as much as we do women and girls. Boys who languish in a “you go, girl” world will have nothing to offer those same girls when they later become women. Ergo, it is no one’s best interest to foster a feminist world in which the sexes are pitted against one another. Men need women, and women need men.
But men have been told, in no uncertain terms, that they’re superfluous. And men simply won’t work as hard, or at all, if there’s no point to their contribution.
Clearly, America has a long way to go to undo the damage that’s been done to marriage and families. But let’s stop focusing all our energies on economics. Before economics comes our mindset, attitudes, beliefs, and values.
Change those first, and from there, we can start to restore optimism about marriage and family.
Suzanne Venker (@SuzanneVenker) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She’s the author of five books and a relationship coach, as well as host of The Suzanne Venker Show. Her website is www.suzannevenker.com.
