Get hitched. Have kids. Save society from anti-marriage progressive elites
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Summary
Brad Wilcox s new book, "Get Married: While Americans Must Defy the Elites: How to Build Strong Families and Save Civ Civ Civility," details the decline in marriage in America, and the role of cultural elites in helping to explain why.
Transcript
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There was a time when it seemed everyone wanted to get married.
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Then marriage became less popular over the years.
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Divorce became very popular throughout the 1970s and 80s.
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But is it partly due to fewer people getting married?
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There's a new book out called Get Married While Americans Must Defy the Elites Forge Strong Families
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It's by academic Brad Wilcox from the University of Virginia.
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And he joins me now on the Full Comment podcast.
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So, I know this is a book directed to Americans.
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Our numbers are going to be somewhat similar as we talk about statistics.
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Why do you say that people should be defying the elites?
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Who are the elites and are they telling us not to get married?
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So, I think when I first kind of released the title on the internet, and the book wasn't out yet,
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there was a prominent journalist in the States called Matt Iglesias who was like,
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The elites are the ones who are doing a pretty good job at marriage in America.
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So, there's no question that Americans who are college educated and more affluent are more likely
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But what I think he missed was the way in which a lot of the messaging coming from cultural elites,
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ironically, including Matt Iglesias, is often not very marriage friendly or even kind of
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In fact, he had written a piece for a prominent platform called Vox, something to the effect of,
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you know, marriage is in decline and that's not a big deal, right?
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So, the point I was getting at in the book is kind of making the argument that elites in journalism,
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in the academy, in terms of Hollywood, even C-suites nowadays, often will kind of publicly
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discount the importance of marriage or even sort of, you know, attack marriage in some kind of way,
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talk about it as patriarchal or as kind of like a, you know, an infringement on people's freedom,
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even as they're often in their own private lives benefiting from marriage for themselves,
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for their, you know, their spouse and for their children.
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And so, it's a kind of way in which a lot of our elites are talking left, if you will,
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and then walking right, thinking about this in terms of just sort of marriage or family.
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And that's a problem because they're not kind of using their influence, their power,
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their authority in their public capacities to kind of share the benefits of marriage and to
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encourage stronger marriages and families for the country as a whole, for the society as a whole.
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So, that's kind of the message that I was giving in part in the book.
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So, as you look at the statistics, and I know you've looked at the Canadian ones as well,
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and you were recently in Ottawa, speaking to my old friends at Cardis, but as you look at the stats,
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is there a shocking difference between, you know, if we take it out of the culture war,
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we put it into the class war, between upper income and lower income?
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If you're at the bottom of the economic ladder, is there a difference between how you live in
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terms of family structure than if you're at the top?
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Yeah, no, there's definitely a class war, in a sense, going on when it comes to marriage.
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And what we do see is that college educated and, you know, folks who are in the upper third
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of the income distribution are much, much more likely to be married compared to folks who are
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in the bottom third of the distribution economically, or who are not college educated.
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And that divide has really kind of opened up since the 1970s.
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What I think people don't realize, don't recognize, is there wasn't really a divide
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when it comes to, like, race or ethnicity or class in marriage and family in the middle of the last century.
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But in the last, really, 60 years, that divide has opened up in part along class lines
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Which is ironic, because the whole marriage is the patriarchy.
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We should, that, where do you hear that the most?
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On college and university campuses across this continent.
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You know, what's striking is that we've been looking at some polling lately on kind of whether
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or not people think that, you know, married parents are important for kids.
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And the group that's the least likely to embrace that idea, that's the most kind of likely to resist
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the idea that kind of in the abstract marriage matters for kids are liberal college educated
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And there's basically almost a 60 percentage point gap between conservative college educated
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Americans and liberal college educated Americans on that particular question.
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But, you know, the irony is that, you know, the vast majority of those liberal college educated
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So this is kind of the tension that we see is a lot of elites, again, are talking left but
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And, you know, they're not using their authority as professors and teachers and school
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superintendents, for instance, to kind of share the message about the value of marriage,
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but also not just some kind of like preaching, but even kind of sharing kind of just their
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own life experiences with people who may not have grown up with married parent families
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and might want to actually know, like, well, what do you do when, you know, you're having
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some kind of disagreement with your wife about something?
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And how do you kind of navigate that successfully?
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And, you know, because you've obviously done it.
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And so I think that's the challenge is that we need to kind of share the benefits and the
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value, but also kind of some, you know, some strategies for successfully navigating relationships
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and marriage and family life across, you know, our society to bridge this marriage gap.
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If we put that out there in a public forum, there'd be a whole pile of people who say,
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well, marriage doesn't matter to civilization.
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Yeah, I think a lot of contemporary folks do believe that marriage is just a private affair.
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It just matters for you and your partner and maybe your kids.
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They don't appreciate that because we are social animals, as Aristotle said, that what happens
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in our own families matters for our neighborhoods, our cities, our provinces, and for the country
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And we see, for instance, in the States that there's been a marked decline in happiness in
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And as one recent University of Chicago economist found, the number one factor that he found
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in his models that helped to account for that was the decline in the share of Americans who
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We know from the work of Raj Chetty at Harvard and his colleagues that the number one factor
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they found that predicted mobility for poor kids, that is, rising from sort of rags as a
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child to riches as an adult, was the share of two-parent families in a community.
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So is that for the kid as they're growing up or when they're an adult?
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So what his work is showing us is that children who grow up in communities with a lot more
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two-parent families are much more likely to experience economic success as they move into
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adulthood compared to kids who have lots of single-parent families in their communities.
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So in the United States, for instance, what he sees is that a community like the San Francisco
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metro area or Salt Lake metro area, both of which actually have high rates of two-parent
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families, are much more likely to generate that upward mobility for poor kids in their
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communities than kids growing up in, for instance, the Charlotte or the Atlanta metro areas that
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And this is controlling for things like race and ethnicity and school quality and income
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So it's just kind of showing us there's something about family structure per se that matters,
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not just at the individual or the household level, but actually at the community level.
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That we haven't really paid attention to in our thinking and our discussions and debates
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And so, yeah, I think when marriage is strong, you see less child poverty, you see more mobility,
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you see more safety in your communities, less violence, less crime.
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And all this, you know, there's a lot of like collective benefits that flow from strong families
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that we don't tend to recognize and realize in a lot of our public debates.
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This is something that economist Thomas Sowell has been talking about in the African-American
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And he describes the difference between when he was young and growing up in Harlem, going
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to school there and what it's like now in black communities across the United States.
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But you've taken what he observed a long time ago and you've looked at it countrywide.
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And it's important, again, to stress, I think all people don't realize this, but there have
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been times in American history when African-Americans, for instance, black Americans were more likely
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And Sowell's, you know, life history is kind of emblematic of the point that I was getting
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And that is that, you know, there was a time in American life when there wasn't really a
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big racial divide or big class divide when it came to marriage.
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But there is now, and that's important both because it reinforces this class divide in
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And then also on the racial divide, you see work from John Iceland at Penn State showing
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us that kind of the biggest factor now accounting for gaps in poverty and affluence between blacks
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And this has kind of been increasingly so compared to previous decades.
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Um, so when the family breaks down, what we've seen in the United States is working class,
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poor and African-American, uh, you know, communities have been hit hardest and this kind of marriage
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divide only reinforces a lot of other divides that, you know, give us cause for concern.
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If you were to bring this up in a political context today though, and say, we need policies that are
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beneficial for families and keeping them together or in strengthening families, you would be pilloried.
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I mean, there's all kinds of so-called family friendly policies aimed at making life more affordable
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or a tax credit here, a tax credit there, but to say that while we're doing this to strengthen
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families, that would be seen as, um, social conservatism that would not be welcome in the
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mainstream of, of many political discussions in the mainstream of much of the media.
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And that's one of the points I touched on both in the book and some of the commentary that
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And again, I mean, I, we're living in a world now where unfortunately marriage has become
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Even though, as you say that, like the, the, uh, college educated liberals are living that
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That's the tension is that, again, they're often kind of living a relatively, you know,
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a neo-traditional family lifestyle in private, a marriage centered way of life in private and
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they're benefiting, you know, uh, people who get married as I show in my book are about
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twice as likely to be very happy with their lives.
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Um, they accumulate way more assets across the course of their lives than they're never
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Um, you know, they're, uh, more likely to in the face of a cancer diagnosis to, uh, to
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survive because they have the benefit of a spouse in their corner, you know, navigating,
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you know, hospital realities and doctors offices and all that stuff.
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So there's just no question that I think most people who have kind of are wise to the world
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at some level, either explicitly or implicitly recognize that getting married and staying
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married benefits them, benefits their partner, benefits their kids, you know, benefits their
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long-term, you know, um, their long-term, um, interests.
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And yet there has not been a willingness, unfortunately on the left to kind of articulate any of this in
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You know, I've been, uh, we just had a by-election or as you might call it in the United States,
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It's made a lot of news and I've been spending a lot of time looking at the demographics of
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And, uh, it was, uh, striking when I, you know, when, when we said that we're going to have
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this discussion, I said, okay, well, let's go back and, and test Brad's theory based on
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some of the electoral districts here and the, the wealthy one in Toronto, St. Paul's, where
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we had the election, it's, uh, married or living common laws, the stat, and it's more
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than two thirds are married and less than a third are common law.
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If you go to a poorer district, uh, those numbers change dramatically and, and the, uh,
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Well, it's less than a quarter in the wealthy district and it, it's much higher in the poorer
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So there does seem to be some of that, but is there, you know, is common law different
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So I haven't investigated the Canadian, um, pattern recently, but we have looked at the
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difference between cravitation and marriage in the States and then also in Europe, um, and,
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and countries too, where it's, it's quite, you know, kind of, uh, common, quite conventional
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to have, you know, people living as a, um, as a cohabiting or common law in a sense, couple
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with kids in places like, you know, uh, Scandinavia and France and whatnot.
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And we still found that even, um, in Europe and of course also United States, that kids
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who were born to married parents were markedly more likely to be still living with their
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parents compared to kids born to cohabiting parents.
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And this is true also in Finland and France and other European countries that we've looked
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So we, we do tend to see that there's a kind of stability premium when it comes to marriage,
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where, um, kids who are, who are born and raised in married households are more likely to be
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still with their parents as they move through, you know, childhood and kids who are raised
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in common law or cohabiting households are more likely to see their parents split.
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And of course, the big question here is how much of this is kind of about marriage per se
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versus a kind of selection effect where the kinds of people who get married today might
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be more educated, affluent, religious, conservative, whatever.
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Um, I think it's certainly part of the story, but I'd also would suggest, uh, to your audience
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that, you know, the terms of entry when it comes to marriage and just living together are
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Um, that there's a public ceremony, even in secular, you know, marriage ceremonies where
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people are kind of standing in front of family and friends standing before their intended
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making public commitments and that this is consequential for kind of, you know, uh, the
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Brad, you talk about things like, uh, which segments of American culture thrive most in
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marriage, uh, whether kids are a disaster for marriage or make you happier.
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I want to talk about those issues when we come back more in moments.
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Brad, in your book, you talk about how some parts of American society are the masters of
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Who are they and why specifically do, do these groups perform better?
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So we see in the data, Asian Americans, religious Americans, uh, conservative Americans and college
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Of course there's overlap between some of those groups, but if you kind of look at those different
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four categories, you see, they're more likely to get married in the first place and then to be
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either happily married or stably married in the second place.
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So I call them the masters of marriage because they kind of stand out in comparison to other
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And so have you been able to account for that, that certain types of people are more likely to
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So yeah, I argue in the book that there are kind of five pillars to, uh, strong marriages today.
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And those pillars are, uh, communion, children, commitment, cash, and community.
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And I think those groups in different ways, um, sometimes in common ways and other ways,
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um, you know, often kind of rely on some of those pillars to kind of support their marriages.
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And so when it comes to like religious Americans and conservative Americans, for instance, they're
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particularly likely to embrace ideas about commitment in terms of like they're committed to marital
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permanence as an ethic, or they're committed to fidelity as an ethic in ways that are, you know,
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somewhat more exceptional compared to the average American.
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Or talk about community, for instance, as well, and find that people who are kind of embedded in
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communities that give honor to family, um, and emphasize family are more likely to, you know,
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And I would say that Asian Americans and, uh, religious Americans tend to be embedded in social
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networks that, you know, are more likely to sort of either explicitly or implicitly stress the
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importance of, uh, of marriage and family stability.
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Um, or when it comes to, um, to cash, what we see is that, uh, a lot's changed obviously between
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women and men when it comes to working family in the 21st century.
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But it's still the case that men's stable employment is more important for getting married
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and staying married than women's, uh, employment.
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There's a new study from Sasha Killwald, for instance, at Harvard showing that when women
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lose their jobs, uh, wives lose their jobs, no effect on divorce.
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When husbands, when men lose their jobs in the family, um, divorce goes up by 33%.
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And it's kind of tells us that, you know, for kind of communities where men are stably
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connected to full-time employment, you're more likely to see marriage in a good, uh, position.
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And we see, I think for all four of these groups, for conservatives, for religious, for, um, college
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educated and for Asian American, uh, men that they're more likely to be employed, uh, full
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So why is it, do you think that that, uh, jumps out?
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Is it because, um, of the psychological impact on, on the man, on, on the husband?
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Is it a, a, you know, a, a deep seated, uh, need by the wife to say, no, I, I need a man
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So what we see when it comes to men's unemployment is just, um, it's, it's, I think it's psychologically
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devastating for guys when they're not working, um, for on average, obviously there are exceptions.
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We know that there, you know, there's some decent stay-at-home dads, but I'm just saying
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that for the average guy, the average Joe, um, there was a New York times piece not too
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long ago showing, for instance, that when women were unemployed, you know, they increased
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their, their kin care, they're volunteering and they were like, they were doing stuff,
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you know, men who are unemployed were much more likely to be staring at a screen, um, in
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And so there's just something I think about the men's self-worth that's more closely connected
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to, um, to employment that continues to this day.
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Um, and so we've seen some research, for instance, is that, uh, husbands who are unemployed do less
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housework than husbands who are employed full-time, which of course is just, I'm sure, infuriating
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I mean, here you have a guy who's at home, um, not bringing any money in and not doing much
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So that's kind of a, that's a, that's a, that's going to be a stress fact.
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Um, and then for the wife, I think, you know, um, and what I found is it's sort of the,
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on the marital happiness side, the, the, really the effect is for married mothers.
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Um, so I didn't find a big story for women in general, when it came to husbands being employed
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full-time in terms of marital happiness, but there was a marked difference for married
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And so I think for married moms, the issue there is that, you know, they want to have some
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Maybe, maybe they want to work full-time and they want to work part-time.
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And if their husband is employed full-time and they've got kids in the house, so it gives
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them, you know, the latitude, the flexibility, the options, you know, and they can kind of
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rely upon him to provide a financial secure foundation for the family.
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And so I think that's why in part, you know, um, when he loses a job, you know, it's much
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more likely to lead to, uh, you know, to divorce court than, uh, when she loses a job.
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So we've been talking about the financial side.
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We were talking about how some groups get married.
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The class difference is part of the reason that, uh, people are lower on the income scale
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Is it due to the fact that they may feel, well, I don't have the economic wherewithal.
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Uh, I don't have tens of thousands of dollars to spend on what's expected of a wedding today.
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You know, a bachelorette in Nashville, a bachelor party in Vegas, all this crazy stuff, $120,000,
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I mean, part of the, part of the challenge is that there is kind of like this really super
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high threshold that's been set for weddings today.
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It's part and parcel of sort of seeing marriage as a capstone.
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So when my mom was married, she got married in her early twenties.
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Um, you know, and you know, that was sort of the norm in her, her set back in the late
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And so, you know, people didn't have as big weddings and they moved into very modest,
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And, you know, wasn't a, there wasn't a big kind of economic threshold to jump over.
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Whereas today, a lot of people think you have to have, you know, uh, a destination wedding
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and spend, you know, tens of thousands of dollars on the reception and all this kind
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of stuff, which obviously makes marriage more inaccessible to working class and poor
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But I think the other piece though, is that we do see, um, and this is again, kind of the
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irony is that our elites tend to discount the importance of male breadwinners in theory,
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So we do see, you know, upper income folks are much more likely to have stable male breadwinners,
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Um, and unfortunately, if you go down the class ladder, you just see that working class and
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poor couples are much more likely to have situations where she's earning more money, where
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And that is not, again, not a recipe for, you know, getting married, um, and kind of getting
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So that's one reason why they're not putting a ring on it.
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Just because the guy for any number of reasons is, you know, not employed full time.
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And that's, you know, that's a barrier, uh, for them when it comes to putting a ring on
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So you deal with a number of different things that you say, okay, well, here's this myth.
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Um, the soulmate myth and the idea that I love you for as long as it makes me feel happy.
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So the soulmate myth is this idea that what kind of marriage and love are all about is
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kind of that intense emotional, that intense romantic connection between two people.
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I kind of like the butterflies in the stomach that you first have when you meet someone
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oftentimes and kind of like the sense like we are perfect.
00:25:34.620
And that's, I think, pretty typical for a lot of us at the beginning part of our, you
00:25:38.160
know, of our dating relationship or even, you know, the honeymoon period in life.
00:25:42.120
But the, you know, the fact of the matter is, is Jonathan Haidt wrote in a previous book
00:25:47.660
on happiness is that, you know, for the average couple, there's going to be a shift away from
00:25:52.860
kind of like this intense emotional connection towards a more companionate model, more of a kind
00:25:59.420
And if you don't kind of recognize that marriage is about more than intense feeling, more than
00:26:04.100
intense romantic or emotional feeling, if you don't appreciate too, that every couple
00:26:08.620
has problems and challenges, if there's no perfect soulmate out there for you.
0.92
00:26:16.260
And you still see, you know, as I talk to ordinary couples, there are folks out there
00:26:19.640
who still have this idea that if marriage takes work, if there is conflict, if there
00:26:27.160
is, you know, disconnect on some major issue or personality, you know, fit, then you're
00:26:35.640
And of course, my view is that, you know, marriage is a commitment, you know, that you're
00:26:39.760
supposed to love your spouse through thick and thin, and there are going to be tough times
00:26:44.580
and conflicts and compromises that are part and parcel of that.
00:26:48.580
And some people are still sort of stuck in the soulmate mindset, which is just not very
00:26:53.480
realistic for any long-term, you know, friendship or marriage.
00:26:58.500
There used to be a play that was persistently put on here in Toronto and it's called, I love
00:27:05.100
Uh, we all change over time and, and, and things happen and relationships change.
00:27:11.520
If you think it's going to be butterflies the entire, first off, I think that would
00:27:15.360
be awful to live that way forever, but it's, it's just not going to last.
00:27:23.920
And I think, you know, there's also something that's kind of beautiful about being with,
00:27:27.060
you know, someone who's imperfect and of course you're imperfect as well and kind of, uh,
00:27:31.880
navigating challenges and growing together as a couple.
00:27:34.140
And, and, you know, there's something, you know, beautiful and powerful about building
00:27:38.520
a long-term marriage, um, that has, you know, difficult chapters and moments.
00:27:43.740
You've kind of been able to work through these things and see your, your marital friendship
00:27:47.940
So, yes, I just think people need to realize that marriage is about more than just intense
00:27:56.780
It's about having someone in your corner when you do get sick with cancer at age 59
00:28:02.320
Um, it's about kind of being part of a larger kinship network.
00:28:05.940
Um, it's, I think for many, many of us about kind of having kids and raising them together
00:28:11.540
and sort of seeing, you know, a new generation unfold in your own home and then grandkids.
00:28:16.620
So, um, people have kind of what I call more of a family first mentality.
00:28:20.920
Um, I think have a richer and thicker understanding of what marriage is about.
00:28:26.060
And therefore they're less likely to be worried about the ebb and flow of particular, uh,
00:28:30.880
feelings, you know, which will ebb and flow in any given marriage.
00:28:35.700
I, uh, I know many, uh, married couples who for various reasons don't have children, including
00:28:44.780
I thankfully don't know many of the folks that you talk about in chapter seven, the parent
00:28:52.160
I can't say I'm, you know, they're in my social circle, thankfully, but the idea that
00:28:56.540
kids are just kids are the problem and they're going to make your life and marriage miserable.
0.98
00:29:06.680
So I think the issue with kids today is multifaceted.
00:29:11.740
I think that there is, um, people are concerned about, you know, uh, finding decent housing,
00:29:17.660
you know, for having kids, they're concerned about the, you know, the environment, uh,
00:29:22.900
they're concerned, I think about the way in which having kids was going to affect their
00:29:26.440
lifestyle, you know, their, their ability to kind of travel and eat out and all this
00:29:31.500
So, um, they're in fact, they're worried about how it's going to affect their career.
00:29:34.520
Um, and so I think all these things kind of coalesce and, uh, help to explain why we've
00:29:43.840
It's down depending upon the, you know, the demographer 1.3, 1.2, um, fertility rate, which
00:29:51.020
means that, you know, across Canada right now, you know, the average woman is going to have
0.84
00:29:57.500
Um, and of course the replacement rate is about 2.1.
00:30:00.360
So, you know, absent immigration, of course, you're getting a lot of immigration recently
00:30:04.040
in Canada, but absent immigration, what that tells us is that Canada would be shrinking
00:30:10.440
Um, and it just also tells us there's some, there's some, you know, set of factors, probably
00:30:15.480
both rising cost of housing in Canada, but also kind of just a certain set of cultural
00:30:20.800
assumptions about childbearing that have made, um, you know, parenthood a lot less attractive
00:30:27.400
and in some ways accessible to, uh, to Canadians.
00:30:30.720
But what I think people don't realize is that, you know, uh, what we find is that there are
00:30:38.360
And I think a lot of this sort of revolves around how does this affect women, but no group
00:30:41.960
of men and women who are happier in the United States, for instance, than married fathers
00:30:48.980
Just take women because we've seen the polling data is that women are more skeptical about
1.00
00:30:53.160
marriage and motherhood today, um, than men are.
00:30:56.400
And so when, let's just look at the women, what you see is that, you know, 40% of married
1.00
00:31:01.100
moms are very happy with their lives in the United States today, compared to just, um, 22%
00:31:11.960
And then when you look at who's the least happy, um, the groups of women who are the least happy
00:31:17.260
got 25% of single childless women versus just 13% of married mothers.
0.95
00:31:25.360
So on both ends of kind of a happiness continuum, what we're seeing is that married moms are
1.00
00:31:29.840
the happiest and married moms are the least likely report that they're not too happy.
00:31:36.180
Um, they also, married moms also report more meaningful lives and less lonely lives than
0.97
00:31:48.320
And that is that kind of, I think the reputation in public, especially for women of marriage
00:31:55.940
And yet the reality is that at least, um, and looking at the survey data, you know, married
00:32:02.960
moms more likely to be flourishing than their single and childless peers.
0.69
00:32:05.900
So with all this data, why are so many people, including so many in media, in the academy,
00:32:21.740
If, if their own life experience says one thing, if the data says the same thing as their
00:32:29.020
own life experience, then why are they down on, on the institution?
00:32:35.620
Um, number one is obviously there's been a lot of family instability over, you know,
00:32:40.480
And so, you know, many, I think men, women have seen, you know, their parents get divorced,
00:32:46.040
their best friend, their older sibling get divorced.
00:32:48.880
And so, you know, understandably clouds their view of marriage.
00:32:52.920
Um, I think another part of the story here is, you know, we still live in an age when
00:32:57.360
in the average married family, even progressive families, women tend to do more of the housework,
1.00
00:33:02.500
more of the childcare, more of the kind of family management.
00:33:06.960
And, you know, if, if you're committed to kind of a 50, 50 model of, of doing everything,
00:33:12.200
that's going to look, you know, less appealing, um, than, you know, what you would have maybe
00:33:20.520
And so you might be more inclined just to sort of, you know, I don't want to have a
00:33:23.160
situation where I'm, you know, the wife and mother and I have a, you know, uh, an extra
00:33:28.720
burden when it comes to, um, you know, caring for the kids, managing the household, you know,
00:33:35.140
So I want to, I want to kind of focus more on my career, you know, I think that's, that's
00:33:41.160
Um, and then I think too, and this is, this is a harder thing to say, but it's true.
00:33:46.220
So progressives are less likely today to get married.
00:33:55.300
And I think, and less likely to be happy in general, and they're more likely to kind of
00:34:00.660
dominate, you know, our public cultural organs of production, the media, you know, the academy,
00:34:07.720
our public schools, you know, all that kind of stuff.
00:34:10.220
And so I think they're more likely to take a critical take on marriage, um, and family,
00:34:15.960
which then is kind of like distributed across the culture, given where there's, you know,
00:34:22.880
Do you have advice for, um, either for married couples or for, uh, uh, for policymakers?
00:34:30.520
I mean, maybe you've got advice for, for couples.
00:34:33.020
I see that you were, uh, endorsed by forgetting his name Chapman, that the guy behind five love
00:34:38.220
languages, he's one of the people endorsing your book.
00:34:41.200
So I mean, practical advice, what's, what's kind of, what's the takeaway for ordinary couples?
00:34:44.880
One is regular date nights are really valuable for couples, especially couples with kids.
00:34:49.080
I would say just kind of connecting, you know, keeping that, um, I'm not saying that romance
00:34:54.260
is everything that's sort of the soulmate model, but it's really not nothing.
00:34:57.260
So it's important to try to cultivate that romantic spirit, um, you know, on a regular basis.
00:35:03.040
And I think, uh, date nights can be helpful there.
00:35:05.480
I encourage couples to steer clear of a me first approach and embrace a, we first approach.
00:35:12.640
We see is the couples that have got joint accounts are markedly happier unless divorce
00:35:23.960
I, well, I think, you know, money, what's behind that money is a big deal.
00:35:28.900
And, uh, marriage is, you know, about sharing a life together.
00:35:32.800
And so one way you share a life together is, you know, you put your money together, especially
00:35:36.380
because oftentimes, you know, both parties are not earning half their household income.
00:35:42.280
I talked for instance, to a colleague in my twenties when we were both in our twenties.
00:35:53.220
Um, and I asked her, Hey, you know, how's it going?
00:35:55.660
But she expressed some frustration that she couldn't buy a couch for their apartment.
00:35:59.720
And she had, you know, I think two kids at the time.
00:36:02.560
And I was like, uh, just, I didn't say this, obviously, but I was thinking, what's going
00:36:10.260
And, um, and she's, and she kind of like, Oh, we have kind of separate accounts and I
00:36:14.460
don't have as much money in my account as he has in his account and you know, all this
00:36:17.960
And I was just going to like flabbergasted because my wife and I had one account and if
00:36:21.760
she wanted a couch and there was enough money in the account, she'd get the couch.
0.93
00:36:25.820
There wasn't, there wasn't like some kind of like, you know, so I'm just saying that's,
00:36:28.160
that's the dynamic in play is that, um, in part, right.
00:36:32.500
You know, whereas if you have a sense of like, it's our money, it's our financial future.
00:36:36.340
We're gonna have to talk through some tough, you know, things.
00:36:44.300
You know, money matters and that is for marriage too.
0.52
00:36:46.040
So I think that's, that's an example of kind of more, do you take a, we first approach
00:36:49.940
to money and marriage or do you take a, me first?
00:36:51.880
And I think a, we first is much, much better, um, on commitment.
00:36:55.800
Can I recognize the importance of not using the D word in your thinking or your conversations
00:37:01.980
You know, you've made a commitment, work through your, you know, your challenges for
00:37:05.120
all possible, obviously without, you know, um, opening up that Pandora's box, talk about
00:37:12.560
Um, you know, steering clear of attractive alternatives in the real world.
00:37:16.280
Um, but also, uh, nowadays steering clear of attractive alternatives in the virtual world,
00:37:20.860
you know, and that obviously relates to anything from, you know, social media to pornography,
00:37:27.220
Um, you know, the, the less of that, the better for your marriage, um, is kind of the takeaway
00:37:31.940
for an ordinary couples talk obviously about the importance of men being intentional about
00:37:37.160
Not, I mean, I, a lot of the guys that I know have gotten divorced and, you know, in
00:37:41.340
their forties, fifties are guys that I know have a record of not being stably employed.
00:37:46.420
And I know that it's sort of undercut their wife's confidence in them and their sense of
00:37:53.200
And so obviously some, you know, people are fired without, you know, through no fault of
00:37:58.380
their own, but, but it's also the case too, that there are some kinds of guys who just
00:38:02.660
don't fully take their financial and professional responsibilities with the requisite seriousness.
00:38:13.120
Um, and then, and finally, if, if you've got a religious bone in your body, I would recommend
0.95
00:38:16.920
that you go to, you know, your church, your temple, your synagogue, your mosque, because
00:38:20.780
generally speaking, couples who are embedded in a religious community, um, for very sociological
00:38:26.740
reasons in part, you know, you're surrounded by a lot of families tend to get, you know,
00:38:31.200
messaging and encouragement that, you know, pushes you, I say, especially as a dad and
00:38:36.440
husband to be more intentional about, you know, um, being there for your family, for
00:38:44.660
your spouse, for your kids, um, and, um, you know, steering clear of things that can get
00:38:50.140
people into trouble, like, you know, drugs and, and alcohol and whatnot as well too.
00:38:56.560
So, um, those are some things that, you know, that are more practical that come out in the
00:39:05.520
Are there things that are politicians at any particular level of government could be
00:39:11.280
doing to, uh, to change some of these patterns that you've been watching and seeing?
00:39:17.740
So I think one thing is just being very clear that the financial incentives line up with
00:39:21.880
marriage and now parenthood, especially in Canada with your low fertility rate, we often
00:39:27.140
I don't, I don't, I'm not as familiar with the Canadian sort of, you know, policy regime
00:39:30.380
around supporting lower income families in Canada, but we know in the States that a lot
00:39:35.640
of working class couples are penalized when it comes to marriage, uh, because the way in
0.97
00:39:41.780
which we've structure our benefits basically means that if you earn above a certain threshold,
00:39:46.580
you don't qualify for something like free healthcare in the United States, um, or free childcare,
00:39:51.360
or, you know, what's called the earned income tax credit.
00:39:55.620
So just being attentive to the way in which, you know, as you look at kind of the, the different
00:39:59.880
benefits that are offered to families in Canada, that they're, you're not unintentionally making
00:40:04.180
it, you know, less financially attractive to get married or to have kids for that matter
00:40:08.580
So that's one issue that I would share with your Canadian eyes.
00:40:12.100
I think another issue is, is housing affordability.
00:40:14.760
I think people are reluctant to get married, especially to have kids if they don't have access
00:40:19.920
to, um, decent housing, especially single family homes.
00:40:24.420
And so I think just, yeah, that is our, our biggest issue in this country right now is,
00:40:30.240
uh, a housing bubble in especially Toronto and Vancouver that is out of control, but rising
00:40:37.920
And the, a lot of the push for, uh, by policymakers is to say, great, we'll build giant condo towers
00:40:45.060
and that might be fine for, for some families with kids, but it's not the ideal that everyone
00:40:52.640
No, that's the challenge is that we see there's something about, there's been some really
00:41:02.160
That's not, um, conducive to family formation and childbearing.
00:41:07.160
Um, so unless you're Jim Gaffigan, well, he's, yeah, he's an exception.
00:41:14.320
You don't want to, um, I mean, we've seen this obviously this, this, this, and it's East
00:41:18.660
I mean, we've, this story is played out in Seoul.
00:41:24.800
So when you build these massive urban centers and big towers, people don't want to have,
00:41:31.560
you know, kids in that, in that context, you need to figure out ways to, um, increase.
00:41:40.900
I'm just saying, you know, give people their own little, you know, their own little castle,
00:41:44.880
I think my parents, my parents' first home that I remember when I was a toddler, uh,
00:41:50.480
would have been maybe 1100 square feet, maybe, but it's a three bedroom home.
00:41:56.380
And it was a single family home on its own little plot.
00:42:01.380
So we had, so I think, yeah, building a lot of modest single family homes would be,
00:42:04.940
would be really helpful if we could figure out a way to do that policy wise.
00:42:07.480
And I know that that's become part of your political conversation in Canada.
00:42:10.660
But the final piece is, you know, Canada has got better family policies.
00:42:16.080
Finland has got better family policies than the United States.
00:42:19.660
No question, for instance, that those two countries, for instance, you know, much better
00:42:23.680
in terms of just benefits, money, blah, blah, blah, for, you know, for families, more parental
00:42:28.280
leave, you know, pay parental leave, all this kind of stuff.
00:42:31.620
But both Finland and Canada, for instance, have markedly lower rates of fertility now than the
00:42:37.920
And I mean, we've got our problems down South in the US, obviously, but I think there still
00:42:42.960
is a kind of greater regard for marriage and childbearing South of the border than there
00:42:50.040
And so there's also a cultural challenge here in question.
00:42:52.760
So I think you've got to figure out ways to, in the media, in your universities, in pop
00:42:59.460
culture, in your education system, to talk up the benefits of marriage and parenthood to,
00:43:06.500
you know, school age children and young adults.
00:43:10.660
Because absent that, you know, you're just going to see a precipitous decline in marriage
00:43:18.680
and family life in Canada, as is, you know, is sort of playing out in a lot of countries.
00:43:26.960
Brad, we are out of time, but thank you so much for your time today.
00:43:31.320
And I encourage people to check out the book, Get Married.
00:43:47.780
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00:43:52.500
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