People have been poking fun at marriage-obsessed cultures for a long time, from Mrs. Bennet in “Pride and Prejudice” to current TikTok videos of the mom from India who doesn’t care that her daughter gets nominated for a Nobel Prize because, unfortunately, she’s not married. In My Big Fat Greek Wedding, both Mom and Dad and the entire overbearing Portokalos family get on Toula’s case for her lack of prospects. Even in Greek school, Toula wryly observes, “I learned valuable lessons such as, ‘If Nick has one goat and Maria has nine, how soon will they marry?‘”
In the centuries before and after she wrote, Jane Austen and her Mrs. Bennet merely reflected a culture-at-large emphasis on marriage, a “truth universally known.” However, these days, India Mom, the Portokalos clan and other marriage-centric communities have become distinct from 21st century social norms that view marriage as not only optional, but dispensable.
Some say good riddance to the annoying, nagging and badgering that young-adult predecessors endured from aunts, parents and society assuming that they should grow up, get married and have kids.
But not so fast, says Brad Wilcox, one of the country’s leading academic authorities on marriage. The collapse of an emphasis on marriage and family life, he argues in his recent book “Get Married,” correlates with a rise in individualism that not only weakens motivation to marry, but contributes to a difficulty of staying married.
Of course, decades of research now confirm important emotional, physical, economic, safety and community benefits connected with marriage, with economist Sam Peltzman reporting recently that “being married is the most important differentiator” between happiness and unhappiness.
And so, those obnoxious mothers may be on to something. Academic psychologist Meg Jay, who specializes in ages 20-30, writes in her book “The Defining Decade” that the research compels her to step in as therapist for those without a meddlesome church or family community to remind young men and women that postponing marriage often leads to low-commitment relationships while “the pool of available singles shallows over time, perhaps in more ways than one.”
Yet even those who defy a commitment-averse culture and enter marriage with the best of intentions find staying married difficult without a strong support system. That makes it especially important to pay attention to those outlier groups who are doing a good job of this — along with what it would take to create stronger marriage culture in communities where it doesn’t exist.
Lessons from marriage-centric communities
Encouraging young adults to embrace marriage and family takes a village. Anyone skeptical of the importance of community in family formation should read Freya India’s recent essay, “The Age of Abandonment,” where she poignantly describes the plight of Gen Z women robbed not only of parents who stayed married, but also of extended-family and religious communities to provide a compensatory safety net of caring adults. India bemoans “the feeling that nobody has our back. That we can’t trust anyone … we are alone.”
With a ”total abandonment of any sense that we belong to something bigger,” she writes, loss of faith and shared values leaves young women with Reddit and Instagram for community instead of real people. In addition, growing up with no stigma around family breakdown leads to little sympathy for children of divorce, only therapy culture advocating even more independence and self-actualization. “Please,” India writes, “will somebody step in and say to this generation that maybe they don’t need more self-love, more belief in themselves, but something to belong to.”
In addition to belonging within a relationship, there’s a larger crucial sense of belonging. According to Wilcox, we need to “move beyond the psychological conceit that a successful marriage is just about two people mastering the perfect set of relationship techniques to maximize their sense of compatibility, communication, fulfillment, romance or self-actualization.”
Staying happily married has a lot to do with the community you belong to, and four groups in the U.S. win the medal for masters of marriage: the faithful (Americans who identify as church-going and faith-practicing Christians), the conservatives (those embracing traditional values), the “strivers” (Wilcox’s term for the well-educated, who hold liberal views yet adhere to more traditional lifestyles) and Asian Americans (particularly from China, India, the Philippines and South Korea).
Larger forces, writes Wilcox, “put us on the path to better or worse unions” and these four groups, he explains, reject pervasive anti-marriage messaging. Asian-Americans prioritize strong “familist ethics” that ward off cultural currents of individualism. Conservatives and the faithful possess what Wilcox calls “ideological hedges” that keep them from falling prey to marital substitutes like serial relationships, nontraditional coupling and a single lifestyle that keeps all options open. And the strivers, although ideologically aligned with more progressive and individualistic worldviews, nevertheless tend to stay married and copy their family’s traditional structure that helped them succeed in the first place.
While these groups have commonalities that account for marital longevity in their ranks, two of them, interestingly, the religious and the conservative, undermine assumptions that class alone determines marital success. It’s true, as Harvard economist Raj Chetty’s work highlights, that two-parent families dominate higher income neighborhoods, while single-parent families are more prevalent in lower income communities. But, as Wilcox points out, socioeconomic status isn’t the whole story — with the key to marriage-centric communities more than just wealth.
Faith and church-going correlate with marital longevity and family stability, but not high income. A table of the top 10 counties for children in married families compiled from the American Community Survey and US Religion Census finds communities like solidly middle class Utah County, with a median family income of $76,626, topping the chart, followed by Williamson County, Tennessee, and then peppered with the similarly most religious places in the country alongside the other half of the table that consists of some of the richest counties in America.
Religious life, explains Wilcox, whether participating from a synagogue, church, mosque or temple, endows marriage with not only deep spiritual significance, but also practical, social, emotional and even financial support. Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Jews and others who regularly attend religious services and try to practice what is preached develop a long-term, family-first perspective not only from theology, but from lives played out in their communities, couples and families modeling what “for better or for worse” means in real life scenarios.
Conservatives may or may not be religiously observant, but are more likely than others to be married, and happily married. Counties leaning Republican have more marriage, less nonmarital childbearing and higher family stability than counties that lean Democratic.
However, writes Wilcox, while “a conservative worldview increases your odds of getting married in the first place … after you’ve tied the knot, it does not much reduce your odds of getting divorced.” In the General Social Survey, education, ethnicity and religion were all stronger predictors of marital longevity and divorce than political ideology.
In fact, the top predictor of avoiding divorce, it turns out, is a college degree. While faith is the strongest predictor of marital quality, the educated strivers, according to Wilcox, are particularly good at the delayed gratification that not only helps them succeed in school and in the professions and business, but also helps them stay committed and married. Despite holding progressive attitudes toward family diversity and single motherhood, writes Wilcox, the strivers “do not put these views into practice in their own private lives.”
Coming in second as a top predictor of avoiding divorce (before regular religious attendance in third) is ethnicity. Asian Americans are 64% less likely to divorce than other Americans, 86% less likely than white couples. They bring to their unions not only strong familism that prioritizes family over the individual, but also practice striver habits of delayed gratification, education and hard work. Asian Americans are disproportionately represented in affluent counties that make up, along with religious counties, the top areas in the U.S. for children in married families.
Even Asian Americans, however, don’t reach the marital quality levels of couples who share a common faith and attend religious services with their spouse. The active faithful are six percentage points more likely to be “very happy,” with faith being a stronger predictor of marital quality than political ideology, education, race and even income.
Wilcox highlights many ways religious communities boost the odds of not only a strong and stable family life, but a happier one. If stress is a cancer to family life, faith buffers trials through meaningful ritual, powerful social networks and a purposeful sense of the cosmos. Religion helps couples to heal and resolve moral incongruence and to cultivate high relationship quality.
Not all religious couples are happy, of course, but regular religious attendance correlates with a reduction in your risk of divorce by between 30 and 50%. In fact, the more religious adherents involve home-centered spiritual practices like prayer with regular attendance, the higher their levels of relationship quality. Although religious couples are often portrayed as repressed, husbands and wives who practice a common faith report greater sexual satisfaction than their peers, and those who do not regularly participate in worship services are markedly less likely to be happy.
Help for the community-less
But what of those who aren’t religious … or Asian American, conservative or part of the educated class? What then? Do we continue to watch marriage rates decline, let young adults remain oblivious to the immense emotional and economic benefits of marriage and ignore children growing up, as Freya India opines, with families falling apart and “nothing, nobody to catch us”?
Skeptics may be wary of government stepping in to support vulnerable communities with low marriage rates and high family instability, but our public systems still definitely end up dealing with the fallout of family instability: single parents unable to support themselves, at-risk children and disproportionately high crime in neighborhoods without married couples. Trying to prevent these scenarios has been going on at the federal level for a surprisingly long time.
For nearly 20 years, federal grants for community-based relationship educational programs have helped lower-income youth and couples learn what strong-marriage communities naturally teach their members through cultural osmosis — things such as: finish high school (at least), get a job and get married before having kids. If you want to stay married, learn to compromise, cooperate, listen, deal with conflict in healthy ways, have realistic expectations, agree on financial goals and, above all, stay committed during hard times — because it’s worth it.
While naysayers question whether the government should be involved in promoting marriage, others, like Alan Hawkins, the current manager of the Utah Marriage Commission, point out that a significant body of research finds small but significant improvements in relationship quality and skills for participating couples and that higher risk couples benefit the most. No one is twisting their arm either — an overwhelming majority of low-income couples polled want to participate in programs that help strengthen their relationships.
Beyond educational programs, Hawkins argues that states must put more skin in the game by giving tax breaks or other financial incentives to reduce barriers to marital and premarital counseling. Even more important, states need to get rid of marriage penalties built into public assistance programs that lead low-income couples to avoid marriage because their married joint income would make them ineligible for help.
“The investment of these modest public dollars,” Hawkins writes, “is yielding a significant bang for the buck in terms of healthier relationships, less domestic violence, higher marriage and remarriage rates, lover divorce rates, less loneliness, improved mental health, and stronger communities.” The National Alliance of Relationship and Marriage Education website outlines steps like these and others states can take to spread marriage wealth and stability.
Luxury beliefs
Government outreach may be a less ideal solution than a culture in which marriage-positive authors like Jane Austen top the bestseller lists. But today’s popular memoirs celebrate stories of women finding self-actualization through divorce or seeking outside sexual partners for their marriage. Still, marriage hasn’t lost its hold on the popular imagination, either.
Donald Miller wrote a 21st century best-selling memoir, too, “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: How I learned to write a better story.” At the beginning he describes feeling stuck as a single man whose writer’s block after his first book’s success leaves him adrift and reevaluating his priorities, staring at a bare mantle with no framed pictures. Estranged from his own father, Miller felt “haunted by a kind of nothingness … I stood for a while and heard the voices of children who didn’t exist and felt the tender touch of a wife who wanted me to listen to her. I felt, at once, the absent glory of a life that could have been.” As Miller goes on to write a better story, he reconciles with his father and forms healthier relationships, one of which eventually leads to marriage.
Lives without marriage can be full of meaning, but the idea that marriage doesn’t matter, says Robert Henderson, author of “Troubled, A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class,” is a luxury belief. Those who, like Henderson, experience family instability and its attendant poverty, crime and neglect understand all too fully that marriage matters and that luxury beliefs “confer status on the affluent while inflicting costs on the lower classes.”
In 1960, Henderson points out, the percentage of American children living with both biological parents was identical for affluent and working-class families — 95%. By 2005, that percentage stood at just 30% for working-class families and 85% for the affluent.
Suggestions abound on the whys and hows of America’s marriage-rate crisis, with Derek Thompson postulating in The Atlantic that “as women’s expectations rise and lower-income men’s fortunes fall … this combination is subverting the traditional role … in which men are seen as necessary for the economic insurance of their family.”
Economics indeed plays a role in marital success, as Brad Wilcox’s charts show. But couples don’t need a tremendous amount of wealth to achieve family stability. What they need is a surrounding community who believes in and supports marriage.
While “elites get and stay married and make sure their kids enjoy the benefits of stable marriage,” Hal Boyd once wrote, their hesitance to “impose” on those who “could really use their moral leadership” means they “tend not to preach what they practice.” He goes on to encourage those with education and strong families to “stop feigning neutrality and start preaching what they practice pertaining to marriage and parenting … (and) help their fellow Americans embrace it.”
Such support may or may not involve meddlesome mothers or cautionary therapists, but must include real people who offer examples, give support and model commitment to a deeply important institution.
This article is the third of a series on the future of marriage in America.