Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Brad Wilcox. He's a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and director of the National Marriage Project. Many online discussions are casting doubt on the role of marriage. Is it actually a bad deal for men and women? Is it dangerous for people to get into? What does the evidence actually suggest at the life outcomes for married people's happiness, especially in a world with rising divorces? Expect to learn if marriage is a terrible idea for men in the modern era, Is it correlation between your marital status and financial status, what happens to men and women's bodies after they get married, why marriage rates are declining, whether cohabitation is good enough for raising children, whether you should have a prenup, and much more. Interesting conversation. This is a hot topic at the moment. Both sides of the internet seem to say that marriage is a very bad idea, and Brad is sticking his neck out saying that he believes otherwise. Very intrigued to see what the the next few years of marriage rates and divorce rates have in store, whether it's going to be another counter revolution or trends will continue the way that they are.

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Plus, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify. Com/modernwisdom, all lowercase, that's Shopify. Com/modernwisdom, to grow your business no matter what stage you're in. But now, ladies and gentlemen, Please welcome Brad Wilcox. What do you think about people on the Internet who say that marriage is a terrible deal for men and women?

Yeah, Chris, I've been playing the marriage horn for a long time, and it's primarily been critiquing folks on the left and the mainstream media, as you know, I've gone after folks at Bloomberg, New York Times, and elsewhere. What's new is we're getting all these voices from the online right, from the red pill right, like Andrew Tate and Pearl Davis, who are saying things like in Pearl's words, that marriage is a death sentence for men, or in Andrew Tate's words, that basically There's no return on marriage. There's zero advantage, is his terminology, from men when it comes to getting married. We're getting it now from the left and the right here. I think it's in some ways emblematic of the difficulties that, of course, comes primarily from the women on the left and primarily from the men on the right. It's partly a reflection of the difficulties that a lot of younger adults are facing in finding a spouse, finding a partner who would be worthy of marriage. That's probably an expression of frustration. But I think it also conveys what I call the Midas mindset. That's this idea that what really matters in life is work, it's money, it's building your own brand.

And I think in different ways, these folks, too, are propagating this Midas mindset because they think that real action is where your work is at, where your brand is at, where your bank account's at.

You definitely see this from the left, women on the left, in a perhaps surprising way that you wouldn't have done 50 years ago, whereby it is all about financial security and being a boss bitch and being independent and I don't need no man. If he comes to me, fine, but I'm not going to go looking for him. So that seems to be the equivalent, that odd horseshoe theory, where some elements of the right and some elements of the left end up saying very similar talking points, even though they don't agree on everything else.

Yeah. Now, what's striking is how similar their message is. They're encouraging women and men separately to stay free of family encumbrances, stay free of marriage, and to pursue individualism, to pursue money, pursue career in different ways, and that that's the pathway towards fulfill, when in fact, the data lead us obviously in a very different direction.

What is happening with current marriage rates? Give me the 30,000-foot view.

Yeah, so I think that's certainly one of the pieces of bad news that I convey in the book, that is the marriage rates come down about 65 %. What We're seeing now in the adult population is just under 50 % of folks are married. We're, that's a new record, a new low.

Where would that have been, if it's at 50 % now or just under, where would that have been 30 years ago, 50 years ago, whatever?

75%, we're talking like the late '60s, early '70s, basically. That's obviously a big change in recent decades. Then we're also projecting, too, between 90% of folks would have been getting married, coming of age in the '70s, give or take. Whereas today we're projecting that probably more than one in four young adults in their 20s today will never get married. This is record demographic territory that we're entering into. It just means there are going to be a lot of permanent bachelors and permanent bachelorettes, at least when it comes to having put a ring on it in this culture today.

What is driving this? We've talked about some cultural forces that are going on and some memes and some movements and stuff like that. But from my position, they usually seem to be in reaction. It's a cope. Not always. There are people who genuinely believe these things, but there's a lot of people retreating into their inner citadels of, I have struggled to make this work, therefore this is the philosophy that I find. And if what you say is correct, that you're going to have more people who are potentially participants of this new party than people who aren't, that's going to allow it to proliferate more and get more and more popular. But structurally, what's happening? What are the other big dynamics that are causing this increase in lack of marriage?

Yeah, well, I think, obviously, there's an economic story here. On the one hand, as a society, we're very affluence. We don't depend upon marriage economically like we did in earlier centuries. That's part of the story. At the same time, the economy has moved in directions that have made a whole class of men less economically valuable, less needed in today's world, and so they're less attractive as husbands. They're more likely to get divorced if they do end up married down the road. I think the fact that men who are not oriented towards the information economy are struggling more is part of the economic story. When it comes to policies, a lot of our policies end up penalizing marriage unwittingly. Things like Medicaid, for instance. I've talked to, just recently here in Charlottesville, I talked to We're having a marriage event at a restaurant, and so one of the waitresses is engaging me afterwards, and she was saying, Well, she and her husband are together, but they're not legally married. They've got two kids. I'm like, What's the story? Well, she gets her insurance for Medicaid, and were they to get married, they'd move above that threshold and lose access to Medicaid for her and for her two kids.

There's ways in which are public policies unintentionally penalized marriage. Culturally, I think, obviously, seeing a big shift towards individualism since the late 1960s that have made us think more about ourselves and less about others, and that plays into marriage and family in obvious ways. We've also seen a parallel shift away from religion, which is also a big factor, I think, in the decline of marriage, since religion is a big predictor, both of getting married and staying married and having children. Then I think there's just been this, what I just described earlier, as a a minus mindset, where I think in part, the rise of the Internet, the rise of smartphones, urbanization as well. There's a lot of good work that's been done on this in Asia. From psychologists in Asia, just basically have made people focus a lot more on status and on their prospects in the mating sector, but less on actually putting a ring on it and transitioning into having kids and having a family. There's a arrested, it's not adolescence so much as an arrested young adulthood where people are just focusing on that 20-something stage of life and not transitioning into marriage and parenthood.

And that's also, I think, and that's just magnified, accelerated by the way in which technology is allowing people to live the life, the online life, the Instagram life, and all the, I'd say, transient and short term values that are magnified on platforms like Instagram and now TikTok, too.

What are the self-reports saying? This is your assessment, looking at the data with your biases and all the rest of it. Sure. What are people saying when they are asked by psychologists and sociologists, why Why are you not yet married? Why don't you want to get married? If you don't want to get married, what's the word on the ground?

Well, there certainly are people who are saying that they're not ready for marriage yet. They're not ready to settle down. They're enjoying their 20 something years having fun. They're trying to get their job, their career launched successfully. They think there's some obstacle between being married and being focused on their work. People the lower income strata. Like I mentioned, some of them will talk about the way in which public policy penalizes marriage. A lot of folks say it's hard to meet someone who meets their standards, both in terms of having their stuff together, a A lot of women say that men in their lives aren't sufficiently grown up, don't have that clear sense of mission and direction, that capacity to care for themselves and care for others. There are men who would report to you that the women in their lives are too materialistic. They're looking for just a breadwinner or a provider, but not someone who's going to really be a partner to them. They're just a whole range of different reasons that you hear from people when it comes to why they're either not able to marry or why marriage is not right now appealing to them or why marriage is not even on their longer term horizon.

What about divorce divorce rates. What's the insight there?

Divorce has come... The statistic people think is still true is that they think that one in two marriages today will end in divorce. But what we actually see in the research is it's probably closer to around 40%, a little bit north of 40% of marriages will end in divorce today. Divorce rates come down since 1980 by about 40%. It rose dramatically from the late '60s to 1980. It basically more than doubled in that era. I think what's important for people to realize is that all the tumult that we saw with the divorce revolution of 1970s and early '80s has settled down.

But that's in line with decreasing rates of marriage. Correct. We have a selection effect going on here.

Correct. The kinds of people today who are getting married are more educated, they're more affluent, and they're relatively more religious. They're also in a country like the US, maybe a country too, like the UK, they're more likely to have be immigrants, non-natives. In my book, I talk about how Asian-Americans are disproportionately married in the US. We've seen a lot of immigrants coming from Asia, obviously in recent decades, for instance. They're more likely to be married than native-born Americans, but just in general, immigrants are more likely to be married in the US than native-born Americans are as well.

Yeah, that is interesting. So recent years have seen a rise in unpartnered Americans as as well, especially young men. 34 % of young women between 18, 29 are single, 63 % of young men in that same age bracket are also single. So it's not just a no marriage culture, it's a no dating culture as well.

So we have seen dramatic declines in dating, although that statistic that you mentioned has been challenged by my colleague, nick Wolfman. He thinks that there's a gap between young women and young men there, but it's not quite that. Or young men are more likely to be single, but it's not quite that dramatic. But still, it is the case that we're seeing record shares of young adults who have not gotten married, higher among young men, obviously, than young women, because women tend to marry guys who are a bit older than they are. We have seen evidence from people like Jean Twenge that dating is down. I talk about the closing of the American heart unfolding, where, again, we're seeing for 20 somethings, a record share of them, projected never to marry more than one in four. Then when it comes to fertility, we think that there'll be also continued declines in infertility in the US as well.

One of the biggest memes, one of the most common memes that you hear about on the internet, especially for men, but also in some regards for women, given that they're socioeconomically more viable on their own now, is that marriage is a bad deal financially. What does the data actually say?

Yeah. So it was striking that when I was finishing up this book, Bloomberg had an article that said, Women who get single and don't have kids are getting richer. And it claimed that women who are foregoing marriage and motherhood were better off than women who are married. And that's not true. What we do see is that women who are married are markedly more likely to be well off, and they're also much less likely to be They're about 80% less likely to be poor, even controlling for things like race and age and education. Then they have about 10 times the assets heading into retirement in their 50s compared to their single female peers. The story for men is pretty similar when it comes to assets in one's 50s. Then men earn between 10 and 25% more as as married men than their single peers. Now, part of that's a selection effect where the kinds of men who are getting married are more likely to have the ethic that would lead to financial success. We also see evidence, though, too, from twin studies that men who are married are doing better financially than their twin who is not married.

It's pretty rigorous evidence that something about marriage per se is associated with with men flourishing financially.

What do you think is the mechanism?

What actually a colleague of mine here at UVA found was that men who are married are less likely to get fired, for instance, even controlling for things like race and age and education. She also found, too, that men who are married are less likely to quit a job without having first found a replacement job, whereas a single guy is just more likely to say, That's it. I've had it. I'm out of here. And then they're unemployed and struggling to find a job. So I think being married just makes guys more prudent about their approach to finding work.

What do you say to the guys that have serious concerns? Getting married is a huge risk because she's going to leave me and take half of everything that I own and I'm going to be stuck paying either her life or child support or something for the rest of my life. Pre-ups are not even worth the paper that they're written on. I see a lot of this in comment sections and on the Internet. What's the truth and what's your take on it?

Well, I think the tough thing about this is there's a mindset thing, which I'm sure you're familiar with in a minisphere. If your mindset is revolving around fear, if you're thinking about the D-word divorce, heading into marriage, in your marriage, you're more likely to end up getting divorced. If you get a prenup, my own book indicates that folks who have prenups have lower marital happiness, and they're more likely to be thinking that divorce is on the horizon. It's one of those things where if you have more of an all-in mindset, I am fully in, and you obviously marry someone who shares that mindset where you're not talking about divorce, you're not thinking divorce, you don't really see it as an option, you're much more likely to be not just avoiding divorce quirk, but flourishing in your marriage because you're going to have a greater foundation of security and trust in your marriage. But beyond that, it's worth pointing out, as I do in the book, that there are ways in which it looks like people can solidify their marriage and reduce their risk of divorce. We see, for instance, is that people who go on regular date nights, over one study, had about 25% less risk of getting divorced.

People who are religious, especially who attend church together, are between 30 and 50% less likely to get divorced. Folks who don't commit infidelity are markedly less likely to get divorced. But my point is that there are things you can do. If you're not religious, the thing I would say is, surround yourself with couples who are stably married. We know from the work of Nicholas Cristal, racus at Yale, for instance, that if your sister gets divorced, if your best friend gets divorced in the face of ordinary marital difficulties that most of us have, if we've been married for 5, 10, 15, 20 years, whatever, your odds of divorce skyrocket. But if your sister is stably married and has navigated the inevitable challenges associated with married life, if your best friend has stably remained Being stably married and navigated those challenges successfully, your odds of getting divorced go way down. There's a birds of a feather flock together thing here, Chris. You need to be really, I think, deliberate once you're married or as you're heading into marriage about picking friends who are with you and for you in your marriage and who are living the kinds of lives that lend themselves to stable families.

If you surround yourself or street so often networks that are more family friendly, that's also a protective factor as well.

Pick your couple's date night partners carefully then is the advice.

We've had Governor Mark Sanford, that Republican governor in South Carolina, he was hiking the Appalachian Trail with the story he gave to one journalist. Well, it turns out he was in South America, romancing a woman who wasn't his wife because he and his buddies would go every year on some international trip that was just crazy. I think in Mark Sanford's case, part of the reason that he ended up divorced was he wasn't good about picking friends who were going to be leading him down the best path marriage-wise.

The obvious, I guess, criticism or question here that gets opened up is, why should I, as a man or a woman, let go of these things that make me happy? I want to go to South America with my boys. I don't want to spend my time playing fucking back gammon or Scrabble or charades with this bunch of other couples. I don't want to restrict my freedom and my opportunities to choose what I want, to sleep with who I want to go where I want to work, how I want to leave a job when I want. All of these things sound like restrictions on my freedoms. What's in it for me? If I'm so happy doing all of these things, what about happiness? What are the happiest people from a relationship status perspective?

Yeah, well, I think it's important just to basically stress that, yeah, getting married does mean taking options off the table, both in terms of romantic partners, in terms of your free time. It does mean you're sacrificing a lot in terms of your freedom. But the point that I would is that we are social animals. That's Aristotle's term. We're hardwired to connect. It ends up being the case that friendships and family relationships are the things that are most important for our sense of meaning, purpose, happiness. There's just no question today that married men and women, especially married fathers and married mothers, are the happiest folks out there in the prime of life. I'm looking at folks 18 to 55, and finding that when it comes to reports of being very happy with your life, that both women and men who are married moms and dads are about twice as likely to be very happy with their lives compared to their single and childless peers. That's a pretty big difference. Then when it comes to a range of indicators, from money to career success to sexual frequency, to religious attendance, to self-rated health, these are all things that predict happiness for ordinary Americans, and pretty powerfully so.

But none of those factors, Chris, compares to a good marriage. Women and men who are happily married are about 545% more likely to say that they're very happy with their lives. As I've looked at this data set called the GSS, the General Social Survey, it's like the gold standard for social attitudes and behaviors in the US. I can't find any variable in the GSS that predicts global life satisfaction like a good marriage. When I've mentioned that statistic, the pushback that I get from more progressive academics is, Well, yeah, it's a selection effect, Brad. The kinds of women and men who are happy are going to be happily married. But my response to that is, Well, you would expect then that you would see a similar story playing out for a career satisfaction indicator in the GSS. And while it's true that people who are happy with their jobs are also happy with their lives. Again, there's no factor that predicts happiness in the GSS, like a good marriage. We see other data sets, too, from Harvard, for instance, tracking men longitudinally, that come to similar conclusions as well. I think it's just important to underline that, yes, marriage requires sacrifices, lots of them, but there are major returns on that investment for most folks.

The final piece that I would say about the happiness story is that I looked at generosity in marriage a number of years ago. What I found was that having a spouse, a husband or wife who was generous towards you, boosted your happiness in the marriage in ways that I think expected. But being generous towards your wife, generous towards your husband, was an even better predictor of your happiness in the marriage. Again, if that's one of the best predictors of happiness overall, I think, suggests to us that living for others, as long as you make a good choice, and that's obviously a huge caveat, living for your spouse, living for your kids, living for your kin, and living for your friends to an important extent. These are the things, obviously, that gives our lives meaning, direction, purpose, and a sense of happiness. Living for ourselves, I think often ends up making us miserable.

One of the things that people who are reticent about getting married or concerned about it have the same way as the financial concern is, well, I'm rolling the dice. At least if I'm single, my happiness lies exclusively in the power of my own hands. Whereas if I get into a marriage, I am now my happiness is contingent on this other person. And we try and do our best to screen whoever it is and work out how crazy or not crazy they might be. But there is a non-zero chance that we get that wrong. And that now means that I have sacrificed okay singleton-ness for unhappy marriedness. Rolling that dice, that roulette spin, it causes trepidation for people.

Yeah, Chris, and I think it's a legitimate concern. And as we discussed before, about 40% of folks getting married today will get divorced. So it is a major, I think, concern. But I think there There are two other things that I would say to that person. Number one is that nothing in life worth having, I think, doesn't require a measure of risk and a potential for real failure in terms of whether it's professional success us, whether it's being a great athlete, whatever it might be, all these things that I think, tend to lend our lives a sense of meaning, direction, and happiness often require risk. And that's true, I think, for love and marriage as well. The other thing that I would say, too, is is that even when marriages fail, and I certainly have friends whose marriages have failed, both women and men. What I also see, though, is oftentimes they have kids, and in the immediate aftermath of divorce, that can be extraordinarily difficult, both for them and for their children. But as they move into their 50s and 60s and 70s, if they're deliberate about continuing to be a good father, a good mother, these friends that might have gotten divorced derive a tremendous sense of meaning and satisfaction from their relationships with their kids and then their grandkids.

So that also, I think, can be a a consolation for folks who have gotten divorced. And one more thing I would add, too, is that, again, I think there are, I talk about in the book, four groups of folks who have much greater odds of being both happily married and for the most part, stably married. Those groups are Asian-Americans. They are religious Americans. They're college-educated Americans, and they're conservative Americans. There are things that, again, you can do both as a spouse and in terms of just being cognizant of the communities where you're-Marrying an Asian?

Is that your advice?

No, I'm just saying... The point I would make about the Asian finding is that there are certain kinds of values in certain kinds of communities. What Asians have is, among other things, a keen recognition oftentimes of how much marriage matters for their kids. That conditions how they deal with marital difficulties and challenges. They tend to be surrounded by kin who are stably married. They often are taking advice from kin about who to marry, especially, obviously from Indian context. You If you're not Asian, you can take some lessons there, too, for your own marital path.

All of that data that you've just come up with there to do with happiness and marital status, how robust is it? Are we going to find out that this is replication crisis in 10 years time? Because that's obviously, Oh, well, that data doesn't seem to be sufficiently this or that or the other. How much are you able to bet that that's accurate and correct?

Well, I think when it comes Just the things like marital stability, there's just no... I've looked at a lot of data sets when it comes to looking at the role of ethnicity and Asian- No, sorry.

The relationship between married, whether or not you are married or single, and your happiness in life and your life outcome satisfaction?

Yeah, that's, again, lots of data sets. The GSS, the American Family Survey, MITUS. There are lots of data sets that show that there's a strong association. Now, the The question is whether or not it's causal. I think that's where the debate comes. There's just no question that folks who are married are more likely to see that they're satisfied with their lives, they report more meaningful lives, and less loneliness, and just In England, the US, Europe, it's definitely a common story.

How does this relationship between marital status and life satisfaction, happiness, loneliness, how does change across time and with age?

I think the best story that I saw, the best study on this that I saw was actually from Britain, where you are from. And what it suggests, it was the biggest... Obviously, there's a honeymoon premium where people, when they're first married, they enjoy, especially large premiums when it comes to happiness. But this particular study from the UK, which is tracking women and men over time, there's a midlife piece where the premium was biggest for folks in midlife, I think in their 40s and 50s. That's, I think, a part, too, because often there are challenges associated with raising kids, with changes in, obviously, your health, yourself. People are becoming aware of their mortality, career changes, all that stuff is all coming out in your 50s, oftentimes. And so to have the benefit of a copilot, I think, can be really valuable for folks.

Yeah. There's this strange smile-shaped graph to happiness and life satisfaction. So for the people that are just listening, if you imagine it's not a particularly smooth smile, it's more like a Joker smile. But if you had the beginning of life on the left, I think It's probably like 13 or 16 or something on the left, and then you've got 80 on the right. And it does seem to really dip down. You know, 40s, basically most of your 40s seems to be pretty rough, and then it picks back up through your 50s. I I think I'm right in saying there's at least some data that suggests the single biggest risk of suicidality are men aged 40 to 45. It's this very particular demographic of men. So it's specifically, again, for men, I'm going to guess that being married is prophylactic against this period of lower mood.

Yeah, and one of the biggest factors predicting both suicide and more broadly, deaths of despair for men is marriage. Married guys are much less likely to end up dying from drinking or drugs or suicide more directly.

What about divorced guys, though?

Yeah, they have a higher risk of all those bad things as well. Definitely.

Again, we're talking about this. It seems like a bit of a theme. It's this risk-reward ratio, I think, that a lot of people are looking at. You hinted it something earlier on with the start around if your sister or your best friend gets divorced, then the likelihood of you getting divorced goes up, too. There is definitely this mimetic thing that's going on. I think motherhood, a lot of motherhood can be laid at the feet of this. If you are not around mothers, you don't see the joy that motherhood brings to mothers. Therefore, what do you see? Well, you see what everyone else sees, which is Instagram, which is a trip to Bali and brunch with the girls and wearing cute heels and not getting stretch marks and all the rest of things. So you absorb the aggregate culture as opposed to the microculture because the aggregate culture doesn't optimize for things that aren't flashy and easily displayed on the internet. And I think that you must have thought of this, too, this mimetic nature of the R-naught number of marriage being either above or below one based on how many people are getting married at the moment.

Yeah, no, I think definitely this goes back to the power of the smartphone, social media, and the Internet. I think one reason we have seen marriage come down and fertility come down in recent years is that people don't fully appreciate how much putting a ring on it can matter in positive ways. There was a study done recently that was suggesting that today a lot of folks think that, yeah, actually men benefit from marriage, but women do not. When you look at the happiness story in the general social survey, what you see basically is that, as I mentioned before, married moms are twice as likely to be very happy as a single and child as women. What you see in basically different data sets is that 60% of married moms say that their lives are meaningful most or all the time, compared to only 36% of single and childless women. They're also much more likely to say that they're lonely lonely. When it comes to things like meaning, loneliness, and happiness, what you're seeing on Instagram or TikTok doesn't correspond to what we see in representative population surveys of men and women.

But it is difficult to convey that in a 280-character tweet or in a cool TikTok video. And there's this interesting trade-off between happiness, pleasure, and meaning and satisfaction in some ways. That it's very difficult to portray meaning and life satisfaction through a cool Instagram post. It's pretty easy to show pleasure and happiness through that, or at least present pleasure and happiness through that. So, yeah, in that regard, I think anything, and this is anything that's difficult, anything which is a little bit more subtle, if someone can get the gains of appearing to have the thing without having to the hard work of getting the thing, they're going to optimize for that.

That's the problem with being online too much, right, Chris? Obviously, there's some work done by a famous psychologist at Toronto, and I'm forgetting his name right now, but it's just basically talking about how folks who are experiencing both a lot of suffering, which wouldn't surprise us, but also virtually no suffering are the worst off. Folks who experience that middle range of suffering are actually the best off. They're the most emotionally resilient, the best in spirit. Actually, we're built to some extent to experience some degree of pain, some degree of suffering, some drama in our lives. If all you're doing is eating well, drinking well, and spending all your day on this device, it doesn't actually end up well for you longer term, is the point.

How does being married change or impact mental and physical health?

Well, in terms of things like depression, anxiety, they tend to go down. Happiness goes up. As I said before, loominess goes down. When it comes to physical health, there the story is a little bit more complicated. On one indicator in particular, women and men who are married do worse, and that is their weight. When you're married, you're off the market, and you're eating at home more and whatever, maybe snacking more, et cetera. You're not making that same effort to keep the pounds off. We do see that's where... But generally speaking, folks who are married are doing better health-wise. For instance, studies of looking at... Indicate that people are more likely to recover and do okay in the wake of some cancer diagnosis. If you have parents, older parents, been to the hospital, you see that oftentimes that spouse is really working the nurses and doctors in ways that tend to redound to the benefit of her husband or his wife. There's just no question that folks who are married do better on the vast majority of health outcomes and live longer, especially true for guys.

They think it's-What's the stats then?

8, 9 years is what I've read and work done by Linda Waight and Maggie Gallagher. That men who are stably married live in 8-9 years longer than their peers who don't get married or who get divorced. And women who are married live longer, too, but they don't enjoy the same premium as as married men do. That's the part we think, too, because men who are single are just much more likely to do crazy things like ride motorcycles, get in fights in bars on a Friday or Saturday night, what have you. So men are just more prone to engaging the kinds of risky behaviors that put them at risk of an earlier death. But married men tend to steer clear of a lot of those behaviors.

And there must be a mediating effect of loneliness here as well. I had Robin Dunbar on the show a while ago, and he was talking about this inner circle. He says that you can keep around about five friends in the inner circle, but a relationship takes up two of those five slots. So if you have a partner, a significant other, you've maybe only got space for three other people. But the most common answer at the moment when people are asked, how many close friends do you have to call on an emergency is zero. That's not the average, but it's the most common. It's more common than any other number is zero. I think the number of men who say that they have no close friends, triple, no, five X from 3 % to 15 % from 1990 to 2020. So in the wake of this atomized, individualized, bleep, bleep, cyberpunk 2077 healthscape, having one person that's always going to be in your boat with you rowing, seems like a pretty good fallback.

Yeah, that's right. I mean, there's certainly been sociologists and psychologists Just who want to talk up the virtues of living single. And obviously not everyone who's single is doing badly. Plenty of folks are doing great, and there are plenty of folks who are married who are miserable. But on average, I think that's because we're hardwired to connect, people who are married are more likely to be flourishing. And that's the average story.

What role does wanting kids have in encouraging people to get married? Have you been able to pass out someone early knows that they want kids, therefore they get married in order to be able to have kids? Is that a predictor?

Yeah, I think we do see today in a more secular world, people are less motivated to get married just for religious reasons or to legitimate their relationship in terms of living together, whatnot. I think once they begin to think about having kids, they're more likely to think about doing that in the context of marriage, wanting to give their kids the gift of of married parents. We see even in Northern Europe, where marriage is much more optional, that either after the first child or before the first kid, as folks think about parenthood or they want to give their kids that experience of married parents, they'll get married. I think there's still a way in which people who are more child-centered think about marriage as the ideal place to bear and rear kids. And of course, they're right. There's just no question that kids are more likely to be benefiting when their parents are married than kids who are in other situations.

What impact do kids have on marriage, marriage success, and then on happiness as well?

There's no question that having a baby is a hugely stressful thing for a couple couples. And so you do see marital quality dip, especially after the first child comes along. But I think what often happens is that couples reach a equilibrium. Some six months, year, whatever it might be, after the baby comes and they begin to adjust to this new creature and this new reality. Now, I think this adjustment can be harder for people who've spent a very long time living without children because kids do take a lot of time and energy and effort, and they can be obviously extremely difficult and frustrating in different ways. I think the transition to parenthood is certainly a challenge. But what's interesting, though, Chris, is that there was a lot of research before 2000 that indicated that parents were less happy than their childless peers. Since Since 2000, we've seen that relationship switch, so that parents today are happier than childless adults. Of course, no group of parents are happier than married parents. Again, when you look at the general social survey, what What we find is that the happiest group of women and men, particularly in midlife and 30s, 40s, 50s, are married parents.

I think what's happening here in part might be that childless adults have fewer of those resources, social resources or connections, school connections, sports connections. For folks who are religious, religious connections that tend to flow from being a parent. I have a lot of kids, and my days are often very busy, and I can be stressed out, but I'm never lonely. I'm going to a basketball practice, I'm dropping off kids at school in the morning, going to church with a family on Sunday morning. There's all this social stuff happening. I'm seeing a sociologist that's worth noting. My peers who are single and childless, they don't have those child-related activities. Then when it comes to just free time, too, you can't spend too much time on a device if you're a halfway decent husband, wife, father, mother.

I think that's also-So you're saying that getting married or having kids is a anti-phone use technology?

Totally. Totally saying that. I think the rise of smartphones and screens in the last decade or so, I think maybe, and I haven't seen any really good evidence on this, but my hypothesis is that married parents may be less likely to get sucked down that electronic rabbit hole than folks who are single and jealous.

What about the reverse relationship? What are the differences and outcomes for kids from married versus non-married homes? There's a lot of people that would say, Well, I don't need to get married in order to be able to raise a child. It's useless. It's just a piece of paper in any case. Look at how many people get divorced What's even the point?

Yeah, there's been, I think, really since the 1970s, Chris, with the dramatic rise in divorce and non-marital childbearing, a lot of folks have been making the argument that what matters for kids is not their parents' marriage, but just getting love and maybe money as well. So what matters for kids is not marriage, but it's money and a loving family, and that can take many different forms. I was raised by a single mom, and I think I turned out okay. My sister turned out okay. Many kids turned out okay from different family forms. But I'm also a sociologist, and on average, what I can tell you is that kids are more likely to flourish educationally, socially, emotionally when they have the benefit of married parents. I think in my book, probably the most striking statistic that I came up with, just in running the numbers with my colleague, Wendy Wong, is that we find in the National Logitinal Survey of Youth that young men today in America are more likely to spend some time in prison or in jail before they turn 30 than they are to graduate from college if they're from any non-intact family.

And by contrast, guys from intact families are about four times more likely to graduate from college than they are to land in prison or in jail. That's probably the most dramatic statistic. It just gives you a sense of how much a sibling-married family matters socially and emotionally, I think, especially for our kids.

I've been a fan of your Twitter for quite a while, and some of the stuff that I've seen over the last couple of yours, I think from you. Young black women from intact two parent families are more likely to graduate from college, 36 %, versus young white women from one parent families, 28 %. Young black men from intact two parent families are less likely to be incarcerated, 14 %, than young white men from one parent families. Boys who grew up apart from their biological father are about two times more likely to land in prison or jail by age 30. Fatherlessness is a better predictor of incarceration than race or growing up poor. And 95% of upper income mums are married, 76% of middle income mums are married, and 35% of lower income mums are married. So fascinating.

Yeah, these are the statistics. And it's important, I think, to just remind folks that oftentimes the biggest privilege that kids have is not how much money their parents make, but whether or not their parents are married in a decent relationship. It's important to add that caveat. It's important to acknowledge that a decent marriage or a great marriage is the best context for our kids.

What role does political affiliation have here? We're seeing an increasing amount of data talking about young Gen Z, Gen A boys are skewing aggressively right, and that the girls are going left. But when we get into the older age brackets, what's the political affiliation role?

Well, Chris, when it comes to marriage, a lot of folks in the media and the academy understand and appreciate that education and money matter. The folks who are college-educated folks who are in that upper middle class bracket are more likely today to get married and stay married. What they don't realize, though, is it's not just class, it's also culture. So a majority of college-educated Americans in the US in that 1855 bracket, are married, but also a majority of folks who are religious and a majority of folks who are conservative, whereas a majority of folks who are not religious are not married, and a majority of folks who are either self-idied as moderates or liberal are not married as well. What I'm saying to you, Chris, is that it's both class and culture today that predict who is getting married and who is staying married. Now, on the politics point, more concretely, what we see is that for single adults, about one in five young adults under the age of 30 are not going to be able to find someone, at least right now, who shares their ideological commitments. What that means more concretely, too, is that liberal women are going to have difficulty oftentimes finding enough liberal men, and conservative men who are single are going to find or have difficulty finding enough conservative women who are sharing their-There's an increase in an unpreparedness of people to date across the aisle as well.

I saw you tweet about that.

Yeah. I think the hard thing about this, too, is that I think Particularly when it comes to how you think about work and family and how you want to organize the division of labor in your own household, how much you think it's important for moms to care for young children, for instance, or for men to be good breadwinners. Couples who are not on the same page on those issues really struggle. What I would say to couples who are dating is it's fine to date someone who doesn't share your politics, but it's really important to come to roughly common ground when it comes to thinking about how you want to raise your kids and divide up work and family, because those things are very real issues for couples today once they have children.

Yeah, so you could have somebody who doesn't share your particular political ideology, but does agree with you about how family life should be set up inside of the house. And that might just make for spicy Thanksgiving Day dinners. But outside of that, the structure of how all of this stuff is put together is interesting. I had a conversation with a friend who I'm not going to name, but this was their controversial thesis, which they have no intention of sharing publicly, that the current dating and mating crisis is good in overall cultural evolutionary terms. Many are called to propagate their genes beyond the demographic pinch point. Few are chosen. Whoever manages to propagate their family in the face of a structurally anti-natalist anticulture will manage to do so by virtue of having developed strong enough immune response to toxic messages. A celibate clergy is good because it screams out a propensity for fanaticism out of the gene pool. And that's from Carl Sagan.

Yeah, I mean, The only thing that I will say there, I think, is that I'm conservative, as you know, but I think, and I would certainly acknowledge that in the last seven years, there are plenty of things that conservers can then should be concerned about in their own tribe. I think what progressives don't appreciate, though, is that they have their own challenges in their own tribe. I think what For progressives, some of their biggest challenges surround marriage and family. We do see in my book and elsewhere some evidence when it comes to getting married and having children, that not only is there a gap between Conservatives and Liberals in their likelihood of getting married and having kids, but that that gap is growing. Because I think progressives, for a wide number of different reasons, are less oriented towards marriage and less oriented towards parenthood. They have fewer of the norms that would steer them into marriage in the first place and then allow them to more easily navigate marriage in the second place. One concrete example of what I'm talking about is we've seen, for instance, in recent years, growing interest in polyamory or support for polyamory, and less support for the classic marriage norm that you should be faithful in marriage.

We see in the data in the general social survey that couples who are husbands and wives who believe that sex outside of marriage is always wrong are more likely to be happily married. I certainly see there are also in other data sets, they're more stably married. I think the challenge for progressives is that some of the newer ideas, some of the newer norms that have filtered into their tribe, into their camp in recent decades, are ones that are profoundly anti-nuptual and anti-natal. That's a challenge that I don't think progressives have fully wrapped their heads around. That is the way in which a lot of their newer commitments are making it more difficult for them to find a spouse, to prioritize getting married, and then to have a family.

Yeah. And also there's a good chunk of data that suggests people who are left of center are more unhappy. Presumably this could be done whilst controlling for marital status as well. So you have someone who's worldview or psychology or lifestyle predisposes them to being less happy than their centrist and right of to counterparts. It also discourages them from getting precisely the union that seems to be very robust in improving their level of happiness. And then for the people who are doing it for the movement, because I want to be a good liberal, whatever that means, because political orientation is moderately genetically heritable, like all of our traits are, if you are someone who genuinely cares about propagating liberal ideology long term, but you are anti-natalist in your philosophy, you are creating a dying future for the philosophy that you say that you care about, which is this... It's still, as far as I can see, that because also people, left of center, reject behavioral genetics, largely, or a lot of the time, that is a hammer blow that I think hasn't hit yet properly. And I think that if people on the left fully understood and realized that they would have a different approach.

A couple of things I would say in response to that. One is that I have looked at the gap in happiness between Conservatives and Liberals and do find that a large minority of that gap can be attributed to differences in the likelihood of being married and the likelihood of being happily married. That's certainly a real thing. Conservatives are happier in general, and part of the reason that they're happier in general is they're more likely to be married in the first and then happily married in the second place, and their progressive peers. In terms of the long-term implications of all this, I think obviously the one fly in the ointment for Conservatives is that many of their kids end up leaving the tribe once they hit young adulthood. There are plenty of, obviously, progressives out there who are raised in conservative or religious homes who are now no longer conservative and/or no longer religious. That's where we do get, obviously, new waves of progressives and new waves of more secular folks emerging. But again, what's striking about some of the newer data on marriage and fertility is that the gap seems to be growing between Conservatives and Liberals in ways that might have long-term implications for the ideological makeup of a place like the United States.

Yeah. So one of the things that we haven't necessarily spoken about here are the dynamics when it comes to choosing a mate. What's the Soulmate myth?

The Soulmate myth is this idea that what really matters when it comes to love and marriage is finding someone who fits you perfectly and who is going to make you happy and fulfilled almost all of the time. It's a very romanticized view of love and marriage. It's one that you get in sometimes Taylor Swift songs. It's one that you can get in plenty of movies. It's one that you get in books like Eat, Pray, Love. The problem, of course, with this idea, with what I call the soulmate myth, is that we know just physiologically, the butterflies, Chris, fly away within a few months or within a year or two of either dating or marrying someone. There's just physiologically a high when you first meet someone, when you first connect with someone. And a lot of those hormones just go away after a period of time. And so that magic that you first experience in a romantic relationship begins to dissipate. And so the challenge is, how do you move beyond that and recognize that there are other things that connect you to that person? I think having a more realistic view of marriage, that, yes, you try to cultivate the romance in your relationship, and that's why regular date nights are really valuable, for instance.

But you also recognize that marriage is about more than just those feelings. It's about things like money, things like companionship, things like kids. But beyond that, I would say it's a recognition that love is about not feelings, but seeking the good of the other. And so couples who have that, I think, richer view of marriage, one that's not as romanticized, are more likely not just to go the distance to avoid divorce court, but they're also more likely to enjoy a higher quality marriage because they just have a richer view of what marriage is all about. And they're not as likely to be susceptible to the ebbs and flows of those romantic feelings in a relationship.

Did you see Mia Khalifa trended? I think it was about two or three months ago on TikTok for saying, marriage is nothing special. It's a piece of paper. And if the person that you are with isn't helping you grow, then it is time for you to move on.

I didn't see that particular comment. But again, I think this is the hard thing for people who have that mentality to wrap their heads around. If that's your view, then your odds of failing at marriage are extremely high. But if your view is instead that you love this person and that you're committed to this person and that you will the good of this person, come hell or high in the water. Your odds of making it are extremely high. And your odds of actually being happy in the marriage and in life more generally, are going to be high, too, most of the time.

The problem is that we are not able... It is very difficult to make ourselves believe something. We can make ourselves do things all the time. You can stay in a marriage. There are millions and billions of people probably that have stayed in happy marriages. But believing that marriage is not supposed to be what a recent guest taught me is the confluence era. For as long as you can benefit me and I can benefit you, this relationship works. And at the moment that that stops happening, the confluence is gone and therefore we don't need to stick about. So it's all well and good saying, look, the thing that is best for you is to believe that marriage is supposed to be more than just about this confluence or about the butterflies or whatever. But we are inextricably linked to the culture and the cultural moment and the memes and the trends that we find ourselves in, and extricating ourselves from that is difficult.

Completely agree with you. I think the challenge here, Chris, and this is why my book is subtitled Defy the Elites. It's part of the subtitle, right? And I've gotten pushback on that from folks who, Well, the elites are actually the ones who are more likely to get married in the first place and to be stably married in the second place. And my own data indicates to be reasonably happy, right? And that's, I think, in part because they talk left and walk right, oftentimes. They talk left, walk right. It's a luxury belief. They don't live the individualistic lives that they propagate on Twitter, or if they're heading up a school board or in some mainstream media publication, they're more likely to honor some of these older traditions that tend to reinforce strong and stable marriages in their private lives. So for For instance, I mentioned the importance of fidelity. That would be one example. Or we could talk about, for instance, joint checking accounts. These things are linked to happier marriages, more stable marriages. Even have experimental evidence. It's a really fascinating study in the University University found that couples who were randomly assigned to joint accounts, and then other couples who were randomly assigned to separate accounts, the folks who were assigned to joint accounts did much better in the first years of marriage than those who were assigned to the individualistic, more often, I think, elite strategy that we're hearing today.

Whereas a lot of the traditions that we have about marriage and family grew up for reasons that there was a social utility to them, a wisdom to them that emerged. So, yeah, I think the challenge is that culturally, you have to defy many of the elite messages that are more individualistic, more me-first thinking. Both in media and then online and social media today. And if you can steer clear of a lot of that me-first thinking and a lot of those me-first norms in your marriage, you're more likely to flourish in your marriage and to have a happily married husband or wife on the journey.

How important is male income and providership when it comes to being an eligible mate? Obviously, this is one of the meta-meams of the Internet, and I tried to meme it into existence with an idea of the tall girl problem, that socioeconomic success amongst young women means that there is an ever decreasing pool of eligible mates for them in the male side. But just how important is it? What makes women happy? What do they want?

Well, there's just no question that men's status as breadwinners is very important in both predicting entry into marriage, marital stability, and marital quality, although it has changed in recent years, in this in this way. What I'm seeing in the more recent data is it's not necessarily who earns how much money in the marriage, so much as he is stably employed, full-time. That's what seems to predict, for instance, marital quality and marital stability in important ways. What I found was that the precise division of who earns what was not as important in predicting her marital happiness as it has been in some previous research on this Then when it comes to divorce, we see is that when she loses her job, there is no effect on the stability of their marriage. This is work done by Sasha Kiliball at Harvard in sociology there. But When he loses his job, his risk of divorce increases, I mean, their divorce increases risk by about one-third. There's something about that stability, that sense of identity, I think, for men that comes from full-time employment, the respect that often, I think, accrues them from their wife. When he doesn't have that full-time job, it's just much more likely to be a problem, both in getting a relationship started and sustained.

I think people don't appreciate that there still is a very gendered story when it comes to work and marriage. That story is that women are looking for and respect men who have a decent job, and men who are not employed full-time are, I think just having much greater difficulty, even today, and still navigating marriage successfully.

You said you have quite a few kids. Are some of them sons? Are they all girls?

I have sons and daughters, yes.

I don't know how old they are, but at some point, your sons are going to begin dating. They're going to enter the dating market. Given the current world of men's advice and the current state of the dating environment, what are you going to tell your sons, or what would you tell a struggling young guy who reads too much of the Internet about how to be as eligible of a mate to the opposite sex as they can be?

Well, Chris, it's interesting. One of the things that I would say both to my sons, but just to young men, and I do say to young men more generally, is that there are a lot of complaints that we're getting. There was a critique of my thesis in the New York Times recently from a journalist, and she was saying, There just aren't any good men there. My response to that idea, I think there are some legitimate concerns. We have to understand why aren't you finding enough good men out there? I think it's a part because we're not giving young men enough concrete advice about what is appealing and attractive to women. One of the things that I find also in my chapter on gender is that women are happier when they're rating the men in their lives to be physically stronger. What I would say to young men who are interested in dating and getting married is that get in shape physically. I'm not, as you might guess, I'm not a big athlete, but I swim regularly. If you're not an athlete, you can find things to do. Run, swim, bike, go to the gym, whatever, but get in decent physical shape.

I think that's one thing that I would say to them because women do value physical strength, and they value guys who can take care of themselves physically. That's one thing that I would say. I would say also have a sense of mission in life. I want to do this job-wise. It doesn't matter what it is, really, I don't think, but just to have a clear sense of I'm learning this thing to do this job. And that might change over time. That's fine. But to have a sense of professionally, you want to do something, and you have a plan and a purpose, basically. That extends, of course, to things that are of a more civic character. I think women also have a tremendous respect for guys who are volunteering in their communities as well. Same thing applies to religion if you're in that religious subset. I think a sense of mission matters as well. Then I would also say to young men that when it comes to dating, to really take the initiative initially. I ask my women in my large family classes at UVA, What's your preference when it comes to that first date? Is it that you take the initiative to ask someone out on the date or that he takes the initiative?

And about 80% of the women in my classes, I've got large classes at UVA, would say it's their preference that he takes the initiative. It's a sign of his interest in them, and it's also a sign of his willingness to engage in risk in healthy ways as well. I would talk to young men about the importance of taking initiative, the importance of having a sense of mission, Especially when it comes to something related to school or work, to being upon their stage of life and the importance of being in decent physical shape. Because these are all things that women appreciate, and I think we're not telling men enough, and adolescent males as well, that you've got to get off the Xbox, you've got to get off your phone, you've got to get out there and hit the gym or do something, get more serious about your studies or your skills, your training, tech, whatever it might be, get a job and make a mark. If you do those kinds of things and develop competencies, obviously, in certain kinds of areas, then you will garner the respect and the interest of women in your milieu.

Yeah, it's the competence that women, I think, largely are looking for. If you were to just ask someone, would you rather have a competent or an incompetent partner? Not clarifying in what domain, by how much. Who wants to be with a useless partner that doesn't have any agency, that doesn't have any intentionality, that isn't able to enact change that they want in any area of their life or even in specific areas of their life? If you're unable to get in shape, it identifies that in some regard, you aren't competent at being able to control your own body and your own physicality. If you aren't able to hold down a job, it shows that you aren't competent at being able to show up on time or be be disciplined or be whatever the thing is. And Jordan Peterson was on the show a couple of months ago, and he said, Women use wealth as a proxy for competence. It's not the wealth that they're after. It's just the most reliable rough-hewn rubric signal that they can find to say, Here is a rank order, starting with Elon Musk, or whoever's at the top now, some Arab Sheik, and going all the way down.

Here is a rank ordered list of 3.5 billion men, and you can work out a It's a competent... It's the best video game ever made. It's the best video game ever made.

Yeah, I think a keyword you mentioned there is, Chris, agency. I think there's so much passivity among young men today and among teenage boys today. Way too much screen time, way too much video games. At a certain point, women notice that, and it's a big turn off, especially when it comes to marriage, because they want a guy who has a sense of agency and who exemplifies that in his life in a variety of different domains.

What do you think about most of the advice coming out of the manosphere? Obviously, there is this huge market for speaking to men. As you've identified, we're not necessarily telling men the right things. Is the manosphere getting anything right or what are the things that it gets most wrong? What do you wish that you could get Spanish from it?

I certainly think some of the things we've talked about just in the last few minutes are articulated in different ways by people like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate. I think what's problematic is that on parts of the manosphere, it's a very self-centered, self-oriented approach to masculinity, particularly people like Andrew Tate, obviously. There's also a way in which women are talked down and are described in very degrading or demeaning or negative ways. I think it can cultivate a certain sense of of suspicion, needless suspicion on the part of men. Now, obviously, we all have both women have to be discerning because there are people out there who are bad actors or who've got vices that are going to make them bad spouses, or there's just not a good fit for a particular person and you. You have to figure out, do you have the capacity for friendship with this person? Do they have some key virtues that will make them a good husband, a good father, a good wife, and a good mother? But I think parts of the manosphere are painting, and obviously an overly negative view of women in marriage and are encouraging men to be selfish in ways that will make them bad romantic partners and reduce their odds of succeeding in marriage as well.

Which ultimately results in them dying on average eight or nine years earlier, being more likely to be in suicide.

Right. Alcohol abuse. And again, this is what Pearl Davis and Andrew Tate Donut really acknowledge or appreciate is that, yes, marriage is a risk, no doubt. But the guys who are not married today, never married, and guys who are divorced, are just much more likely to be, especially if they're not college-educated, if they're not doing well professionally at the top of some game, they are just much more likely to be floundering and to end up sad Bad, lonely, and vulnerable to these deaths of despair.

What about from a woman's side? It's not something that I often see coming from the right, from anybody, right or far left. Bits of dating advice for women, women who want to get married, who want to find a partner, who want to be discerning with their mate choice, but who also know that in a post-Me Too world, men are maybe more reticent about approaching them. They may be more concerned about... They maybe don't have quite the same patriarchy-fueled agency that perhaps our great grandfathers would have done. What do you say to women when it comes to attracting, selecting a male partner?

I think for both young women and young men, I would certainly say, given the challenges that people are facing today is, number one, if you have friends who are wise and discerning, and roughly your age or a little bit older, or even a lot older, just let it be known that you're interested in getting married and have them do the mating game.

Crowdsource the potential mate.

Matchmaking. I regularly introduce students that I know are interested in getting married or young adults to one another. That can be fruitful. Letting it be known to people you trust, judgment you trust. I think if you have a religious bone in your body, go to church, synagogue, mosque, temple, whatever. The folks who are in those communities are much more marriage-minded than the folks who are not. That's worth taking seriously if you have any religious interest or background. I would say also for women in particular, given the fact that a lot of guys are worried about the me too suspicion, signaling with a smile, with a compliment, with extra attention.

Cultivating receptivity is a hugely overlooked way of doing this. I was reminded of the, I guess it would have been the aristocracy during the Renaissance with a drop a handkerchief. You a nonverbal cue equivalent of dropping a handkerchief.

Yeah, all that I think is valuable. Then some folks are just not going to have any success in person. I certainly know folks who are happily married today who met on some dating service, but just be discerning about the service you pick. So obviously, Tinder is probably not the best option. There are newer sites that are cultivating a more marriage-oriented approach that are accessible online, for instance, that can be helpful. I think if you're going to seek out a dating site, pick one that is oriented towards marriage, oriented towards serious relationships.

Brad Wilcox, ladies and gentlemen. Brad, I've been a massive fan of your work for a long time. I'm really glad that you've dug into the deep and dark murky data that's borne all this stuff out. Where should people go? They want to learn more about your work in the book and keep up to date with what you do. Where should they go?

They can type in get married, and that'll go to Harper for the book. I'm on Twitter at bradwilcoxIFS, and I appreciate you. Thank you for the day. It's great to be with you, Chris. Thanks for having me on. We're at bradwilcox. Ifs, and then on the web, oftentimes at familystudies. Org as well. Those are three places to look me up.

Brad, I really appreciate you. Thank you for the day.

It's great to be with you, Chris. Thanks for having me on Twitter at bradwilcoxifs, and with you, Chris. Thanks for having me on.