What Is the Answer to Declining Interest in Marriage?

Individuals and families are happier with healthy marriages, and happy families strengthen their communities, states, and nations. Yet, marriage is in decline, and no one knows for sure how to blame. An article authored by Maria Baer and Brad Wilcox and published at the Deseret News discusses what is behind the decline. 

A recent Pew poll shows that the share of girls who are seniors in high school and are most likely to “choose to get married” some day declined from 83% in 1993 to 61% in 2023. During the same years, the share of young men who hope to marry remained around 75%. The Pew poll is not the only poll showing such findings.

Other polls show similar findings. The Survey Center on American Life recently found that a majority of single women (55%) think that single women are happier than married women (they’re really not – more on that in a moment) whereas a majority (68%) of single men take the opposite view.

There is no debating that women’s confidence in and devotion to marriage is falling. But there is robust debate about whether that’s a bad thing, and what’s causing it. Theories about young women’s declining interest in wedlock typically fall into two camps. The problem is either 1) the boys, or 2) the (feminist) girls.

Proponents in the first camp, usually feminists, suggest women still value marriage; they just can’t find enough marriageable men. Writing for The New York Times in 2023, Anna Louie Sussman said the “state of men today” is too dispiriting for women: too many men are drug-addled, unemployed or underemployed, socially inept and emotionally unavailable. Women who take this view make much of the fact that men are attending and graduating from college at lower rates than women, that they are not working as much as they used to, that many are addicted to porn, and that they often seem unable or unwilling to “engage in a conversation and maintain a normal human relationship.”

This camp will point to the fact that marriage rates amidst the upper-middle class (including liberals!) haven’t fallen as precipitously as other groups. See, they’ll say, women haven’t been brainwashed by the HBO show “Sex and the City” and the #Girlboxx era – they still want to get married! There are just not enough good men left.

This camp has a point. It’s true that too many men are floundering on many fronts – from education to employment – and that a kind of “male malaise” has made a growing number of young men unappealing to the opposite sex.

But there is an undeniable ideological dimension to falling marriage rates, too. Data show marriage has lost its appeal primarily for women on the left, who are much less likely than conservative women to marry and have children, as a new Institute for Family Studies report shows. Liberal women are also much less likely to desire marriage and children than their conservative peers. Another recent poll from NBC News found that liberal Gen Z women rate “being married” and “having children” as among their lowest priorities for a successful life, far below a fulfilling job, financial security and emotional health.

Many feminists no doubt see women’s increasing wariness toward marriage as a welcome sign of enlightenment: they shouldn’t value marriage, they say, because it’s not good for them. In their view, married women are on the losing end of a losing bargain, saddled with the lion’s share of domestic duties and the crushing “mental load” of raising a family while reaping 80 cents on their husband’s dollar for whatever professional work they do manage to achieve….

This theory carries weight too. There is no doubt that marriage can be hard at times, and modern American marriage is hard in particular ways. The 50/50 split is a myth. Women bear a bigger burden at home than do men. It’s hard to afford life on one salary, and it’s nearly impossible to be a working mother and to feel like you’re filling any of your roles as well as you’d like.

But hard doesn’t necessarily mean unhappy. Our research at the Institute for Family Studies routinely reveals that the women in America who are forging the most meaningful and happy lives are married mothers. In fact, married mothers are nearly twice as likely to be “very happy” with their lives as their single, childless peers.

And while marriage rates increasingly fall along ideological lines, female happiness doesn’t: the newest data show that married liberal women with children are now a staggering 30 percentage points more likely to say they are “very happy” or “pretty happy” than liberal women who are single and childless. What’s even more striking is the trend among prime-aged women 25 to 55: happiness among single, childless liberal women has plummeted since “the Great Awokening” of the last decade while it remains high for their peers who have managed to marry and have a family. The tragic irony is that the very group of women who are most likely to think marriage and family are an obstacle to happiness – women on the left – are less happy than their peers on the right in part because they are less likely to be married with children.

The authors question why people are not getting married if marriage and family are truly good for women. Has the feminist movement brainwashed women, or are there no marriageable men? The authors say that there is a common enemy that is overlooked by both theories: Big Tech.

It is not just people cheating online, men playing too many video games, dating apps that catfish. Spending time watching other people do things online pushes “both men and women away from marriage.” Such activity makes men less marriageable, particularly to “liberal women who spend the most time online, to see the point of marriage in the first place.” The internet also makes porn more accessible for men.

Young men’s failure to thrive is one of the tragic consequences of a digital revolution that has distracted them with dopamine hits from socializing, dating, doing well in school and holding down a full-time job.

But the internet also presents problems to women, especially on the left. There’s divorce porn, for instance, where feminist heroines “create whisper networks” of women triumphantly leaving their families and where seemingly every movie, show, book and podcast that brands itself as “celebrating women” do it in the same way: by selling a picture of unencumbered womanhood. It’s also the place where divorced single moms from Brooklyn propagate the message that “Married heterosexual motherhood in America … is a game no one wins.” Messaging like this is poisoning too many young women’s views regarding marriage.

The nature and content of digital offerings are degrading men’s marriageability and women’s, especially liberal women’s, interest in putting a ring on it. Neither sex is developing the capacity to embrace self-sacrifice or long-suffering commitment, precisely the virtues which marriage requires. They’re also what makes marriage so life-giving, character building and personally gratifying. Psychologists have long documented this paradox: deep, lasting happiness is much more strongly tied to meaning than it is to pleasure. The internet calls the kind of virtues that sustain love and marriage “toxic.” The happiness research calls it “the answer.” …