Review: Debunking marriage myths
(iStock)Almost 15 years ago, as part of a year of AmeriCorps service after graduating from college, I went on a program retreat where one of the sessions was about navigating relationships. Our retreat leader (who was then in her late 20s) shared with the rest of us (who were mostly 22 or 23) that her relationships with her two closest female friends had been strained since she had gotten married. Her friends were both single and struggling to relate to her, she thought, because they were unhappily dating and trying to make rent on a single income; they assumed her life was so much easier after tying the knot.
But actually, she said, life gets harder after marriage. Now there are two sets of parents and siblings, two careers and two sets of preferences to consider for everything. Soon, there would be children, with all their demands.
None of the millennial listeners asked out loud the question that hung heavily in the air: So why would you get married?
If the stark data on the declining rates of marriage are any indication, many Americans now assume that there is no appealing answer to this query.
The University of Virginia sociology professor Brad Wilcox is not one of them. Wilcox, a Catholic convert and father of nine who has made a career of using data to promote marriage, serves as the director of the National Marriage Project. His new book, Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization, argues that civilization itself depends upon convincing more Americans to tie the knot.
Although he subscribes to the baseline conservative view that marriage is good, Wilcox is not beholden to the political right. He criticizes political conservatives for both their hypocrisy (that is, touting family values while being on one’s third marriage) and their shortsighted policies (that is, a misplaced certainty that “tax cuts, deregulation, and higher GDP growth” will revive the American family). But neither is Wilcox in thrall to the political left. He condemns educated progressives for insisting upon an “elitist and workist” idea of American life that is culturally deaf to what most working- and middle-class Americans believe and value, and for their “reverse hypocrisy” (denigrating marriage while being married).
Both in his recent book and in myriad articles, talks and papers going back many years, Wilcox busts the myths that he believes have undermined marriage as a social institution and touts the sizable and multidimensional benefits of marriage for individuals and for society.
Two of the former are the “flying solo myth” (the idea that marriage does not benefit people today) and the “family diversity myth” (the notion that all kinds of families are created equal—in other words, that “love and money, not marriage, make a family”).
Different versions of the flying solo myth emanate from the left, parts of which have long held that women should “embrace education, work and freedom from family life,” and from the right, parts of which now hold that “there’s really no good return on investment for marriage” for men. For Wilcox, “there’s not a dime of difference” between these two iterations of “pushing women and men to abandon love and marriage and embrace the life of the ‘lone ranger.’” Both are destructive. Wilcox shows that marriage has positive, tangible—and, he argues, causal—effects on women’s and men’s finances, physical and mental health, and sense of community belonging.
Meanwhile, the family diversity myth is ubiquitous among many progressive elites, who insist, contraall data, that two-parent families are categorically no better for children or for society than single-parent families. These disproportionately influential apologists for nihilistic antitraditionalism, some of whom have taken specific exception to Wilcox’s evidence-based endorsement of marriage, live lives that betray a curious conservatism in revealed preferences. According to Wilcox, many elites “talk left and walk right,” leaving the working class to suffer the indignities that a myopic emphasis on the virtues of “inclusion, individual choice, and progress” has wrought.
But perhaps the most common myth about marriage is the one revealed by my retreat leader’s friends, the ones who believed that her life must be a tub of butter now that she was married. Wilcox calls this the “soulmate myth.” According to Wilcox, the problem with basing marriage on the idea of finding a “soulmate,” or “a person who gives you an intense emotional and erotic connection, who makes you feel happy and fulfilled,” is its individualism. “As an ideal,” Wilcox argues, the notion of soulmate marriage “can make it more difficult for husbands and wives to embrace a richer, more stable and ultimately more satisfying idea of marriage, beyond the me-first spirit of soulmate love.” He contends that “any kind of serious relationship, including marriage, is going to be at times deeply challenging and hard and require a lot of work.”
Before the birth control pill helped launch the sexual revolution, premarital and nonmarital sex were widely frowned upon. Out-of-wedlock births and cohabitation were almost universally considered unacceptable. Meanwhile, reaching age 30 without being married was viewed askance. But even after contraception became widely available, cohabitation had become normalized, and premarital sex was a given, Americans continued to get married. True, not as early or as universally—but, nonetheless, until the mid-1990s, marriage remained the dominant cultural script.
In what perhaps remains the iconic depiction of “sex-positive feminism” and aspirational hedonism, the 36-year-old protagonist of “Sex and the City,” Carrie Bradshaw, who is “scared” of marriage, asks her fiancé, Aidan Shaw, “Why can’t we just keep things the way they are, just live together?”
Aidan replies: “I looked at you tonight from across the room and I thought, I love her. And she loves me. And what are we waiting for?” He continues: “People fall in love, they get married. That’s what they do.”
“Not necessarily,” Carrie intones.
Indeed.
As late as the turn of the millennium, when “Sex and the City” first aired on HBO, many of us were still running on the fumes of the old order. What made Aidan the show’s apologist for traditional coupledom was his conviction that love and marriage go together. What made “Sex and the City” edgy was its assumption that they might not.
Even Aidan was not willing or able to offer any coherent or convincing case for tying the knot beyond his own feelings for Carrie and his readiness to attain the expected state of matrimony. In other words, by 2000, the soulmate myth was as good as it got in our mainstream popular culture.
Those chickens have now come home to roost (or not). So slowly and yet so ubiquitously has “the long marriage” been discarded as an ideal that we are now like the proverbial frogs who remained in the water that boiled them; the heat was turned up so gradually that we did not notice. As a result, we have blithely turned society’s very foundation into a personal, “take it or leave it” lifestyle preference.
Meanwhile, Wilcox, who was warning all the time that this pot would boil and that the nation would suffer as a result, is really arguing underneath it all that we should view marriage not as just one more personal choice but as a vocation.
I wish that every young American would read Wilcox’s corpus. He provides a desperately needed corrective to a culture broadly addicted to a kind of individualism that undermines the importance of marital partnerships and married childbearing. However, the decline of marriage does not exist in a vacuum, nor does Wilcox’s prescription to counter it. Wilcox tends not to incorporate his Catholicism directly into his case for marriage. This makes sense. To make any progress in resuscitating marriage, we need more Americans of all faiths and of no faith to embrace the nuptial life.
But Wilcox’s argument for the embrace of (younger) marriage is ultimately predicated on a notion of marriage as the cornerstone of most well-lived adult lives. Can his promotion of marriage as a foundational commitment worth choosing, both in theory and in practice, persuade any significant number of people to tie the knot—and to do so sooner—in an increasingly secular age that moves ever further from the forms and formalities of its Judeo-Christian foundations?
I am skeptical. After all, Wilcox has been sounding the alarm about the decline of marriage, and offering good reasons for individuals to get married, for decades. In that time, marriage rates have continued to plummet.
Why? Because at bottom, the answer to that question no one asked my retreat leader—if marriage is harder than being single, why would you get married?—cannot be answered by appeals to the data on why marriage is beneficial despite being hard. Willingness to embrace the hard thing is not really about returns in money or sex or the division of household labor.
It is about faith. Faith that I am called to embrace the responsibility of an outward-looking partnership. Faith that a discerning and other-regarding married couple becomes something greater as a unit than the sum of the two individuals involved. Faith that I am expected to take my place, not as a creator or as a ward, but as a steward of others. And faith that I am part of a broader national and international community—from my spouse and my children to those who have passed on to eternity and those who have not yet been born.
Faith also provides us with a reason to have hope. Perhaps I am being Pollyannaish, but I do hold out hope that young people who have been raised from infancy with the idea that perpetual singleness is normal and normative might be looking for something new, and thus be readier to hear Wilcox than their counterparts were a decade ago. And while I am far from optimistic, I also hope that the reaction against prevailing norms and search for meaning in the verboten (which has always driven young people to rebel against their elders) could eventually drive the youth of a secular nation back to religious observance. That would be correlated with more marriage, too.
After all, in addition to all the positives Wilcox cites, there is one thing counterintuitively working in favor of those who want to see more marriages among Americans: We have reached a point where vocational marriage constitutes an alternative lifestyle. And as Wilcox knows better than anyone, alternative lifestyles always have the potential to go mainstream and make inroads on seemingly intractable norms.
Here’s hoping.
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