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Why You Should Get Married Brad Wilcox

Published

11 months ago

February 13, 2024

Online right wing influencers like Andrew Tate and Pearl Davis have joined the progressive journalists at newspapers and magazines arguing against marriage. But what if they have it all wrong? (GraphicaArtis via Getty Images)

Isn’t marriage a trap, mostly for men? Don’t most married couples end up getting divorced? And aren’t most men happier when they’re single?

These are the kind of questions I get from young men whenever I make the case for marriage at speaking events at colleges and high schools across the nation—recently in North Carolina, Virginia, Texas, and Utah.

I don’t need to ask where these men heard that marriage is a trap. It is a message invariably repeated on the online right, usually by Andrew Tate, and it’s reaching a lot of teen boys—even a group of Mormon boys that I spoke with last month in Salt Lake City.

If you haven’t heard of Tate, he is the biggest voice in the online manosphere today—with more than 11 billion views on TikTok alone. A 37-year-old former kickboxer who has been described as the “king of toxic masculinity,” he believes the institution is a bad deal for men in our egalitarian age. (He was also charged in 2023 with rape and human trafficking in Romania.)

“I don’t think many men actually benefit from marriages or relationships anymore,” said Tate on a recent podcast. In Tate’s view, any man in his right mind ought to stay single, make lots of money, and play with his toys (Tate is partial to his Bugatti), rather than make a long-lasting commitment to love.

Tate is joined by Pearl Davis, a female anti-feminist online influencer who recently posted on X, “I am anti marriage as it is today. I think it’s silly to think marriage is a good deal for most men today.” She claims that about 67 percent of marriages end in divorce, and that because most divorces are initiated by women, scores of men are divorced unwillingly and unjustly. (This is also why she believes that divorce should be illegal.)

The anti-marriage chorus is also rising on the opposite end of the political spectrum. But this group believes marriage is a bad deal for women.

Consider this recent headline from Bloomberg: “Women Who Stay Single and Don’t Have Kids Are Getting Richer.” Or The Atlantic in 2019, offering “The Case Against Marriage.” Or, in 2021, The New York Times with “Divorce Can Be an Act of Radical Self-Love.”

In the Times piece, law professor Lara Bazelon argued for what might be called the me-first divorce: “I divorced my husband not because I didn’t love him. I divorced him because I loved myself more.”

The message is clear: leaning into work, rather than family life, is the path to prosperity. But this seductive message in our individualistic age is completely at odds with the facts.

Consider this: in 2020, married mothers ages 18 to 55 had a median family income of $108,000, compared to $41,000 for childless single women in the same bracket, according to the 2020 American Community Survey. That’s more than twice as much, even if it’s split with a spouse. And as married women head toward retirement in their 50s, they’ve typically accumulated $357,000 in median assets, compared to less than $30,000 for their single peers, according to the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY).

The same applies to men. Stably married men heading toward retirement have a staggering 10 times more assets than their divorced or never-married male peers, the NSLY data indicate. (The wealthy Tate is an outlier.)

How about emotional riches?

Well, no one calls their lives happier and more meaningful than men and women who are married, according to the 2022 General Social Survey (GSS). Women ages 18–55 who are married are almost twice as likely to be “very happy” with their lives (37 percent), compared to their single peers (19 percent). Married men ages 18–55 are also more likely to be “very happy” (34 percent) than their peers who are not married (13 percent). Meanwhile, 23 percent of unmarried women ages 18–55 say they are “not too happy” with their lives, compared to 13 percent of married women.

And no, just living together doesn’t cut it. That’s because cohabitation is less committed, more unstable, and generally less happy than marriage.

In fact, marriage is a better predictor of happiness than education, work, money, frequent sex, or regular religious attendance. And despite what Pearl Davis claims, most marriages don’t end in divorce. Only about 40 percent do.

Many people who spoke to me for my new book, Get Married, echoed these feelings.

Katherine, a 40-year-old woman in Virginia, told me that “being married has given me [financial] stability, a deeper sense of meaning in the world, and confidence.” Even though her life is more “messy,” with two young kids in the mix, than it was when she was single, she said marriage and family life make her “happy in a more profound way.”

By contrast, a woman I will call Taylor prioritized a career in digital marketing in her twenties over finding the one, and is now in her mid-thirties and regretting that strategy. If she could go back in time, she told me, “I would actually focus on finding a husband a little bit earlier.”

Meanwhile, a man I’ll call Scott, 34, who is unmarried and living in the outer suburbs of Washington, D.C., has an engaging career as a military contractor, a house of his own, and a six-figure salary. But he said these educational and professional accomplishments are not enough to satisfy him.

“You know, I’ve got degrees on my wall, I’ve got accomplishments and certificates, but it doesn’t mean anything in the end,” he told me. Many days, Scott said he feels alone and at sea. “I have to get up every day and look in the mirror and realize I’m alone. I have nobody.”

(Broadside Books)

Of course, there are plenty of singles who are thriving. But the 2022 GSS also tells us that 27 percent of unmarried men ages 18–55 are “not too happy” with their lives, compared to just 17 percent of married men. In the real world, the Andrew Tate option usually doesn’t work out all that well.

Everyone knows that marriage and fertility are cratering in America. Ideological polarization between the sexes, technological distractions, and rising rates of male joblessness and underemployment are some of the factors driving what I call “the closing of the American heart.” Young adults are dating less, the marriage rate has dropped by more than 60 percent since 1970, and the fertility rate, at 1.7 per woman, is well below the replacement rate of 2.1. About 1 in 3 Gen Zers are projected to never marry and about 1 in 4 Gen Zers will never have children. In other words, a record share of today’s young adults will likely end up not only without a spouse but without any immediate kin.

So this Valentine’s Day, my advice is simple: if you’re in a good relationship, get married. If you’re married, invest more in your relationship. Date nights help, as do shared checking accounts to minimize your chances of landing in divorce court. And if you’re not dating but would like to, expose yourself to more in-person activities—from joining your local church to volunteering at the area food bank to attending that office party you’re tempted to skip.

In short, defy the atomizing, me-first messaging of our solipsistic age—and say “I do.”

Brad Wilcox is professor and director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, Future of Freedom Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, and nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. This essay is adapted from his new book, “Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization,” published on February 13 by HarperCollins.

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TGIF: Hard Pivot Nellie Bowles

Published

2 hours ago

January 17, 2025

admin

Welcome back. This is where, once a week, for a special reprieve, we look at the news and tell jokes. If you’re here for spiritual guidance, I can’t help you (but just in case: yes, you are forgiven your sins).

→ Biden says goodbye: President Joe Biden gave his farewell address Wednesday night, leaving with ominous warnings about dark forces (billionaires) exerting too much influence on American politics. “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

I agree there is a new oligarchy of rich people who manipulate our political landscape, and I, for one, am glad that our president finally sees the danger of MacKenzie Scott and George Soros, billionaire political donors propping up untold numbers of causes. He’s never criticized MacKenzie Scott (formerly Bezos), but I’m sure he was thinking of her, the woman who has thrown $19 billion at activist nonprofits to sway American politics. I’m sure when he just recently gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to George Soros, he was thinking this is the dangerous oligarch I will speak of soon.

No, I’m being silly. Obviously he means the other side’s dangerous oligarchs! When a billionaire oligarch is throwing money at your own team, they’re just a concerned citizen doing what they can with what they have. Me, I’m balanced, moderate: I love all our oligarchs, on both sides. I want more oligarchs and less democracy. I want our political battles to be fought on warring yachts off the coast of Croatia. See, California lets voters vote on everything, and I’ve seen what too much democracy looks like, and I think that Penny Pritzker and Peter Thiel could sit with each other and come up with something better for us.

Biden continued: “President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. . . . Six decades later, I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well. Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families, and our very democracy from the abuse of power.”

First of all, Mr. President, The Free Press is doing great. But I love that Biden’s final address to the nation, his farewell, was about the need for Facebook fact-checkers. It was a presidency built around calling the refs, making us feel bad for any criticism (Hunter is a baby boy), and then if that didn’t work, just banning whatever the staff didn’t like that week.

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January 16, 2025 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

5 hours ago

January 17, 2025

admin

In his final address to the nation last night, President Joe Biden issued a warning that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

It is not exactly news that there is dramatic economic inequality in the United States. Economists call the period from 1933 to 1981 the “Great Compression,” for it marked a time when business regulation, progressive taxation, strong unions, and a basic social safety net compressed both wealth and income levels in the United States. Every income group in the U.S. improved its economic standing.

That period ended in 1981, when the U.S. entered a period economists have dubbed the “Great Divergence.” Between 1981 and 2021, deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, the offshoring of manufacturing, and the weakening of unions moved $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.

Biden tried to address this growing inequality by bringing back manufacturing, fostering competition, increasing oversight of business, and shoring up the safety net by getting Congress to pass a law—the Inflation Reduction Act—that enabled Medicare to negotiate drug prices for seniors with the pharmaceutical industry, capping insulin at $35 for seniors, for example. His policies worked, primarily by creating full employment which enabled those at the bottom of the economy to move to higher-paying jobs. During Biden’s term, the gap between the 90th income percentile and the 10th income percentile fell by 25%.

But Donald Trump convinced voters hurt by the inflation that stalked the country after the coronavirus pandemic shutdown that he would bring prices down and protect ordinary Americans from the Democratic “elite” that he said didn’t care about them. Then, as soon as he was elected, he turned for advice and support to one of the richest men in the world, Elon Musk, who had invested more than $250 million in Trump’s campaign.

Musk’s investment has paid off: Faiz Siddiqui and Trisha Thadani of the Washington Post reported that he made more than $170 billion in the weeks between the election and December 15.

Musk promptly became the face of the incoming administration, appearing everywhere with Trump, who put him and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, where Musk vowed to cut $2 trillion out of the U.S. budget even if it inflicted “hardship” on the American people.

News broke earlier this week that Musk, who holds government contracts worth billions of dollars, is expected to have an office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House. And the world’s two other richest men will be with Musk on the dais at Trump’s inauguration. Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg, who together are worth almost a trillion dollars, will be joined by other tech moguls, including the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman; the CEO of the social media platform TikTok, Shou Zi Chew; and the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai.

At his confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Finance today, Trump’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, billionaire Scott Bessent, said that extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts was “the single most important economic issue of the day.” But he said he did not support raising the federal minimum wage, which has been $7.25 since 2009 although 30 states and dozens of cities have raised the minimum wage in their jurisdictions.

There have been signs lately that the American people are unhappy about the increasing inequality in the U.S. On December 4, 2024, a young man shot the chief executive officer of the health insurance company UnitedHealthcare, which has been sued for turning its claims department over to an artificial intelligence program with an error rate of 90% and which a Federal Trade Commission report earlier this week found overcharged cancer patients by more than 1,000% for life-saving drugs. Americans championed the alleged killer.

It is a truism in American history that those interested in garnering wealth and power use culture wars to obscure class struggles. But in key moments, Americans recognized that the rise of a small group of people—usually men—who were commandeering the United States government was a perversion of democracy.

In the 1850s, the expansion of the past two decades into the new lands of the Southeast had permitted the rise of a group of spectacularly wealthy men. Abraham Lincoln helped to organize westerners against a government takeover by elite southern enslavers who argued that society advanced most efficiently when the capital produced by workers flowed to the top of society, where a few men would use it to develop the country for everyone. Lincoln warned that “crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings” would crush independent men, and he created a government that worked for ordinary men, a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

A generation later, when industrialization disrupted the country as westward expansion had before, the so-called robber barons bent the government to their own purposes. Men like steel baron Andrew Carnegie explained that “[t]he best interests of the race are promoted” by an industrial system, “which inevitably gives wealth to the few.” But President Grover Cleveland warned: “The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor…. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”

Republican president Theodore Roosevelt tried to soften the hard edges of industrialization by urging robber barons to moderate their behavior. When they ignored him, he turned finally to calling out the “malefactors of great wealth,” noting that “there is no individual and no corporation so powerful that he or it stands above the possibility of punishment under the law. Our aim is to try to do something effective; our purpose is to stamp out the evil; we shall seek to find the most effective device for this purpose; and we shall then use it, whether the device can be found in existing law or must be supplied by legislation. Moreover, when we thus take action against the wealth which works iniquity, we are acting in the interest of every man of property who acts decently and fairly by his fellows.”

Theodore Roosevelt helped to launch the Progressive Era.

But that moment passed, and in the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, too, contended with wealthy men determined to retain control over the federal government. Running for reelection in 1936, he told a crowd at Madison Square Garden: “For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves…. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.”

“Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today,” he said. “They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”

Last night, after President Biden’s warning, Google searches for the meaning of the word “oligarchy” spiked.

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Notes:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2025/01/15/remarks-by-president-biden-in-a-farewell-address-to-the-nation/

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/great-disparity/

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31010/w31010.pdf

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-07-10-bidens-unheralded-war-on-poverty/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/unitedhealth-lawsuit-ai-deny-claims-medicare-advantage-health- insurance-denials/

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/13/us/politics/elon-musk-white-house-trump.html

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/which-big-tech-ceos-will-be-at-trumps-inauguration-see-the-full-list/6110692/

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trumps-us-treasury-pick-bessent-says-extending-tax-cuts-top-priority-2025-01-16/

https://www.thedailybeast.com/searches-for-what-is-an-oligarchy-spike-after-bidens-warning/