The Problem at Hand: Family & Marriage

Doug Monroe:

Brad, thank you for hosting us here in the Colonnade Club on the lawn right here. And I can look a little bit to the left and see the rotunda just over your right shoulder.

Brad Wilcox:

Mm-hmm.

Doug Monroe:

But let’s get right into it. Let me ask you right up front, how did you develop a strong interest in family?

Brad Wilcox:

Yeah, no, thanks, Doug. It’s great to be here.

So I was raised by a single mom in Connecticut and then came down to UVA here as an undergraduate, and over the course of my career at the University of Virginia came to this recognition that dads were important for kids and that marriage was an institution that connected typically men to their kids. And so it was that recognition while studying here at UVA and kind of interacting with professors at UVA on these questions and issues that kind of led me to wanting to focus on a career in sociology on the study of marriage and family, and religion as well, in America.

Brad’s Interest in Family and Marriage

Doug Monroe:

But let me ask you right up front, how did you develop a strong interest in family?

Brad Wilcox:

Yeah, no, thanks, Doug. It’s great to be here.

So I was raised by a single mom in Connecticut and then came down to UVA here as an undergraduate, and over the course of my career at the University of Virginia came to this recognition that dads were important for kids and that marriage was an institution that connected typically men to their kids. And so it was that recognition while studying here at UVA and kind of interacting with professors at UVA on these questions and issues that kind of led me to wanting to focus on a career in sociology on the study of marriage and family, and religion as well, in America.

The National Marriage Project & Institute for Family Studies

Brad Wilcox:

The National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia is dedicated to basically studying the American family and studying especially the role that marriage plays in American life, and then also kind of providing a platform for us to have important public conversations about marriage and family life in America here at the University of Virginia.

And then these family studies is really focusing on public education around family questions and issues, and increasingly kind of looking at public policies that can strengthen and stabilize marriage and family in America. So one’s more academic and one is focused more on kind of thinking about and educating the public with regards to and working to identify policies that can strengthen and stabilize family life in the United States.

His Family: A Living Laboratory Experiment

Doug Monroe:

Would you be willing to talk a little bit about your own family and maybe how that relates to your interests?

Brad Wilcox:

Sure. Yeah.

So I’ve been married now more than 30 years. I met my wife Danielle here at UVA. In fact, we kind of had our first meeting on the lawn here many years ago now. We got married and had kids after graduating from UVA. We now have nine kids, five adoptive kids and then four biological kids, including two twins. So our household is always very busy, very noisy, but certainly life is full.

And I think one of the things that I appreciate about having a lot of kids is that I’m 55 now and I still have relatively young children in the household that sort of keep me on my toes. You know, tonight I’m going to go to a basketball game with my daughters playing; in the summers, I’m always in the water with a child, with different kids over the years. But there’s just something sort of life-giving to me as a middle-aged guy when it comes to having a big crew at home.

And so I’m really grateful that I have a lot of children because my life is so much more meaningful for having all these kids in my life.

Doug Monroe:

No, it’s really … You’re a living laboratory experiment about what you’re looking at. It’s very-

Brad Wilcox:

Yeah.

Doug Monroe:

It’s kind of hard to do a laboratory setting for studying families, isn’t it?

Brad Wilcox:

Yeah, no, I mean, I think the joke is when I was studying family sociology at Princeton as a graduate student, I thought of myself as kind an expert on marriage and fatherhood. And then you start having kids and you are quickly humbled. You realize how much you don’t know, you realize how many mistakes that you make as a husband and father. And so having kids has certainly made me a lot more humble about the advice that I give and thinking of myself as an expert, because … And my wife too laughs at this idea that I’m the marriage expert because she can point out any number of ways that I have failed and that I fail on a regular basis.

So again, the benefit of being married and having a lot of kids is that it does really keep you humble. You recognize that you don’t know everything and that you’re kind of constantly in need of correction and of reformation in terms of just trying to do this thing and that thing better as a spouse and as a parent.

Doug Monroe:

The world famous brain surgeon who’s not very good with his hands. I know the feeling.

What is your definition of worldview? Orthodox vs. Progressive

Doug Monroe:

As you know, Praxis Circle is about worldview, which is a word a lot of people use walking around-

Brad Wilcox:

Sure.

Doug Monroe:

… And I think very few people understand that it’s actually a metaphysical concept like philosophy or theology.

Do you ever think about it that way or have a walking around definition for it?

Brad Wilcox:

Yeah. So one of the professors that I study with here at the University of Virginia is James Davison Hunter, and he wrote a book called “Culture Wars” where he kind of articulates that there are kind of in some ways two different kinds of worldviews that are sort of governing and guiding how Americans approach major issues of public consequence.

One broadly would be described as sort of a more orthodox worldview where people have the sense that there is kind of either a god or some kind of natural law that governs and guides our lives, provides us with kind of an exterior standard against which we’re trying to live our lives. And then there’s a kind of more progressive worldview where people have the sense that sort of what is true, what is good is sort of changing from one period to the next.

And I would kind of gravitate towards the orthodox worldview and sort of say that there are objective standards, objective norms that we need to basically conform our lives to and we need to understand and appreciate. We can obviously see them in ways that are going to be in some ways indistinct, like we’re going to be often sort of struggling to understand them to some extent, but we’re kind of aiming to appreciate that there are these sort of unchanging principles that should be informing our lives. And then of course that relates to how we think about marriage and family in particular.

So I do kind of talk about both the progressive and the orthodox worldviews in my class here at UVA, sociology, family, and in so doing, kind of rely on my old teacher, my old mentor, James Hunter.

Doug Monroe:

You mentioned Dr. Hunter obviously, and I’ve been following him since the nineties.

Brad Wilcox:

Right.

Doug Monroe:

And UVA is extraordinarily lucky to have somebody like that-

Brad Wilcox:

Yes.

Doug Monroe:

… Who can bring all these ways of thinking together and put it in his terrific magazine that he does.

How important is worldview/politics to marriage success?

Doug Monroe:

How important is worldview to a successful marriage? And let’s put it this way.

Brad Wilcox:

Yes.

Doug Monroe:

Let’s get right to the political. Can somebody on the left marry somebody on the right? Is that dangerous or is it … Do you have anything to say about that? Because-

Brad Wilcox:

Actually I think the way you’re framing it is exactly correct, right? I think the issue is worldview. And so what we are now seeing, Doug, is that we are living in a world … And I’m not sort of celebrating this, I’m really lamenting this, but we’re living in a world where increasingly what’s happening, and this could change, but what’s happening is the people who kind of embrace a more progressive worldview are much less likely today to get married and to have children. We’re seeing about a 40 percentage point gap between liberal young women and conservative young women in the odds that they are parents in that kind of key 25 to 35 age bracket. That’s one example of the sort of growing divide in the connection between worldview and family life here in America.

And of course, if we were to come back and have this conversation in 1965, for instance, there wasn’t a huge divide in orientations to marriage and family between conservatives and liberals or between Republicans and Democrats, but there is now today, Doug, a growing divide.

And it’s really, I think, tragic in two senses. One is that I think that liberals are not able oftentimes to fully embrace and articulate the value of marriage and family life in their public capacities as professors or school superintendents or journalists or senators, for instance. But it’s also tragic too because liberals benefit from marriage and family life as well in much the same way as conservatives do. So I just think that a lot of liberals are not benefiting from entering into marriage and having kids and families, and they’re paying a personal price for that as well.

But to answer your final question, yeah, I do think basically people should not marry someone who doesn’t share their fundamental worldview. And so if there are clear differences of opinion about the importance of marriage and family, for instance, if one person has this idea that marriage is a commitment for life, kind of a till death do us part idea, and the other person that you’re dating has this idea that marriage or love is kind of good for as long as you have that feeling of being in love, but that divorce would be warranted if that feeling goes away, that’s a recipe for disaster, right?

So I think you just need to be attentive to the importance of marrying someone who shares your commitments around marriage. Republicans, Democrats, sure, they can get married, no problem. But the key thing here, Doug, is to marry someone who’s on roughly the same page with you in terms of your basic and fundamental understanding of what it is you’re doing when it comes to getting married and having a family. And if they don’t share your key values on those questions, it’s probably best to end the relationship and find someone else to marry.

The Key to Happiness? A Good Marriage

Doug Monroe:

You know, we’ve done somewhere around 50 interviews now, and sure, they’re mostly in the center politically, but we’ve interviewed up to 10 different worldviews from the far left to the … Not the far right so much, but in the center. And you can line up scholars a stack high that says that marriage is the center of civilization. There’s never been a civilization built that wasn’t founded on the family. It’s just never happened.

So let’s get to where civilizations are built today, and that is at universities. You’re filled with students. You’ve been teaching now for a long time.

Brad Wilcox:

Right.

Doug Monroe:

It used to be thought that, “We don’t want to tell them what to think, we’ll let them come and explore.” But I know the research is showing that a lot of students really actually want to know what the wisdom is because that’s why they’re here.

So here’s your wisdom question. If you want to be happy in life, if you want to be happy and maybe successful in life, what’s the key, Dr. Wilcox?

Brad Wilcox:

Yeah, that’s a great question. I’ve been teaching here for more than 20 years at Mr. Jefferson’s University. He’s famous for obviously a lot of things, including founding UVA, but probably most famous for being the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, where he talks about the importance of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

And on that last phrase, the pursuit of happiness, what I’ve really been underlining in my class here at UVA, in Sociology of the Family to my UVA students is that when it comes to the pursuit of happiness, it looks like from my reading of the data, that there is nothing more central to the successful pursuit of happiness than forging a strong and stable marriage, a good marriage basically. When we look at the data, nothing, not a good job, not money, not health, not even regular religious practice compares to a good marriage in predicting, forging a meaningful and happy life in America today.

And a lot of my students at UVA are surprised to learn that, and that’s because they tend to be sort of operating from what I call kind of like a Midas mindset, where what’s really important is education, money, and especially work. They have kind of the operating assumption here oftentimes that, “What really matters for my capacity, my ability to forge a meaningful and happy life is to have a great job.”

And so I’m just kind of here to tell them that, “Look, yeah, that matters. Work matters, no doubt. Education matters obviously. Money matters too. But there’s just no question that for most Americans, for most men and women, nothing compares to a good marriage and a good family when it comes to living a meaningful life and being happy most of the time.” And so that’s sort of the key idea that I communicate here at the University of Virginia to my students in the classroom.

Doug Monroe:

That was walking around knowledge, I would say, when I came to UNC. And I should comment, I’m wearing my UVA shirt here, but if any of my Carolina friends found out about this, my social media will light up.

The History of Marriage since WWII: Three Phases

Doug Monroe:

I don’t want to ask you about the history of marriage since Moses, but could you talk a little bit about the trends in marriage since, say, World War II?

Brad Wilcox:

So what we’ve seen in marriage, I think really since World War II is a kind of … Basically there have been sort of, I would say, three different phases we’ve kind of seen play out.

So in the immediate aftermath of World War II, obviously a big spike in marriage and fertility. That’s when the Baby Boom takes place. And I think we kind of lined up culturally and politically and economically a range of different factors that supported a much more familistic orientation to American life, including the way in which the federal government got behind the production of huge tracts of housing, the culture was very family friendly. I mean, religion was booming, for instance, would be one example of that. And then economically, it was pretty easy to support a family on one salary. So marriage and family boomed in that era.

And then in the sixties and seventies there’s kind of a turning away from marriage and family. There’s kind of a “me first” shift we see in the culture. A lot of working class men begin to sort of lose their financial footing in the seventies, which erodes marriage and family life in America. And we kind of take sort of a more secular turn as well, a more feminist turn as well, which kind of diminished sort of the cultural power and value of marriage too. And so marriage and fertility start to fall in the seventies, particularly marriage. And since the early seventies and the present, we kind of see the marriage rate, for instance, decline by more than 60%.

But I think in really the last decade or so, we’ve kind of seen a leveling off of a lot of these family trends. I think we’re kind of in a new moment and we’re sort of trying to figure out where we’re headed as a culture on the family front.

And so what I have seen, for instance, is basically some good news and some bad news. What’s happening now is that marriage and family life are becoming much more selective for people who are more educated, more affluent, but also more religious and more conservative. And that means that for kids, the news in America is good. We’re seeing an uptick in the share of kids who are being raised by their own married parents. We’re seeing an uptick in the share of kids who are being raised in a married household more generally.

At the same time as marriage has become more selective, as fertility rate has fallen, we’re also seeing [inaudible 00:21:11] more young adults today are heading into a world where they’re not going to get married and they’re not going to have kids. And that is worrisome to me.

So the good news basically is for kids, they’re more likely to enjoy a married mother and father for the duration of their childhood. But the bad news is for adults who have much lower odds today of enjoying the benefits of a marriage and a family as they move into midlife and later life today.

And I think the question is, “So what’s going to happen in the next two decades?” And my prediction is that I think family stability is going to continue to increase, but I’m just not sure if we’re going to see a renaissance when it comes to adults in marriage and childbearing. That’s the big question mark for me.

Marriage Masters: Strivers, Asians, the Religious, and Conservatives

Doug Monroe:

Very interesting. I could break that up into separate questions, but I’m going to get more directly into your book right now and ask you which cultural groups are best at marriage, because it does relate to worldview, to get back to Dr. Hunter.

And one of the surprising things that I had read elsewhere here and there, but you really focused with a chapter … And that’s why I love the book is your chapter focus was really well done, and I think you brought many groups of statistics together in each chapter. But it’s not Christians that are necessarily best at marriage at all. You know, certain types are pretty good at it-

Brad Wilcox:

Sure.

Doug Monroe:

… But you isolated the groups.

Brad Wilcox:

Yeah. So what I talk about in the book is that there are really four groups of Americans who are what I call masters of marriage.

And those four groups are college educated Americans, who I call strivers in the book. They have a focus on education and professional success, kind of a longer term orientation that kind of redounds to the benefit of their families and their marriages oftentimes; we have Asian Americans, who are the most likely actually to be married, stably married in America today. Especially Indian Americans really kind of top the charts. But Asian Americans is one group; religious Americans as well. Americans who are regular churchgoers are also more likely to be married in the first place, happily married, stably married as well.

And I thought when I first started this work that that would be it, those three groups, you know, the college educated, the Asian Americans, and the religious Americans. But as we did the analysis, what we found with my colleague, Dr. Wendy Wayne, is that conservative Americans were also a group today getting married in greater numbers and also being more happily married.

And this was even controlling for religion. Okay? So there’s something about being conservative in America today that’s also kind of a key factor above and beyond religion. And that’s because conservatives today, generally, of course there are important exceptions, but generally are more likely to embrace marriage as an institution, and to articulate the values and virtues that are required or that certainly help people when it comes to forging a good marriage and even prioritizing marriage in the first place in young adulthood.

So it’s those four groups that I see today generally being more successful on the family front.

Doug Monroe:

And … I don’t know, this is just an aside comment, but those that aren’t in those groups are not as successful, but it’s not like they’re terrible either. I mean, there’s generally a 10 to 20% delta there.

But if you had to…

Brad Wilcox:

Actually, it’s important though just to understand.

Doug Monroe:

Yeah.

Brad Wilcox:

So what I’m saying here is when you look at the data, what you see is that a majority of college-educated Americans are married. Only a minority, unfortunately, of less educated Americans are married. A majority of Asian Americans are married. Only a minority of, for instance, African Americans are married. A majority of religious Americans are married, and only a minority of secular Americans are married. And then a majority of conservative Americans are married and only a minority of liberal Americans, right? When it comes to this 18 to 55 prime age group.

So there are some clear differences by religion, race, ethnicity, and ideology now that were not true, say, 60 years ago. There weren’t big divides by religion or race or class 60 years ago in American life. There are today.

What are the benefits of marriage? Money, Health, Happiness, and Meaning

Doug Monroe:

All right, let’s … Look at all these students going to class.

Brad Wilcox:

Yep.

Doug Monroe:

That’s great.

Brad Wilcox:

This is-

Doug Monroe:

It’s a fantastic spot.

Brad Wilcox:

Yeah, we’re in a good spot.

Doug Monroe:

We’re in the amphitheater here.

Brad Wilcox:

Yes.

Doug Monroe:

But my dad told me before I went off to boarding school, he said, “Doug … ” He took me to lunch to tell me this, “Doug, keep God first, get married and put her second, and you will have a happy life.”

Brad Wilcox:

Right.

Doug Monroe:

Okay. So let me ask you sort of the bottom line question. What are the benefits of marriage? If you’re really considering it and you’re on the fence, what are the benefits?

Brad Wilcox:

Yes. I think the benefits of marriage are both prosaic and profound.

So let’s start with the prosaic benefits. I think there’s just no question that married Americans today are more likely to be kind of flourishing when it comes to money and health, especially on the latter point, men. Right? And so there’s just no question that being able to share your expenses, oftentimes today sharing income just puts married Americans in a much better financial bracket than unmarried and especially their single peers.

And that’s even controlling for things like education and race. There’s just no question that … So for instance, we see that women who are married, about 80% are less likely to be poor; and that for both men and women, as they hit their fifties, getting closer to retirement, have about 10 times the assets if they’re stably married compared to their peers who are never married or their peers who are divorced.

So there are just-

Doug Monroe:

Let me stop you right there.

Brad Wilcox:

Yeah.

Doug Monroe:

We thought we were poor the whole time, and suddenly were not. But go ahead.

Brad Wilcox:

So there’s just a way in which marriage just tends to reinforce a lot of habits and practices that reinforce financial stability for ordinary Americans.

Health-wise, one scientist that I know estimates that guys who are married stably live about nine years longer than their guy peers who are not married. Women also do better too health-wise, but not quite as much as the men, because us men, you know, we’re knuckleheads oftentimes. And so once we get married and have both the responsibilities of marriage and the advice and counsel of our wives, we’re more likely to flourish.

But also we see too when it comes to cancer, for instance, that people who are married have just way better outcomes because they have a support, they have an advocate. My father-in-law, when he had cancer, for instance, at the UVA hospital, my mother-in-law was there every day talking to the nurses and doctors, making sure he was receiving the best possible care that he could possibly get. And I’m convinced that he only got through his cancer scare, which was pretty bad, because she was in there every day buttonholing doctors, talking to nurses, and just making sure that they were doing everything in the best possible way. So again, when it comes to money and health, pretty important concerns, I’d say for most of us, especially as we get a bit older, it really helps to have a spouse at your side, no question.

But I think obviously, there’s more to life than money, and meaning and happiness, especially in this moment we’re living in, where I think a lot of Americans are struggling on the meaning front and the happiness front. There’s just no question that married Americans are more likely to live meaningful and happy lives. In fact, what we’re seeing is a growing divide when it comes to happiness, for instance, where married Americans are retaining their happiness levels across time in our common life today, and unfortunately, unmarried Americans are seeing their happiness levels really fall. And that’s, I think, just because when you’re living with and for someone else, and often with and for children, your life is just incredibly meaningful. It’s incredibly rich. You come home every day, you talk to your kids, you talk to your spouse. You’re also serving them, giving of yourself to them.

And Aristotle said, “We’re social animals.” We’re just built, I think, to be with and for others. And for folks who don’t have that advantage, particularly today when we’re often spending too much time with devices in this new digital age, I think that’s why having a spouse, and also, really, having kids ends up being more valuable to us today, because they keep us living in the real world with and for others. And again, unfortunately, a lot of people, a lot of adults today who don’t have the benefit of a spouse and kids, I think end up spending way too much time, devoting way too much attention to the virtual world. And that world just is not as life-giving as the real world, and that’s where I think our families help keep us grounded. So that’s quickly why I think being married, but also actually having a family, ends up being not just valuable today, but Doug, more valuable today than probably really ever before.

Doug Monroe:

Well, it’s probably not something people my age thought about when I was a kid, but I can tell you people my age do think about that now, and it’s hard to keep your positive attitude the older you get. And when I look around, and I have eight grandchildren now, and so my wife and I are sitting there thinking, when we see young people, “Get married. Get married.” Because every decade that passes is a decade lost on the back end of what your life can be, and it’s glorious when you get there.

Who are the family decline victims? “Working Class,”  African Americans, and Left Liberals

Doug Monroe:

Okay, let’s focus on the negative. You mentioned a trend since the ’60s, probably the ’70s starting outright, that has been negative toward marriage. Who are the victims of this decline? You write a lot about that in “Get Married,” and this is serious business.

Brad Wilcox:

Yeah, so I think what I call the closing of the American heart when it comes to marriage and family life, which has been playing out in different ways, really, since the late 1960s, really got accelerated in the 1970s, got going in a big way, 1970s. And I would talk about three groups who have been paying a price. So I would say, really in the ’60s and ’70s, poor, working class, and African American adults and kids paid the biggest price for the shift away from marriage and family, the rise of the counterculture, but I would say, really in more recent years, there’s also a way in which I think liberal Americans, I think unwittingly are also paying a price, because they’re also seeing now their numbers when it comes to marriage and childbearing really come down as well.

So I think those groups have paid the biggest price for our country’s move away from marriage and family, and are paying the biggest price now today. It’s important, though, just to note that we are seeing some good news, particularly for African Americans. We’re seeing an uptick now in the share of Black children who are being raised in a married family. So it’s also important to note that history doesn’t move in a linear direction, Doug, and we can, I think, see times and situations when some of these trends move in a better direction.

Three Marriage Myths: #1 – Flying Solo

Doug Monroe:

You have a group of chapters early on in there that I thought, when something is bugging you and you can’t put your finger exactly on what’s bugging you, and then all of a sudden you see it in print, you go, “Whoa, that is so true.” You have three chapters in there about the three myths about marriage. It relates to how to be happy by being married, but what are those three myths?

Brad Wilcox:

So those three myths are what I call the flying-solo myth, the soulmate myth, and the family-diversity myth. And the two first myths relate to adults and the last myth relates to children. So the flying-solo myth basically is this notion that living the unencumbered life, being free of the encumbrances of marriage and family is really the way to forge a meaningful and happy life. Often is focused, especially on the left, towards women, and now focused to some extent on parts of the right, I’m thinking of Andrew Tate, on men. Basically, telling young women today on the left, young men today on the right, that the path to living the best possible life is one that steers clear of marriage and family and not towards marriage and family.

There was, I said, a classic piece in The New York Times, for instance, I think it was in 2020, by a writer in Brooklyn. They’re always from Brooklyn. I don’t know what it is in Brooklyn. And she said that married heterosexual motherhood in America is a game that no one wins, right. So she’s arguing in The New York Times that women who are married moms are, basically, much more likely to be miserable than their single and childless peers. And then, of course, Andrew Tate comes along about the same time, is telling young men from a more right-wing perspective that marriage is a dead end, and that guys should steer clear of marriage, and focus on getting strong, making money, and using, but not marrying the opposite sex. And so the takeaway, I think, for both of these groups of people is that marriage is not the path. Family life is not the path. And yet, what we see in the data is that today both men and women who embrace marriage, and embrace kids, have kids, whatnot, are the ones most likely to be flourishing.

Three Marriage Myths: #2 – The Soulmate

Brad Wilcox:

You also asked, too, about the role of the soulmate myth. And the soulmate myth is this idea that love and marriage are about experiencing passion, and seeing it all through just the prism of romance, and not having an appreciation that marriage is about more than romance. Certainly, romance matters, but it’s about, too, money. It’s about kin, and especially, it’s about creating a world where you can raise kids successfully together as a couple. And so for Americans who embrace the soulmate myth, they think it’s just all about this intense emotional, romantic connection between them and their partner. And they’re just much more vulnerable, not just to getting a divorce when the butterflies fly away in their relationship, but what they’re also vulnerable and they don’t appreciate, is not experiencing all the different goods of marriage.

And so what I saw in a study that I did in California, for instance, is that couples who were embracing what I call a family-first model of marriage, that understands that marriage is more than just that sort of intense romantic connection, were actually more likely to be happily married than folks who had a more narrow, soulmate-y kind of approach. Because I think they were much more vulnerable to the ebb and flow of those intense romantic feelings, which do ebb and flow in any ordinary marriage. And by contrast, the folks who had a thicker, richer view of marriage were more likely to appreciate that you’re doing a lot as a couple. You’re building a strong financial foundation, you are raising kids for a good and virtuous life, and you are also enjoying the benefits of cultivating emotional intimacy. And they were the ones who generally were happy in their marriages, because I think they had more goods that they could pay attention to in their marriages.

Three Marriage Myths: #3 – The Diversity Marriage

Also, when it comes to the family-diversity myth, what we see in the academy here where I work and in the mainstream media, there’s this kind of idea that family structure doesn’t really matter for kids. What matters for kids is a loving home and lots of money. And yet, what we see in the research is that kids are more likely to flourish when they have the benefit of stable married parents, who on average are more likely to give them more love over the course of their lives in a stable way, right? And also, they’re better able to financially support them, too, because they are stably married, and they’re not incurring all the costs that come with either raising kids on your own as a single parent, or navigating the challenges financially of moving in and out of one relationship and one household after another, right?

And so the story here is that people who are forging stable married families are better able to raise kids who are flourishing today in America than single parents, adoptive parents, stepparents, or foster families, or grandparents. And let me be clear, I was raised by a single mom, and I think that kids can do well in a variety of family forms. But I’m just saying I’m also a sociologist, and I can tell you that the research is just very clear that on average, kids are more likely to flourish when they have the benefit of stably married parents. And that’s why the family-diversity myth is off the mark.

Doug Monroe:

Yeah, it’s very clear to me why that is, but I’m not going to tell you why, because I’m interviewing you.

Marriage Decline’s Perfect Storm: Welfare, Feminism, Secularization, Markets

Doug Monroe:

I’m going to take the bullets on this one. Okay? I’m going to read a sort of phenomenon, a list of phenomenon that has caused the decline in marriage. And you comment on these, but not in this direct of a way. And I’m going to even label where they’re coming from, the left, the welfare state, the extreme welfare state, well beyond what we ever thought it would be. Feminism, and there’s a certain type of feminism. I don’t view it as one thing. That’s number two. Number three is wokeness, which I would say relates to postmodernism and to cultural Marxism. Secularization, over-secularization, and the decline of religion. And there’s a debate about what causes that, whether the family or religion.

Brad Wilcox:

Sure. Right.

Doug Monroe:

One of the things I really liked is you hit on both sides in your book. You don’t pick on one side necessarily versus the other. On the right, it’s a market mentality toward everything, and that really should be broken down into a number of categories as well.

Brad Wilcox:

Sure. Right.

Doug Monroe:

Any comments on that list? What is that?

Brad Wilcox:

Yeah, so I mean, I think the bottom line, right, is that marriage and family in America, Doug, are much weaker today in some important ways than they were 60 years ago. We’re not going to go back to 1955, obviously, and we need not go back to 1955, but we have to understand and appreciate that, again, most of us, our kids and us, men and women are more likely to flourish when we have the benefit of a marriage and the benefit of a family. And so what is it that’s happened over the last 60 years that’s made it much more difficult for many Americans to have the benefit of a spouse and a family? And I would say on the cultural side, I would certainly finger the me-first decade of the 1970s as a big part of the story here. The way in which we turned away from focusing on family to focusing on, “What makes me happy? What makes me fulfilled?” Not recognizing that if you begin to move in that direction, you’re much more likely to end up in a dark and selfish place, basically, and to sort of hurt your family.

When it comes to the cultural side, too, I think that secularization was certainly a big part of the story. The fact that few Americans were both involved in a church community, and were giving some major authority to religious teachings and governing and guiding their life, that’s a big part of the story. I think feminism was problematic insofar as it tended to both inflate women’s expectations about what marriage could deliver in ways that were often unrealistic. And I think, also, tended to devalue the important role that guys can and should play in the family. Of course, there are good things about feminism in terms of, especially, I think making it clear that domestic violence was unacceptable. That was, I think, one of feminism’s big contributions, and also coming to appreciate the role that women could play in the professional arena, but… So a mixed bag on the feminist front.

So those are some of the cultural factors, I think, at play. On the welfare state, I would say, basically, that the biggest problem there is it often made, again, men superfluous. Men’s unique contribution as a father and as a breadwinner was basically often eliminated for many poor and working-class communities, couples, and families. And that, I think, was a big problem in the ’60 and ’70s. Even going forward, that’s still a problem.

And then for the right, I think, yeah, just this idea that the market is an unvarnished good, that whatever makes the economy grow, whatever makes corporate America do better is good for the family. The whole idea that if General Motors is doing well, then the American community is doing well. And clearly, there are things happening and that have happened in the sort of market world that haven’t been good for the family. The eroding place of many men in our economy today would be one example. We’re seeing a growing share of guys, especially guys who are not college-educated, being eliminated, marginalized from the economy, and that’s just terrible for them. It’s terrible for their relationships and for their families. No question about that.

I think the other thing, too, we’re seeing in the new economy is that a lot of the companies that are thriving in the information economy, in the sort of digital economy, if you will, are selling products that are completely destructive for marriages and kids. We can think about ways in which Microsoft is pushing products that put too many of our teenage boys on gaming platforms in ways that are completely destructive for them and for their futures. We can think of ways in which Meta and its Instagram product has done terrible harm to the emotional well-being of our teenage girls. And we can see how these new AI companions are going to really gut the capacity of ordinary women and men to develop the skills and the orientation towards cultivating real physical and emotional intimacy with the opposite sex, too.

So the market is not always, obviously, an institution that has the best interest of the family at heart, and we need to be aware of that and much more attentive to that. And there’s certain elements on the right that don’t appreciate that the market can play a negative role in the family. So we have to appreciate, again, how these different factors have combined, really, almost in a perfect storm to undercut the strength of marriage and family, especially, I would say, in the ’60s and ’70s, but even in our current moment as well.

 Pornography Devastates Relationships

Doug Monroe:

Well, the institutionalization, let’s talk about the market, but I really want to go to feminism for a second. But just to comment on that pornography, for example, is so profitable. It is so prevalent on the internet.

Brad Wilcox:

Sure.

Doug Monroe:

I’ve heard as much as a third. I maintain there wouldn’t be any pornography if it wasn’t for men, and they can be on the left, or the right, or the middle, it doesn’t matter. But that’s the perfect storm you’re talking about, where technology comes along and…

Brad Wilcox:

So yeah, pornography is one example, and it’s just going to get… I mean, with AI, it’s going to get even more distracting and a more degrading as well, in ways… I mean, I am a practicing Catholic and I could talk about this in moral terms, but I’m just saying, I sit in my office on a regular basis, talking to students about the role that pornography is playing in their relationships, and they are deeply concerned about how it’s playing out in the lives… generally, female students talking about how it’s playing out in the lives of their male boyfriends. So this is like I can see this sort of issue of pornography exacting a kind of devastating toll. It really makes, especially the female students that I speak to, wonder about their physical worth. It makes them worry about how their boyfriend or their future husband is going to be handling the distracting and degrading, often, character of this issue. It creates some real fundamental frictions in young-adult relationships that are just part and parcel of the kind of struggles that we’re seeing young adults wrestle with in American life today. So certainly pornography is one problem.

Today’s Feminism: Marriage and Sexual Differences

Doug Monroe:

What I’d like to do is focus a little bit now on feminism just for a second, and because I think the issue has really raised its head in different ways that haven’t been… It’s different than in the past. So if we broke feminism down into four stages that are generally accepted, the suffragettes, the equal opportunity at work and outside of work, and stage three might be women should enjoy more sex, or women should be more like men, or men should be more like women, or generally move to the feminine side. And the third stage would be, well, once we’ve moved everybody into the middle, let’s just eliminate gender altogether and have no such thing as sex.

Brad Wilcox:

Sure.

Doug Monroe:

I personally am definitely for stage one and two, and I think that’s part of the Judeo-Christian way. What are your comments on that? Are women starting to see that in the rearview mirror and it’s clear now, or versus some unknown future, which was maybe the late 60s, early 70s, where they didn’t need to make some gains? What’s going on there? What do you see?

Brad Wilcox:

I think the biggest issue that I would say with feminism, or just more broadly a culturally-progressive orientation today, is I think there are two challenges facing us in that way. So one is that I think that there is not an adequate appreciation among many progressive feminists for the role that marriage plays in securing a good life for women, right? And so there are plenty of scholars, and there are plenty of mainstream journalists with prominent platforms who would either diminish, discount, or devalue the importance of marriage in women’s lives, and would argue that marriage is an obstacle to women flourishing. So I think that’s one problem that I see playing out on many different fronts from people who are coming at this issue from a broadly feminist perspective.

I think the second thing is there’s not a kind of an adequate appreciation of the reality of sexual difference, the way in which there are, on average, important differences between how women and men experience the world, how biology affects their experience of love, and marriage, and family life, and the world more generally. And so it just makes it difficult for them to understand and appreciate that difference is real, on average. Of course, there are exceptions with all these patterns that we see for women and men. But it just makes life more difficult when we can’t appreciate that there are some differences that do have a bearing on how we approach things like romance, sex, marriage, and family life. And if you are trying to paper over or ignore those differences, you’re actually more likely to get into trouble in your own world, in your own relationship, in your own family.

So one example of what this looks like is that when my wife and I were first married, we didn’t really fully appreciate that oftentimes, when women and men are facing some kind of major challenge or conflict, the guy is more inclined to try to figure it out, work through it, solve it, often on it own terms, and the woman is much more likely to want to talk through it and be given some sense of, basically, comfort and some sense of understanding. And so I would be basically offering solutions to my wife’s challenges and problems, “Well, do this, or do that, or this is what you should do.” And she didn’t want any of that. She wanted me just to be an empathetic listener, and to just help her process the challenge that she was working through.

And by contrast, when I was facing some major challenge or difficulty, I often wanted to be just left alone to go into my corner, basically think the issue through, figure it out, and then come back at the world. And she wanted to talk it through with me, and help me emotionally engage the challenge of the issue, and I wanted none of that. And so we had a lot of struggles early on in our marriage, because we had classically masculine and feminine ways of dealing with these issues, but we had no kind of vocabulary and no real way of understanding that we were approaching it in somewhat different fashions, as men and women often do.

So this is, I think, where people who don’t understand and appreciate that there are some differences, typically, between men and women, are more likely to run into trouble. And I think we would all be on a better… we would be handling these issues with greater success, greater comity if we could rediscover and understand, again, in this current moment, that yeah, there are some differences between women and men on average. And appreciating those differences, celebrating them, handling them with a measure of humor helps us all to navigate, among other things, marriage and family life in America.

Doug Monroe:

You were probably in college when that book… maybe it was even older than your college years, “Men Are from Mars and Women Are from Venus”?

Brad Wilcox:

Mm-hmm.

Doug Monroe:

Everyone that read that, I don’t care where they’re on the left, right, and the center, just read it and went, “Yeah, that’s true.” Now, you can’t even look at that book without thinking it’s sexist.

Marriage’s Success Sequence

Doug Monroe:

So let’s get to the success factors again. Okay?

Brad Wilcox:

Mm-hmm, sure.

Doug Monroe:

We’re going to revisit some material you’ve talked about, but you talk about a success sequence in your book in several different ways. What is the success sequence to marriage?

Brad Wilcox:

So there are many voices now, Doug, on the left and the right, actually, who are calling into question the reality of the American dream today for ordinary young adults. And I actually think when it comes to housing, that’s a real issue. I think we have failed. We are failing our young adults when it comes to figuring out how to build and sell particularly single-family homes that are within reach of ordinary working and middle-class families. That’s one way in which… I’d say one way in which we’ve got to do better as a country, and we’ve got to do better, too, in particular regions of this country on that score. But what I think people don’t appreciate is that there is, basically, a pathway to living the American dream in many respects, to avoiding poverty and reaching the middle class, and that pathway runs through education, work, and marriage.

And the success sequence is this idea that if you get at least a high-school degree, and if you work full-time in your 20s, and get married before having any children, so if you combine education, work, and marriage in those ways, your odds of being poor are just 3% in your late 20s and 30s, and your odds of reaching the middle class or higher are 86%. And then also, too, it’s important to note that young adults who are following the sequence are much happier, and they’re much less likely to be emotionally distressed than their peers who are not following the sequence, and finally, they’re more likely to be forging stable marriages and families. Folks who are getting married before having kids are just way more likely in their thirties to be stably married. So the point here is there’s a pathway to living out the American dream that we need to tell young adults, tell teenagers, tell twenty-somethings that they can kind of follow this pathway. And at the end of it expect to live out certain classic dimensions of the American dream. And so what certainly we’re doing in these family studies is trying to help communicate this across the country. And we’ve been working in Alabama and Texas and Ohio and Utah to help lawmakers and educators understand and appreciate the success sequence. And we’re now getting people also to move on their own steam to pass laws in those states and to get the success sequence rolling out in classrooms across those states as well. It looks like, no, in some places we’re waiting on legislation to pass, but there’s certainly a movement building in many states to get the sequence communicated to the broader public.

Five Cs to Marriage: Communion, Children, Commitment, Cash, Community

Doug Monroe:

I’m going to skip Tony Bennett’s five keys to success, but I want to give him a plug to obviously the key to teamwork is also the key to family. It won the national championship for us I believe in 2019, I think, Carolina’s 2017. But that was one of the most exciting final fours of all time. But get the book to get those five. Let’s focus in on your five C’s, another memory device that capsulizes how to be successful.

Brad Wilcox:

So in the book I talk about the way in which there are masters of marriage, and I actually begin in that conversation by talking about the work of John Gottman, who’s a psychologist at the University of Washington. And John Gottman has some great advice about how you can do things in your marriage, like having five positive interactions versus one negative interaction. He’s got some advice about how to handle conflict in a marriage in a very constructive way that I think is super helpful for couples to understand and appreciate. But he’s focusing on the microdynamic between a couple in a marriage. And what I’m doing as a sociologist, talking about sort of the broader context, the macro context within which couples today, Doug, are more or less likely to flourish. And so I’m saying that what we see for the masters of marriage, for strivers, college educated Americans, for religious Americans, for Asian Americans, for conservative Americans is they’re often likely to embrace five C’s that help them build out strong and civil marriages.

And those five C’s are communion, children, commitment, cash, and community. So when it comes to community, for instance, I talk about the importance of doing a we before me approach to marriage. That’s a good way to forge communion in marriage. And one example is the role of money. Basically what we see is that couples who have basically shared pools of money, who share their assets, share their checking accounts, are way more likely to flourish compared to couples who have separate accounts. Large, separate accounts where they’re not really combining their money. It’s just one example of the way in which forging the sense of communion in marriage is an important way of building out a team-based approach to marriage that redounds to the benefit of the couple. For instance, one new study from Indiana found that when couples were randomly assigned to shared bank accounts, separate bank accounts, and to do as they please with their bank accounts, the couples who were assigned to the shared accounts did way better in their marriages in the first two years of married life.

So this is powerful evidence, randomly assigning couples to these different models, that forging this “we before me” approach to marriage is the path. So that’s the communion point. The kid’s point is that a lot of voices today are telling us that kids are an obstacle to having a good marriage, a happy life. You see this on TikTok, there’s a Time cover story celebrating kind of the childless life for instance. What they don’t tell you is that yes, when you first have kids, it is a huge challenge for your marriage. You are losing sleep, you’re stressed out, you’re rearranging the priorities and the way your dynamics work out as a couple. So yes, we do see a dip in marital happiness when kids come along, but as you write yourself, figure out this new challenge and embrace the responsibilities of parenthood, what we are now seeing, Doug, is that parents in America, especially married parents in America, are markedly more likely to be happy with their lives compared to their childless peers, especially their single childless peers.

So the second point about kids is just to understand and appreciate that actually kids are a pathway towards forging and meaningful and happy marriage and life. And especially we’re seeing too, that couples who are doing both fun things with their kids and even more so hard things with their kids are more happily married. And so what I mean by that is yes, going to a UVA basketball game over there with my kids is a blast. And it’s linked to in general being more happily married. But doing the hard work of chores on Saturday morning, the Wilcox household, which always elicits lots of eye rolls from my kids, is an even more powerful predictor of a good marriage. I think there’s just something about productive work in the household that we often don’t appreciate today, but still is very much associated with a [inaudible 01:01:51]

Doug Monroe:

Let me stop you on two. I’ll just say from my own personal experience, what kids do particularly, under say five, is when then everyone worked outside the home, but when you come home you realize that what you’re dealing with outside of work is not important, because of your kids.

Brad Wilcox:

Yes.

Doug Monroe:

Do you ever have that feeling? They bring you into their world and you realize, “Wow, this is important?”

Brad Wilcox:

No, that’s true. I think kids ground and guide our lives in really profound and important ways, and you recognize that there are things that are way more important than what’s happening at work. And there are things that are way more important at what’s happening in Washington DC for instance. Or even in your friendship world too when it comes to your kids. So yeah, 100%.

Doug Monroe:

Keep going with number three.

Brad Wilcox:

When it comes to-

Doug Monroe:

That one’s important to me. Number two I think is just…

Brad Wilcox:

When it comes to commitment. There are plenty of voices today that are discouraging us from embracing different kinds of commitment. Like this idea that marriage is for life, till do us apart. And that’s been happening really since the late sixties and seventies that there’ve been lots of voices in the culture that are telling us that marriage is not for life. You shouldn’t embrace that ideal. And even now more we’re getting people with this whole thing on polyamory, telling us that sexual fidelity is not something that you should be striving for. But what I saw in my research is that couples who embrace the norm of lifelong marriage and couples who embrace the norm of sexual fidelity are way more likely to be thriving, because they’re committed to one another. They’re making the effort, when things get hard, to work through that frustration, that anger, that challenge, that disappointment that you have with your spouse or with your marriage.

But by working through these difficulties and challenges, they come up usually on the other side with a greater sense of having built a meaningful and generally happy marriage. So there’s just no question that couples who embrace commitment rather than fly away from it on a variety of different levels are more likely to be both happily married and stably married. When it comes to cash we see is that couples who have a decent income stream and shared assets are better off. One shared asset obviously for most folks today is a home. And so working to kind of build a financial foundation that you’re working out together is a good thing for couples. We also see though that, and this is the more provocative point, especially his work, his full-time work, that’s linked to a happier marriage when they’ve got kids in the household and to a more stable marriage as well.

There’s a recent study from a colleague at Harvard, Sasha Killewald, and she found that basically when the wife is not employed or when the wife is unemployed, no effect on her likelihood of divorce. When the husband is losing his job or he’s not employed, way more likely to get divorced, 33% more likely to get divorced. It just reminds us that even in the 21st century, there’s just something about a husband having, typically, and of course there are exceptions, but typically having a decent job that gives his family a measure of financial security that allows he and his wife to figure out what’s the best thing for them. And that may mean that she’s working outside the home too. But there’s just something about giving his wife and family the gift of that steady work, that steady paycheck that is still very much linked to happier marriages and happier families and more stable marriages. So that’s the cash piece. And the final see is about community. And the idea is that birds of a feather flock together.

Doug Monroe:

True. Okay. It’s true. I’m just going to say, true.

Brad Wilcox:

And Doug, you are your friends. You are your friends.

Doug Monroe:

You are. Yeah.

Brad Wilcox:

And if your friends are doing good things in life in general, and in the family in particular, and I’ve got great single friends who are living wonderful lives, virtuous lives in their own way. But I’m just saying, if you have friends who basically are encouragement to your marriage and encouragement to your commitment as a father or as a mother, you are way more likely to be doing the same thing. If your friends are doing stuff that is going to drag you down, is going to put you on a path that’s going to put your life in some kind of difficult predicament or is going to threaten your marriage and family, then you’re way more likely to do… The classic example was a Republican governor, Mark Sanford. And he had a bunch of buddies. And they would go every year on some big international trip and have a wonderful time.

And it turns out they were doing some stuff that was not good for their marriages. And Mark Sanford got involved with that woman down in Latin America and that torpedoed his marriage, torpedoed his political career. I’m sure it was devastating for his children as well. So just an example of how you’ve got to look at your friends, and be with men and women who lift you up and don’t drag you down and hurt your marriage family. So on that score also talk to you about the way in which for many Americans, faith community is the community that is most likely to increase their odds of being both happily married and stably married. And so what we see is that religious Americans, Doug, are significantly more likely to be happily married between 30 and 50% less likely to end up getting divorced and more likely to be engaged moms, especially engaged dads. So for many Americans, that family-oriented community is found in and through a local religious community as well.

Valuing the Institution of Marriage

Doug Monroe:

I’ve got basically three more questions relating directly to get married. The second question is going to be relating to your prior book in 2004. But coming back to your commitment C, what if I boil it down? Well, this is a little bit different, but if I was just to say having respect for the institution of marriage itself.

Brad Wilcox:

Correct.

Doug Monroe:

And you relate that to the vow you make, if you get married in a church that says for better, for worse, for richer, this is it, and this is my solemn vow.

Brad Wilcox:

Right. Yes.

Doug Monroe:

Having respect for your own promise and your commitment to your spouse, that in and of itself, I think at least in the olden days, got people to stay married, depending on your point of view, all the way through the tough times or far longer than they should have. I don’t know which. But-

Brad Wilcox:

Both.

Doug Monroe:

… what do you think of that? Is that too simplistic?

Brad Wilcox:

Yeah, no, I think for many folks, there was a time when the vows that you took in marriage, until death do us apart, for instance, forswearing, others for instance, were vows that really were sacred. And sacred, both in a religious sense, but also just in the sense of my sacred honor. I’m not going to get divorced, I’m not going to have an affair. And that meant that you kind of had to exercise a substantial measure of self-control and often endure a lot of hardship. And I think that in the post-sixties era, people accorded less sacrality to those vows.

They took them much less seriously. And we all saw the consequences of that shift playing out in families across America. So I think the challenge is can we reinvest those kinds of vows with a degree of sacredness today for our moment? And certainly some of the students that I see at UVA are dead set on doing things differently. They’ve seen other things play out in their own families of origin and they want to move in a different direction. And that’s an encouragement to me, Doug.

Doug Monroe:

Well, when I came to UVA from Carolina, had a lot of friends that were on their five-year plan. And they were of course gentlemen by that time, and so they were welcoming the stupid redneck to Mr. Jefferson’s University, you see? But right around the corner here is his rotunda and the author of the Declaration of Independence has sacred honor right at the end. So there was something about that that was part of the culture. There were certain promises. I know that in commercial space, even down to the yeoman, since they didn’t have time for contracts, your promise was everything. If you didn’t have that, you had virtually nothing.

How does Christianity support family and marriage?

Doug Monroe:

So let’s get to Christianity a little bit. This will be a card that we will use I think to fit into other interviews, but your book here is “Soft Patriarchs and New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands.” And so how does the creator, God, Imago Dei, Adam and Eve, the 10 Commandments, how does that further family and marriage?

Brad Wilcox:

So there’s a really interesting evolutionary anthropologist is what I call him it at Harvard named Joseph Heinrich. And he talks about, among other things, the way in which marriage is a keystone to most civilizations. That’s his view. And in particular to how he thinks kind of western Christianity played a key role in shaping the context of marriage and family life in the West. He talks, for instance, about the way in which Christianity basically made marrying one’s cousin unacceptable. There was an expectation you had to marry outside of your immediate kin network, in a sense, to leave your own family of origin and form a tie with someone outside of your immediate family. And so that created a context where you couldn’t have an overweening kinship where everything was too clannish or too focused on benefiting just sort of your immediate family.

There’s a way in which that encouraged the West as opposed to some other societies to embrace people who were outside of your immediate kinship network and created the basis for a certain healthy individualism from his perspective. So that’s I think one legacy of Western Christianity that we are benefiting from. I think too, there’s obviously a way in which monogamy emerges from the Judeo-Christian tradition. And I think we might have sort of taken that for granted for much of the 20th century. I don’t think we can in the 21st century. I think that’s sort of like the rise of polyamory. And I think just the existence of polygamy in many parts of the world today still suggests too that we need to relitigate that issue of monogamy. We need to understand and appreciate that by encouraging people to have just two parties to marriage, there was a way in which Christianity was helping to cultivate a certain proper intensity to the marriage relationship, a certain degree of intimacy that is not accessible in a polyamorous or in a polygamous context.

I think also we’re able to understand and appreciate too as we look at the role of monogamy, including from Joseph Heinrich, he has a wonderful academic piece on monogamy, how much monogamy tends to lift up the lies both of men and women in different ways. Men, by giving them basically the ability generally to marry someone and to have the beauty of a marriage, a family of their own. And for women to protect them from being treated more as objects, where they’re just sort being accumulated by or treated as-

Doug Monroe:

Dominated.

Brad Wilcox:

Where someone can just collect a number of women and sort of treat them in a more domineering way as well. And then too, just understanding and appreciating as well that monogamy is much more likely to cultivate a healthy sense of fatherhood as well. That what we see is that, again, in the academic research is that it just does a good job of connecting ordinary guys to their kids on an ongoing basis. So that’s certainly, I think, part of what we see, and part is the legacy of Western Christianity based upon his work as well. And then I think the other thing that I would talk about too is just the way in which men are encouraged to take servant orientation to the household. And see in Ephesians that they are called to serve their wife and their kids.

And I think in many contexts, many cultures and many historical moments across world history, men have either been domineering towards their wife and kids.

Doug Monroe:

The patriarch.

Brad Wilcox:

Or they’ve been the distant or out of the picture, they’ve been absent from the household. And so I think what’s beautiful about Christianity is it often has really encouraged men to walk that, and this is what I talk about in this book, “Soft Patriarchs,” is that it’s encouraged men to steer a middle path between being domineering or being absent, and to really embracing their roles to serve their or wives and kids in their capacities as a husband and father.

Doug Monroe:

That became, of course, in the Roman times, and then certainly in all of Western civilization all the way into the 1800s, Mr. Jefferson being a gentleman that was very much part of being a gentleman, was related somewhat to the Christian ideal.

Should everyone get married?

Doug Monroe:

Let me go to a question that really deserves a whole separate interview. And that is, does everybody need to get married? Jesus wasn’t married. The disciples weren’t married. Does that mean if I’m not married, what’s the deal there? How do you think about that? We all have our own answers, but it’s a very important question.

Brad Wilcox:

Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s an important question. So I don’t think everyone is supposed to get married. I don’t think everyone’s called to get married. I think there are some people who don’t have an interest in marriage. And I’m also a Catholic and certainly think there is a place for people living, celibate lives for the sake of the church, for instance, the Christian community for instance. And often living beautiful and fruitful lives. I do think for most people who are not married, it’s just important to figure out what’s your community and to be really anchored into a community. I said before that Aristotle’s told us that we are social animals. And so I think for most people who are single, it’s really important to have that kind of community that’s standing with you and for you. So I think too, it’s important in this moment where I’m projecting that probably more than a third of young adults today will never marry. And this is a record prediction that’s extremely sobering. I think for me.

Doug Monroe:

What was it in the 70s? 15% or something like that?

Brad Wilcox:

Well, historically between 89% of Americans living over the last century would be getting married at some point in their lives. And so we’re now seeing that that number’s just dropping dramatically. And so again, we’re expecting a record share of young adults not to have the benefit of marriage, but that also means that those of us who are married I think need to be more intentional about reaching out to people who are single, because they’re often more likely to be in need of friendship in this new world that we’re living in. So yeah, not everyone should get married, but I think we as a society have moved way too far away from seeing marriage as the norm for the vast majority of people.

So we might’ve said in 1955 that we could use a few more people who are single. Some of these people getting married are doing it for the wrong reasons. But I think now we’re in a moment where marriage rates have hit record lows and we’re projecting record lows of adults who are going to be ever marrying. And so I think it’s time to push the pendulum in the opposite direction towards embracing folks to get married, because they’re not getting enough encouragement from their parents, from their professors, from their peers, from the pop culture today about the value of marriage, the value of family, and we can do better on that score.

Too Many Men Floundering in America

Doug Monroe:

Brad, boys and men have been having a very tough time, certainly. I know Mary Eberstadt’s husband has studied this in detail. What’s going on there? How do we fix it?

Brad Wilcox:

Yeah, so one of, I think the most disturbing trends that I’ve seen in looking at American life today is just seeing what I call the floundering fortunes of men in America, boys in America, or the male malaise is what we’re seeing, where boys are often floundering in school, where boys are not doing well when it comes to the romantic arena, where young men are not gainfully employed and where all too many guys are spending all too much time on a game console, basically. So there’s a lot to be worried about here when it comes to boys and men in America.

Richard Reeves does a great job of diagnosing how boys are failing educationally and socially, and how men are failing in their relationships and in the workplace, and how we’re all paying a price because our boys and men are not measuring up in ways that girls and women would like them to measure up. So great job diagnosing. He points out, for instance, and we’ve all seen this when it comes to the middle school and high school awards, overwhelmingly it’s the girls who are cleaning up. I see this in my own kids’ schools, right? When it comes to who’s doing well in high school, about two-thirds of the top performers are girls in our high schools, and about two-thirds of the bottom performers are boys in high schools. This is one evidence. Here at UVA, the vast majority of students now are women. Where are the men here at UVA? Is a kind of point that Richard Reeves really underlines in his book of boys and men. These are all important, I think, points for us to sort wrap our heads around, try to figure out what’s going on.

But when it comes to the sort of prescription, I think he is off the mark because he doesn’t really articulate a clear and compelling understanding of how we can offer a new but distinctive model of masculinity for our young men to sort of orient themselves to, to serve as a playbook, a guide for how they’re going to navigate their world, how they’re going to bring unique gifts and talents to the world they live in. What it is that they do as boys and men that’s really important and distinctive.

And he also discounts the importance of marriage for men. And we just know from just a ton of evidence that there’s just no question that married men are way more likely to be flourishing than their unmarried peers. They work harder, they work smarter, they work more successfully. Their emotional wellbeing is markedly higher, their lifespan is way longer, they’re way less likely to commit suicide.

So there’s just no question that if you are concerned about the welfare of men in America today, you’ve got to be dedicated to articulating a clear and compelling model of masculinity that our men can kind of latch onto and orient their lives towards. And you also have to really appreciate how the institution of marriage plays a key role in helping most ordinary guys flourish. And if you don’t do those two things, you’re not really doing all that you could to serve the welfare of men in America today.

The Three Ps for Being a Man: Providing, Protecting, and Paying Attention

Doug Monroe:

We would need a whole another interview to talk about what the prescription is for being a man. But we don’t have time for that.

Brad Wilcox:

But let me just quickly say that, and I talk about this-

Doug Monroe:

That’s a big question.

Brad Wilcox:

I talk about three Ps in the book when it comes to sort of like, and it’s really to think about what, also we don’t really acknowledge that whatever people might say about what they’re looking for and what women might say they’re looking for in a guy, when it comes to looking at how the average women experience married life, what we do see is that women basically report that their husbands are basically good providers, good protectors, and good at paying attention to them. So three Ps, providing, protecting and paying attention in profound and important ways.

Women who have husbands who do well in all three of those ways are on average markedly happier than their female peers who don’t have husbands who kind of excel in those three ways. And this is just by looking at the numbers, looking at what makes women happy in marriage. I was actually particularly surprised to see how much women who kind of rate their husbands as good protectors, huge factor in women’s marital happiness.

I didn’t know that before I did just crunch the numbers. And I think that’s about kind of giving them a sense of physical safety. They feel like when their husband is at home or when he is walking about in town with them, they just sort of feel physically safe or that’s meaningful to a lot of women. And I recount some examples. There was a couple that I talk about. They were on the subway and there was a guy who came up and tried to rob them and the guy kind of stood up and confronted the assailant and that was just a huge thing for that woman.

So that’s part of the story here. But I think too, just recognizing that providing is still important. And then the newer thing is just kind of paying attention. Having a husband who’s capable of emotionally and practically investing in the marriage and the kids is also kind of really important.

So I think three Ps we can kind of hold up to our young men say, “Look, you need to be ready as you move into adulthood to provide, to be a reliable breadwinner, you need to be physically fit and capable of protecting your girlfriend and your wife. But also being aware of socially what makes my wife feel my girlfriend feel like she is protected socially in a wider array of settings. And you need to be capable of paying attention.”

That means putting down the phone, engaging eye to eye and being attentive to social nuances and her needs in a variety of contexts, but also kind of once kids come along of being able to really give your kids the attention that they need. If you can do those three things, you’re way more likely to thrive when it comes to dating, thrive when it comes to marriage, thrive when it comes to family life. And we’re not doing enough right now to prepare our boys and our men to be good at providing, protecting and paying attention to the women and the kids in their lives.

Doug Monroe:

That all makes sense to me. The problem is that most men I know aren’t very formulaic about how they go about their daily behavior. And if they become that way, looking at a formula, they will all of a sudden feel like, “Well, I’m just doing this to please whatever woman that’s in my life,” versus having either a heroic role or a saintly role or some sort of model that you’re trying to be like that maybe might be a person, that then becomes part of your character. Like Aristotle talks about how we are what our character is. I think it’s Aristotle.

And I think that’s when you lose a father, and I’m talking to someone that was brought up by his mom, it’s a deeply troubling thing for men. And so we need more heroes.

Today’s Elites: Hypocrites on Marriage?

Doug Monroe:

Let me go back to Richard Reeves, his prior book about elites. That was one of the main subjects. You talk about elites a lot.

Brad Wilcox:

Right.

Doug Monroe:

One of my favorite books, like “Bowling Alone” would be Charles Murray’s book “Coming Apart” where he talks about, what is it, Belmont and Fishtown. Could you comment on… I mean, I’ll just be blunt, how elites are saying one thing and doing another and hurting us.

Brad Wilcox:

So there’s a huge class divide in American family life where what we’re seeing is that Americans who are elites, who are college educated, who are more affluent for instance, are way more likely themselves to get and stay married today. And when my book was sort of first coming onto the scene, there were some commentators, like Matt Iglesias, a very smart center left journalist who was saying, “Brad, why are you saying that Americans must defy the elites in your subtitle here, because the elites, Brad, are the ones who are really flourishing at marriage and family life today.”

And what I think Matt didn’t really appreciate is that my point was that, yes, elites themselves personally are often doing great on the family front, but they’re often kind of giving out advice, giving out ideas and messages that are destructive for ordinary Americans, or in some way kind diminish or devalue the importance of marriage and family.

And actually was that Matt Iglesias had written a piece about 10 years ago in one of his publications in Vox, kind of like discounting the importance of marriage in American life. So even he himself 10 years ago, I think he’s actually more marriage-friendly now, but kind of asserts marriage is not really that important for our society and for our country.

But the point is that when it comes to, again, school superintendents, college professors, mainstream media journalists, even C-suite executives, you often I think see situations where they’re making decisions or saying things in public or advocating for policies that either intentionally or unintentionally undercut marriage or kind of discount the importance of marriage. They’re not talking about what they’re doing in their own private lives to the broader public. They’re not sort of sharing the wisdom that they have gleaned from their own private lives with ordinary Americans.

And I think that’s to the detriment of working class and poor Americans lives. So one example of this, for instance in the book I talk about is that Reed Hastings, who’s the co-founder of Netflix, mentioned in his autobiography that he was struggling in his marriage. His wife was not happy with his travel schedules, a lot of travel, founding businesses, hither and yon.

And so they went to counseling and they talked through the issue and they figured out some arrangement that made her happy and made him happy or whatever, they compromised, figured out something. And they’ve been married more than 30 years, got two kids together, and now they’re sharing a couple of billion dollars together. So they managed to make it, they kind of dealt with their problems, their challenges, their differences of perspective, and they forged a path that was strong and stable for them and their family.

The problem though is that Netflix offers plenty of shows and movies that aren’t particularly family-friendly, don’t necessarily kind of, in a winsome and real way, maybe give us models for virtues and values that would be helpful for ordinary people watching Netflix, and even kind of had this movie that they basically sponsored, the Marriage Story that told a very kind of dark and discouraging tale about marriage and American life, kind of travels from New York City to LA with this couple, a professional couple who ended up getting divorced and experiencing all this drama with their son.

And the problem with the marriage story that Netflix told in the movie “The Marriage Story” is that it’s kind of giving us a sense that marriage in America isn’t really working. The irony is that particularly for Americans in that professional class, like the couple depicted in “The Marriage Story,” most Americans who are getting married today, Doug, manage to make it, especially college-educated couples, the vast majority of them today are getting married and staying married.

And that tale was not told by Netflix. So this is one example of how I think our elites often do, what I call, they sort of talk left when it comes to marriage and family, and yet in their own personal lives they walk right. And what I’m hoping that we can move forward to is a world where our elites in their capacities as senators, as Hollywood executives, as professors, as journalists, not only kind of are often living decent lives as spouses and parents in their own personal private worlds, but also in their public capacities with greater authority, can help other Americans understand and appreciate the value of marriage, and also push for policies that make it easier for ordinary Americans who don’t have the same financial resources that they do to get married, stay married, and to live out the American dream for themselves.

Doug Monroe:

I’ll just say that all the extremely wealthy billionaire or close people I know, they’re all married, whether it’s the right, left, center, and they’ve been married for a long time in every single case. It doesn’t mean that I don’t know some extremely wealthy unmarried people, but in general that’s certainly true.

Marriage and Family: Western Civilization’s Foundation

Doug Monroe:

These words right here, save civilization.

Brad Wilcox:

Yeah.

Doug Monroe:

Please comment.

Brad Wilcox:

The great Harvard anthropologist, Joseph Heinrich talks about marriage as the keystone for most civilizations. And his point is just the way in which marriage tends to stabilize family life, tends to bridge the sexual divide between men and women, tends to foster human flourishing, tends to advance social order. And so when marriage and family are flourishing as sort of the fundamental building blocks of any civilization, everything else tends to be more likely to kind of be working well.

And here at the University of Virginia, we are kind of literally sort of sitting in the shadow of Thomas Jefferson’s rotunda here. His Monticello is just over there, basically his home. And we can appreciate how he underlined in the Declaration of Independence, the importance again of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These kind of three core American values, if you will.

And when it comes to life though in America today, we’ve seen kind of a tremendous explosion in what are called deaths of despair, where more Americans are dying because of drug use or alcohol poisoning or suicide in recent years than ever before.

What we’re seeing too when it comes to liberty, the American dream, sort of seeing economic liberty, the kind of opportunity for people to rise from often poverty, that rags to riches story to riches in adulthood, that there are millions of American kids across this country who don’t have the opportunity to experience that kind of economic liberty over the course of the lives which we as Americans value.

And when it comes to the pursuit of happiness, we’re seeing evidence, a new study from Chicago, for instance, showing us that more and more Americans are not happy. That millions of Americans are kind of failing at that classic Jeffersonian pursuit, the pursuit of happiness. And when it comes to these issues, deaths of despair, when it comes to the American dream economically, when it comes to the pursuit of happiness, we’ve got more and more evidence that oftentimes the number one factor here in why our country is not doing well in these three areas, life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness is because marriage and family are failing or they’re not happening in the first place.

So on the deaths of despair point, Jonathan Rothwell at the Gallup has been showing some work indicating that marriage is one of the top predictors of deaths of despair, especially for working class men across this country, men who are not married are more likely to succumb to deaths of despair when it comes to economic liberty. Raj Chetty at Harvard is showing us that the number one factor in his 2014 study is the share of two parent families in a community, that’s sort of the top predictor of poor kids rising from poverty into success as adults.

And then on the pursuit of happiness, what we see from this new study at Chicago is that the number one factor accounting for this decline in happiness is the fact that fewer Americans are putting a ring on it. So these are just kind of, I think, indications of the way in which when marriage and family are not flourishing, our American civilization is not able to live up to its deepest ideals.

Doug Monroe:

My theory on why that’s the case is that there’s something about blood kin or family where particularly in the nuclear one husband and wife family, you maximize love. That you love your children and your spouse more than other people. That seems to be just natural in humans. It’s not fundamentally required because we would say the disciples or Jesus or anyone, you can love, I mean you can love tremendously and give your life for many causes, but on average in the walking around sense, you’re maximizing love in society through family. To me that’s just a truism.

Legislative reform needed to renew marriage in America?

Doug Monroe: What are your legislative recommendations, Brad, to help fix the problem?

Brad Wilcox:

So when it comes to renewing marriage in America, there’s no question that there’s a big cultural work that has to get done. We’ve got to do a better job in our schools and universities, in the pop culture, now in social media to make the case for marriage and family, also to equip people with the skills, the values and virtues that they can grab onto to forge strong and civil marriages.

But there is a place too for public policy, and I think we’ve got to tackle the affordability issue now when it comes to family formation, we’ve got to figure out ways to make housing more affordable. That for instance, is like making lot sizes smaller and reducing the regulations that builders have to navigate when it comes to building homes so that we can build homes that are affordable for working class and middle class families.

Financially we have to tackle too what’s called the marriage penalty, where a lot of working class families now have to choose between marriage and something like Medicaid, health insurance, just the way it’s set up. So we have to figure out how we can make sure that our public policies don’t unintentionally discourage, especially working class couples from getting married today.

We have to also, I think about, on the male malaise issue, re-forming our schools and our vocational education, higher education in ways to make them much more boy-friendly, much more male-friendly so that we have more men who are marriageable and are attractive guys as both boyfriends and then later on as husbands. So these are some of the kinds of policy measures that we should be taking. I also think on the financial front that expanding the child tax credit and giving families the opportunity to use that money, especially when they’ve got young children in the home, to tackle the cost associated with raising the next generation is warranted.

And then finally what I would say too is that we should be expanding school choice across the entire country. What we see in the research that I’ve done with colleagues is that young adults who come from private schools, often from Christian schools or Catholic schools, are more likely to be getting married, staying married, having kids in marriage. It depends, the story varies to some extent from which kind of school, but there’s just something about the sort of normative climate, and social climate that is found in private schools today that seems to be more conducive to getting married, staying married and whatnot.

So I think we need to think too about letting more kids have access to schools that are often more family-centered and not just making that, as is often the case today, in places where there is no school choice, that the only people who can afford private schools are rich families. And I would like to see an America where it doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, middle class, whatever, you can have access to a decent private school that’s consistent with your own family’s values. And that’s why I think we should do more to extend school choice across the country.

Doug Monroe:

That would be a huge thing. And we’re trending somewhat I think there.

Will American political parties come together or grow more apart?

Doug Monroe:

A couple more questions and let’s look to the future a little bit. To get a little political, do you think that we’ll ever see the good old days that truly never existed, never ever existed, where the opposing two parties in the United States really got along and compromised in profuse ways, but do you see the Democrat and Republican parties growing more apart or more together or is it situational or what do you think?

Brad Wilcox:

Yeah, I think right now we’re heading on a pathway towards greater polarization. And I think that’s partly because we make the mistake of dehumanizing our opponents. And I would say as a Catholic, as a Christian man, that everyone is created in the image of God. Everyone is an image bearer. And so everyone deserves to be treated with the dignity and respect that is due to them as a child of God.

And so I’m concerned by people in my party, I’m a Republican, and people in the Democratic Party, who say things and do things that clearly communicate that they do not look at the other side as human or as image bearers. So unless and until we can do a better job on that score, I sort of see us heading in a worrisome direction of greater polarization. I think the other obviously piece though is the worldview piece, and this is just a fundamental challenge, is that people who have really different worldviews on some central important issues and questions like marriage and family, often have difficulty today kind of finding common ground. So that’s a challenge.

I’m not optimistic in the short term about that issue, but in the longer term, it’s hard to know how we might see some people moving in ways that allow them to find common ground.

Doug Monroe:

Just having watched a TV series on the history of the presidency since George Washington, it’s usually some situational thing on the outside that knocks us in the face, that brings us together again.

Brad Wilcox:

That’s true.

Doug Monroe:

We’ll see whether that happens.

Brad Wilcox:

Right.

The Great Awokening’s Impact on Marriage and Family

Doug Monroe:

So let’s focus this last question in on a time period. I think that helps. Let’s take the summer of 2020, which to me was a very dark time. It fostered the founding of the Free Speech Alliances and kind of woke up those in the private sector who thought everything was okay. They realized it wasn’t-

Brad Wilcox:

Sure.

Doug Monroe:

It was a little bit like the late 60s, let’s say. In your area of marriage and family, are you optimistic or pessimistic about the trend since 2020? That’s only five years but-

Brad Wilcox:

Yeah, I think I would actually take it back to 2014 and Matt Iglesias, the journalist, had this great phrase, the “Great Awokening,” talking about how since around 2014 the culture, especially young adult culture, moved in a pretty hard left direction on things like race and other social justice questions.

And I think from my perspective, the biggest problem with the Great Awokening is that it was, I think linked to a decreasing appreciation for the importance and value of marriage and parenthood as well as polyamory. So it kind of sort of pushed a lot of young adults, especially young women, in the direction of looking at marriage and family with a more gimlet eye, a more skeptical eye or a more hostile eye, and also opened up kind of polyamory as a possibility for folks, women and men on the left especially.

And so I think as we kind of move beyond that cultural moment, that woke moment, we need to kind of understand and appreciate how much actually marriage and family are good institutions and monogamy is a good thing for women and men and kids generally. And we can put a lot of those cultural experiments or ideas that came to the fore in the Great Awokening, put them aside and move on, move beyond them.

Doug Monroe:

We’re very, very grateful for your time today and wish we could continue on, but thanks so much.

Brad Wilcox:

Doug, it’s been a pleasure to be with you. Thanks for hosting me.

National Marriage Project

Institute for Family Studies

American Enterprise Institute

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