Last night, we went to a restaurant and sat near a large extended Indian family of about 15, ranging from an elderly matriarch to a newborn handed from one doting relative to another. They were clearly content, and not boisterously so. I would bet a lot of money that there will be no divorces in that family, at least compared with other families staring at their cell phones throughout the restaurant meal.
Brad Wilcox, professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, would likely agree. Wilcox, who is also the Director of the National Marriage Project at Virginia, makes the case in Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization that married people with children are happier than unmarried people with children, who are about as happy as married people without children. To many of us, his assessments are merely common sense, whereas to others they may come across as smug, glib, or even bigoted, especially because he sees shared religious values and connections as helpful to marital success. What is useful for the complacent conservatives and sputtering liberals alike are the impressive datasets that Wilson has amassed to make his case.
He identifies four groups that are likelier to have successful marriages: Conservatives, the Faithful, Strivers, and Asian-Americans. In all cases, the spouses work hard on behaviors that lead to successful marriages, and put their families first. Successful couples tend to share their finances and his last name. Even liberal women look for men who are “good providers.” Couples avoid situations in which they might be tempted to stray—remember the criticism Mike Pence got for his rule never to eat a meal alone with a female staffer? But nobody ever was able to accuse him of infidelity. Families do things together, whether chores or outings. They also situate themselves within communities that share and reinforce values favorable to marriage.
The community reinforcement becomes even more important when you consider that our society incessantly broadcasts the joys of individualism, and often dismisses marriage and children as an impediment to personal fulfillment and happiness. Read any advice column in the newspaper. A common trope is that children suffer more when parents are unhappily married, and will thrive after the divorce. Wilcox’s research shows this is definitely not the case, especially when children land in a post-divorce household with an unrelated male. Divorce if you must, but do not rationalize that your children will be better off for your new freedom (obviously excluding cases of marital abuse). Wilcox’s research also shows that unmarried couples with children are less happy and less secure than their married counterparts.
As a young adult, it is hard to ignore the broader message that your career or just “having fun,” are more important than finding the right spouse. If you are in a large urban area, in a left-dominated field such as education or publishing, or inclined to vote Democratic, you will be vulnerable to the siren songs that tell you your loneliness is something to be celebrated, “Eat, Pray, Love,” and all that. The challenge of finding the right spouse is complicated by the insistence that you don’t need one, and that few are worth the hassles involved. By the time you realize the sirens are wrong, it may be too late. The drumbeat has been steady since the 1970s, but exacerbated by the cultural divide that has opened since the “post-2014 Great Awokening, in which far-left takes on gender, race, and social justice have achieved new salience among progressive minded young adults.”
But Wilcox goes beyond simply indicating who is happiest. He is passionate in insisting that the trend away from marriage has been hardest on working class people. The rich and affluent can afford their affectations, whether unwed motherhood or a single income, but the working class cannot. Marriage allows two people to share their assets, and buy a home that is the cornerstone of longterm savings. Marriage binds a man to the children he fathers, so that he is as likely to raise them as their mother. Government benefits such as the Earned Income Tax Credit are not available to married couples, making marriage a penalty for many couples.
Wilcox excoriates our ruling class for not giving vocal support—cultural and economic—to marriage and family life across America, even as they practice these virtues themselves. It is a strange hypocrisy, in which these elites preach hedonism while themselves obeying all the rules that produce strong families.
Wilcox’s data shows that almost half the happiness advantage enjoyed by college-educated Americans, can be explained by the fact they are more likely to be married than less educated men and women. Nor do these elites use their talent or position in society to write op-eds, make films, develop curricula for schools or advance policies that tell the truth about these realities. In their private lives, these “Strivers” forge strong marital and family bonds, but they have dropped the ball for others as they are driven by their progressive commitments to “honor family diversity, a belief in individual choice, a desire to signal their adherence to the current zeitgeist, and an unwillingness to offend their peers.”
As a result of this “elite dereliction of duty,” Wilcox contends that working class children, men, and women are much more likely to end up undereducated, unhappy, and poor, or even jailed. This has consequences for our civilization, as ordinary people are deprived of their shot at the American Dream.
Interestingly, Wilcox says that the dilemma for young people may be worsening with political polarization. Young women are becoming more liberal and young men more conservative, raising the prospect that they may have difficulty finding a partner who shares their politics, or more fundamentally, their values.
Wilcox offers policy prescriptions that will challenge both ends of the political spectrum. He accuses policymakers in recent years of rarely pursuing or prioritizing family first policies despite a trillion dollars spent each year on social welfare policies. The right is focused on market efficiencies that destroy jobs and sometimes communities depending on those industries. He suggests a “family wage,” an expanded child tax credit, eradicating the “marriage penalty,” and promoting other “family first” policies.
The left’s faith in the state’s ability to seize the core functions of families is equally misguided, as is its assumption that women want to be in the workplace rather than at home with children. School choice is important to help families arrange their schedules to maximize stability at home. His research with Wendy Wang found that only 3 percent of millennials who earned at least a high school diploma, worked full time, and waited until marriage to have children were in poverty by the time they reached adulthood. Public campaigns to end smoking and teen pregnancy have helped change behavior, Wilcox argues, so why not widely publicize these facts to help normalize marriage as the key to a good life?
The book is not perfect. The solutions that are common sense to many may come across as too pat to others. Not everyone finds a soulmate, or even an acceptable mate, although it would be helpful if young people started looking earlier and parents spoke to rather than just modeling norms favorable to marriage. Wilcox acknowledges that marriage and childrearing involves hard work and dedication, noting his own family’s challenges. Building a career matters too. His call for religious-affiliated organizations to challenge the overwhelming progressivism from our pop culture, schools, and our media is the equivalent of waking David to confront a looming Goliath—David is still a young shepherd and Goliath remains Goliath.
This would be a good time for a new administration that recognizes the national—not just personal—value of marriage to bake it into departments and policy prescriptions. If it comes from the victory of a man who has been married three times himself, so be it. As Samuel Johnson advised, “to be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition.”
Paula Weiss is the author of The Antifan Girlfriend and The Deplorable Underground.