Dr. Brad Wilcox is a professor of sociology and director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. His new book, Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forged Strong Families, and Save Civ Civ, argues that the real way to ensure that America flourishes is by getting married and having kids.
00:00:00.000Academics and the media want you to believe that monogamy is making us miserable, that marriage is some archaic institution that we need to get rid of, that really we should all just be single, child-free, polyamorous, but the data actually shows that all of that is what's making us sad.
00:00:24.300That the happiest people are married people, that the happiest people having the most fulfilling sexual lives are actually Christian married people.
00:00:36.900And here today to talk about all of this is Dr. Brad Wilcox.
00:00:40.760He is a professor of sociology and director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia.
00:00:46.920His latest book, Get Married, Why Americans Must Defy the Elites Forged Strong Families and Save Civilization, argues that the real way to satisfaction and fulfillment and the real way to ensure that America flourishes is by getting married and having kids.
00:01:03.040So we're going to talk about that, all the data that supports that on today's episode of Relatable, which is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers.
00:01:09.260Go to GoodRanchers.com. Use code Allie at checkout. That's GoodRanchers.com, code Allie.
00:01:16.920Dr. Wilcox, thanks so much for taking the time to join us again.
00:01:26.560So you have a new book out, Get Married, Why Americans Must Defy the Elites Forged Strong Families and Save Civilization.
00:01:35.940You're really, in my opinion, like the foremost voice, one of the most prominent advocates of getting married and having kids in an age
00:01:45.240where all the experts are saying, don't do that, don't have kids, don't get married, be polyamorous or stay single forever and do what you want to do to pursue happiness.
00:01:55.760So tell us a little bit just why you wrote this book in the midst of all of that.
00:02:00.660Yeah, Allie, I was raised by a single mom and I've kind of done a lot of research indicating the value and the power of marriage for children.
00:02:07.540But as I've been talking to students at the University of Virginia, what I've been hearing, especially from the young women that I speak with,
00:02:13.680is kind of a pervasive sense of concern, of fear about the future for them when it comes to relationships and especially marriage.
00:02:22.440And they just wonder, they worry that they're not going to be able to find a guy who is worthy of commitment or kind of interested in committing
00:02:30.180and would make a good, you know, husband down the road.
00:02:34.080So my more recent conversations with students and then just kind of looking at the sort of statistical landscape now have me very concerned about the impact of these larger trends on marriage for adults.
00:02:45.740And so that's what kind of led me to do this book.
00:02:47.820It's really trying to give people a sense of why marriage is important, you know, for young adults, and then also some ideas about how they can forge strong and stable unions today.
00:02:57.720You talk about this New Yorker article that argues that not only is marriage maybe inhibitive for people's happiness,
00:03:08.400but that specifically Christianity and the marriage that it encourages actually stops people from being as happy as they could be or flourishing as much as they should.
00:03:21.100And so what do you say to something like that?
00:03:23.320That really is the popular narrative today.
00:03:25.340Yeah, there's just so many media pieces out there, Allie, that are, you know, basically giving people a pretty negative view of marriage
00:03:33.520and a negative view of the role that religious faith plays typically in Americans' lives.
00:03:38.520So this New Yorker article basically was suggesting that Christian men are porn-addled, their wives are upset with them,
00:03:45.200and this is leading to any number of, you know, pathologies in their relationships, their lives, and their marriages,
00:03:50.800and that, you know, Christian men are divorcing their husbands more in terms of, you know, because they're upset with their use of pornography.
00:03:58.420Now, I think we all understand and appreciate that Christian men using pornography does create real challenges both for them and for their marriages.
00:04:07.900What was striking about this New Yorker piece was that it had kind of no broader context.
00:04:12.600It did not tell the audience that on average, Christian men are less likely to use pornography compared to men who are secular.
00:04:20.640That on average, Christian couples are less likely to get divorced if they go to church than couples who are secular or non-attending.
00:04:29.620And that, as my new book shows, there's no group of Americans who actually have more sex and have better sex than religious couples in the U.S.
00:04:39.460So when you're attending church together, what I find is that about 65% of church-grown couples have sex at least once a week,
00:04:46.540and less than half of secular couples have sex once a week.
00:04:50.740I was really kind of blown away by that finding.
00:04:55.200And then when it comes to sexual satisfaction,
00:04:57.720we see again that religious couples are much more likely to be sexually satisfied than secular couples.
00:05:04.040So the broader point here is that, you know, and this is a great example of the way in which kind of the media is painting a negative portrait of the faith and family connection.
00:05:13.680And yet we see in the data is that on average, the link between faith and family is strong,
00:05:19.440including when it comes to this most controversial topic,
00:05:23.360and that is sort of sex, marriage, and faith in America.
00:05:26.100I mean, what is the motivating factor behind trying to paint marriage and monogamy,
00:05:45.260particularly Christian marriage, as something that is an obstacle to happiness,
00:05:51.000rather than just echoing what the data actually says, as you said,
00:05:57.100that people in these marriages are much more likely to be sexually satisfied and just happy in general?
00:06:04.240Is it kind of like, in your assessment, a misery loves company thing going on here?
00:06:09.840Or is it just kind of the progressive biases we see playing out in the media?
00:06:15.760Yeah, I think there are a couple of factors here.
00:06:17.400So in the book, in fact, in the preface, I kind of detail how for a long time,
00:06:22.520the left has been kind of taking, you know, swipes at marriage.
00:06:27.620And I talk about a piece in Bloomberg that suggests that women are richer if they forego marriage.
00:06:32.580I talk about a piece in the New York Times that suggests that marriage is a route to misery for women.
00:06:40.140So that's kind of, I think your audience would kind of be aware of that.
00:06:42.960But there's also kind of a neurodynamic here playing out as well.
00:06:45.240And that is the online right, people like Andrew Tate and Pearl Davis are also now attacking marriage.
00:06:50.100And they're saying that marriage is a bad deal for men.
00:06:52.900You know, there's so much divorce out there that, you know, men are basically taken to the cleaners by their wives on many occasions.
00:06:59.460So what we have now, Ali, is that the sort of the online right is attacking marriage.
00:07:04.240And then the sort of the mainstream left is attacking marriage.
00:07:07.560The online right is sort of targeting men.
00:07:09.980And the mainstream left is targeting women.
00:07:12.660But their bottom line basically is that folks should just steer clear of marriage.
00:07:16.260And I think that they're doing this in part from a place of pain.
00:07:19.800I think there are plenty of men who've been divorced unwillingly and they're upset.
00:07:24.480And they gravitate towards this online right perspective.
00:07:27.740And there are plenty of women who've been frustrated in their marriages or frustrated in their relationships or frustrated that they can't find a guy who's sort of worthy of marriage from their perspective.
00:07:39.300And they're more likely to take a very dim view of marriage as well.
00:07:42.400But finally, you kind of touched on the progressive angle here.
00:07:45.680And that is that I think the progressive assumption is that every new pattern, every new fashion that comes down the family pike, the relationship pike is just great.
00:07:58.900You know, that we should always kind of embrace that which is new.
00:08:01.560And so I think that explains in part why this newest fashion, polyamory, has been getting so many glowing media hits in places like the New York Times and New York Magazine.
00:08:13.800I definitely want to talk about polyamory and what you said about the kind of progressive assault on marriage.
00:08:21.960And I think you made a really good, insightful distinction there that I'm so interested in fleshing out more.
00:08:27.580That both the online right, which I don't think is representative of mainstream conservatives, but the kind of I don't know if I would call it far right.
00:08:38.220But as you said, the very online type of right wing media figures who might describe themselves as red pill, as you said, they are targeting men in that.
00:08:54.840They're saying, look at how women and specifically feminists have taken advantage of men and look at how everything is stacked against men.
00:09:07.960Men are blamed for everything, but really women are the problem.
00:09:11.620Really women are the ones exploiting men.
00:09:13.980Really women are the ones taking advantage of men in the relationship.
00:09:17.560Really it's women who are the problem in all of this.
00:09:46.780So I think this is going to be with us for a while, unfortunately.
00:09:51.920And I think it's a consequence of the fact that we are seeing a growing divide between the sexes, partially ideological, where a lot of young men are kind of moving to the right to some extent.
00:10:02.280And even more women are moving to the left.
00:10:04.800And so, you know, this dynamic creates, you know, a kind of separation between the sexes and a skepticism and even hostility between the sexes.
00:10:13.580There's also, I think, a dynamic, too, where, you know, dating apps often kind of disadvantage a certain, you know, share of men and make them more angry, you know, about the opposite sex as well.
00:10:28.720And so this kind of feeds into the audience for this red pill, right, as you described it.
00:10:34.060And then, too, there are, you know, men who've been divorced unwillingly and for reasons that wouldn't be counted, I think, as legitimate.
00:10:39.560You know, I know, for instance, a guy whose wife left him for, you know, their kid's piano teacher and his good husband, you know, all that, you know, there was nothing really explicable about, you know, what happened.
00:10:51.020And he wasn't treated very well in family court in Virginia.
00:10:54.180So there are, you know, guys like, you know, like this gentleman that I know who could be attracted to the red pill, right, for that reason as well.
00:11:02.820So these are some of the factors that are driving this.
00:11:05.060And I think the algorithms online kind of only, you know, sort of deepen sometimes, you know, some men's hostility towards women and their lack of faith in the possibility of finding love and, you know, forging a strong marriage.
00:11:20.620Yeah. And I just see this mentality on both the right and the left, but in different ways.
00:11:27.440This disbelief that strong, happy marriages exist where both the man and the woman, yeah, sure, they have arguments and conflicts, but they're happy.
00:11:38.480They're satisfied. They have a good life.
00:11:40.980They've kind of figured out as much as they can the dynamics.
00:11:43.580And certainly there's a disbelief, I would say, particularly on the left, that there are happy Christian marriages where there's not some like secret compartments in the people's lives where they're actually deeply unhappy with their station in life and the fact that they're married.
00:11:59.380It's a total disbelief that there are people that exist who are happily married and just live normal, truthful, honest, productive, responsible lives together.
00:12:10.180They like being moms and dads. They like being husbands and wives.
00:12:16.280It's I don't know if it's just a product of being perpetually online and just kind of having your little silos of ideology or if it's that because, like you said, because they've been hurt in their own lives.
00:12:31.120It's difficult to believe that there are people who are happily married and in relationships out there.
00:12:37.640Yeah, well, obviously, there are tons of kids, you know, who've been raised in, for instance, divorced homes, including homes that may have been, you know, Christian in some way, you know, Striper or other.
00:12:47.800And so, again, I think sometimes we're kind of talking about people who are coming from a place of pain and then writing, you know, about marriage or writing about Christianity in ways that are that are shaped by their own negative experiences.
00:12:59.660But I think what's unfortunate about some of these dynamics is that they're kind of not putting, you know, the larger picture into perspective here.
00:13:07.500And one of the things that my book does, again, is to sort of show how for the average American, marriage is a pathway to meaning, to prosperity oftentimes, and to happiness.
00:13:18.840And that most married men and women are happily married today and that most married couples, you know, contra Andrew Tate or Pearl Davis will actually go the distance.
00:13:31.500And that means practically that we're not seeing a one in two pattern where one in two couples are getting divorced in this country.
00:13:39.180And when you account for, we hear very often that divorce inside the Christian church is the same rate as divorce outside the church.
00:13:49.820But when you account for particular factors like actual church attendance, couples who pray together, couples who really are taking their faith seriously together, you do see that divorce rate drop dramatically, right?
00:14:03.520In the book, I report that people who are attending church are 30 to 50 percent less likely to get divorced, depending upon the data set.
00:14:11.000I am relying here in part on Tyler Vanderbilt, a professor at Harvard of Biostatistics, who has done work in this space.
00:14:16.880So there's just my evidence, his evidence, others, you know, kind of just showing that for most people, being a part of a church community is a source of strength for your marriage and not the opposite.
00:14:29.040And one of the broader points here is that birds of a feather flock together.
00:14:34.640And what we know from work done by Nicholas Christakis at Yale is that basically divorce is sort of highly socialized.
00:14:44.980It sort of is transmitted from one friend to the other, from one family to the other.
00:14:49.660And what that means practically is that your odds of getting divorced are just much, much higher if you're surrounded by friends and family who get divorced, because, you know, all of us have difficulties and challenges in our marriages.
00:15:00.260And so if your best friend is getting divorced in the face of an ordinary challenge, you're more likely to do the same thing.
00:15:04.920But by contrast, if you're surrounding yourselves with people who take, you know, a high value of their marriage and navigate their challenges successfully, like many church-grown couples do, then your odds of divorce are going to fall.
00:15:19.660You talked about this trend of kind of like polyamory.
00:15:32.220But before we get to that, I do want to talk a little bit more about, because I think that we really do kind of have a progressive zeitgeist, the ubiquitousness of the progressive influence is obvious to most people.
00:15:46.000I think watching this podcast probably more than they're familiar with kind of like the red pill side.
00:15:50.920And I think we could probably safely say that most influential institutions in this country, they're dominated, at least to some extent, by progressive ideology.
00:15:59.580And I came across this TikTok video that I thought typifies this progressive mentality.
00:16:07.100Maybe she wouldn't even see it as progressive.
00:16:08.780It's more like self-love, self-fulfillment, self-satisfaction, which I do deem to be progressive.
00:16:14.900But this, I think, typifies so much of the mentality about marriage and singleness.
00:16:19.500And so I just wanted to play this TikTok and have you respond to it.
00:16:23.780A day in the life of a single woman who doesn't believe in marriage or want children.
00:16:27.960I spent most of my adult life in a long-term partnership that was safe and comfortable, but deep down I was starving for emotional connection.
00:16:34.620For years, I ignored my gut feeling that I was deeply unhappy and hoped it would somehow magically get better.
00:16:39.100At the time, I couldn't fathom being happily single because I didn't even know it was a possibility.
00:16:43.120I've never seen it represented before.
00:16:44.500It doesn't mean that I don't want to be in a partnership ever again, but I have zero desire to have children, so I'm comfortable waiting it out.
00:16:49.760In the current political and economic climate, there is no guarantee that I can successfully raise a child with the life of abundance they deserve.
00:16:56.400And I'm enjoying spending my hard-earned money on me.
00:17:14.720Yeah, I talk about this as a kind of a Midas mindset, Allie.
00:17:17.540We're basically kind of telling through media and pop culture and now social media that Americans should steer clear from marriage and family, you know, and towards mammon, broadly defined, towards work, towards money, and, you know, the unencumbered life.
00:17:32.160So it's all about freedom from family rather than freedom for family.
00:17:35.780And what people don't realize is that, as Aristotle taught us, we're social animals, and we're hardwired to connect, and we're just much more likely to be flourishing in terms of meaning and happiness and loneliness being, you know, lower when we're married with kids.
00:17:51.180In fact, there's no group of Americans today who are happier than married fathers and married mothers.
00:17:57.500And that story is told, obviously, in my book, Get Married, but it's not told in many mainstream media platforms, as you all know.
00:18:04.780Yes, there was a very recent CNN article that said that, that said, you know, no matter how you analyze the data, what you're going to find is that married people tend to be far happier than those who are not.
00:18:21.520And the poll author, Jonathan Rothwell, is the Gallup Poll, he said, we see a fairly large and notable advantage to being married in terms of how people evaluate their lives.
00:18:34.580Married adults who did not attend high school evaluate their lives more favorably than unmarried adults with a graduate degree.
00:18:41.920Very often we're told, like, the measure of happiness is through education, the measure of happiness is through how much money you make.
00:18:48.440And really, that's not what the, what the data shows.
00:18:53.620Yeah, so that's, that Gallup Poll is really on the money.
00:18:56.460My own book shows basically, yeah, education and money do predict happiness, but nothing predicts happiness in our regression models and our statistics like a good marriage.
00:19:05.200Not sex, not money, not, you know, not anything.
00:19:08.300And so that story is, I think, not being told enough to our young adults and to, you know, Americans more generally.
00:19:16.220Yeah, and it's, it's really such a shame.
00:19:18.860It's so interesting in a culture that prioritizes, or we say that we prioritize happiness more than anything else.
00:19:25.860That's what you hear, especially among young people.
00:19:32.440So I think, yeah, I think the paradox, the paradox of happiness, you know, from, you know, both the Christian tradition and the classical tradition as well, like Aristotle, is there's a recognition that kind of directly pursuing happiness or directly pursuing your own kind of immediate desires is the path actually not towards happiness, but the path towards misery.
00:19:53.060And by contrast, you know, the path is actually is paved both through virtue and through kind of making a gift of yourself to others, including, of course, a spouse and kids.
00:20:05.580Yeah, that's certainly true within Christianity.
00:20:07.900He who was willing to lose his life will find it.
00:20:10.880And I guess it makes sense that that kind of spiritual and eternal and deep truth would be confusing to a world that seems to be only interested in the material.
00:20:23.060So I'm interested in talking to you about polyamory.
00:20:36.780There was this big piece, I think it was in the New Yorker, a practical guide for the curious couple.
00:20:44.020This is something else that's been so glorified is why don't we just leave this archaic idea of monogamy, which is so they would say,
00:20:52.900I don't know, anti-human and not, you know, it's not with the times anymore.
00:20:59.300It's not catching up to what people really want and how we really are.
00:21:04.360And so we need to just be free to have multiple relationships at once.
00:21:44.780And, like, you know, I struggle to give my wife the attention, the affection, and the money, if you will, that she needs and deserves, right?
00:21:52.620And the idea that just practically speaking here for a second, that I could, like, extend my attentions in other directions is just, it's laughable, right?
00:22:02.280So that's, I think, part of the challenge.
00:22:03.980But I think also there's no recognition that this would be a disaster and is a disaster for children.
00:22:10.320You know, we know that kids are more likely to be harmed when they're in the presence of unrelated strangers, you know, in the household, especially unrelated males.
00:22:18.540There's a lot of evidence on this score.
00:22:20.160We know from evidence derived from studies of polygamous, you know, households in other parts of the world that kids in polygamous households tend to do worse than kids in nuclear families in other regions across the world.
00:22:32.320So the point I'm getting at is that monogamy serves important social, emotional, and financial goods for adults, for children, and even for the community.
00:22:43.040There's a Harvard scholar named Joseph Heinrich who's just written a lot about how monogamy has actually powered the rise of the West.
00:22:50.160So this whole push for polyamory is just so naive.
00:22:54.540And we even see, ironically, in this book by Molly Roden-Winter, who's the, you know, the sort of celeb right now being profiled for all these polyamory stories, that when you actually read her book more, there is so much sadness indicated by her about the ways in which her husband kind of pushed her into this way of life.
00:23:12.780So, you know, this is going to lead to a lot of heartache and a lot of broken families and a lot of hurt kids is kind of the bottom line.
00:23:18.880Yes. And that's what I see a lot in these kind of TikTok polyamory influencers when they're talking about their relationships and giving people advice on how to navigate polyamorous relationships.
00:23:33.740There's a lot of what I would call cope.
00:23:35.740Like they are, they talk about untraining their minds from, you know, the remnants of monogamy that are still in there.
00:23:48.620And, oh, when I feel jealous because my partner is on a date with his new girlfriend, you know, that's just me being selfish or that's just me not being progressive enough.
00:24:00.980But I have to retrain my heart and my mind to embracing the openness of our relationship and realizing that more love for another person doesn't mean less love for me.
00:24:11.640I mean, they're just pushing down their right and basic instincts that is crying out for stability and monogamy.
00:24:20.400Right. And the thing is, is that all the polling tells us, you know, that women are much less interested in this than men are.
00:24:28.020And so, again, we have this crazy situation where this progressive impulse is leading us down a road that is, you know, making women more miserable.
00:24:39.560And it's just it's a sad, you know, part of the story is that this actually ends up making women disadvantaged and in a sense, women unequal in terms of who gets the attention, the affection, the financial resources in these newer relationships.
00:24:54.320Yes. Fifty one percent of adults younger than 30 told Pew Research in 2023, this is according to The New Yorker, that open marriage was acceptable.
00:25:05.000I guess that's marriage in which, you know, you can have other relationships outside of the marriage.
00:25:09.100And 20 percent of all Americans report experimenting with some form of non monogamy.
00:25:14.980Well, that's very troubling. I assume that it's troubling to you, too.
00:25:18.080Yeah, it is. And one of the things that my book talks about, too, is sort of the power of commitment, the power of fidelity.
00:25:24.760And what I find in my book is that couples today who would embrace sort of this classic, this classic ethic of fidelity,
00:25:34.160of saying to what's called the general social survey that, you know, infidelity is always wrong.
00:25:40.300Right. They are significantly more likely to be happily married.
00:25:45.080And, you know, I mean, this is not rocket science to you and to me, but it's just just worth underlining that one of the key purposes of marriage across cultures is to kind of keep the sirens at bay and to focus your attentions and your affections on your spouse.
00:25:58.580And so couples who are doing that successfully are just more likely to be flourishing.
00:26:02.620And that's that reality is not acknowledged, unfortunately, in a lot of the elite precincts that are writing about and discussing love and relationships and marriage today.
00:26:12.980Yes. And you retweeted this tweet from someone named Shari Hamid.
00:26:17.320And I think that this is absolutely true. And it gives words to kind of a thought that I was having a couple of minutes ago.
00:26:23.040He said a self-fulfilling prophecy might be at work when it comes to polyamory.
00:26:26.320Polyamory becomes more widespread because we think it's already widespread.
00:26:31.080Norms around sexuality change because we think they've changed even if they haven't.
00:26:35.300Gosh, I think that's true about a lot of things when it comes to the progressive sexual revolution.
00:26:39.420You start hearing about it more and more and more and you think, wow, this is happening.
00:26:48.200And so you're more likely to engage in it when really it was just a tiny portion of society to begin with.
00:26:56.320Exactly. I think this is how a lot of the cultural changes that have kind of washed over our country.
00:27:01.500There's a similar story when it comes to the divorce revolution, for instance, in the late 60s and early 70s.
00:27:07.540You know, the kind of the me first mentality that kind of took hold among so many young married couples, you know, in that moment in our history.
00:27:13.780And that's, I think, now happening with polyamory as well.
00:27:16.260So and again, what you're going to see is, unfortunately, I think here is that a lot of working class and poor young adults who are getting these messages are going to be most susceptible to them.
00:27:29.620And their kids are going to pay the biggest price for all of this.
00:27:32.000Yes. And so you did this thread and you were refuting some points that have been made about the dangers of monogamy.
00:27:46.760And what you said was that monogamy actually reduces things like rape, murder, assault, robbery and fraud, or it can.
00:27:57.980And it actually increases economic activity, child protection, child investment.
00:28:04.200It reduces rates of child neglect, abuse, accidental death.
00:28:10.640Monogamy does that, not just having the two presence of loving adults or the presence of two loving adults, but actually monogamy does that.
00:28:30.060I don't think he, I mean, I don't know him personally, but he is a very eminent scholar and he's been studying kind of kinship culture, you know, across time and across cultural, across cultures.
00:28:43.760So, you know, his, his point basically is that we can kind of organize, obviously our kinship and sexual relationships in any number of different combinations, but monogamy by kind of giving a stable structure to women and men, and by increasing the odds that men are married to one woman is much more likely to be conducive to a strong and stable social order.
00:29:13.760Here's an example of someone who says, her, her description on her page says, my life as a solo poly person is extremely fulfilling.
00:29:31.220I'm poly as fuck y'all, but I know that many of you don't understand what that means.
00:29:34.900So I'm going to draw you a diagram to explain what my life looks like as a solo poly person.
00:29:41.900So I am at the center and I am my primary partner.
00:29:45.620There are people who I'm exploring, people who I'm dating, my friends with benefits who I'm romantic with and sexual with, my lovers who I'm sexual with, my partners who I'm 10 toes down with, satellites who come in and out of my life, and playmates who I play with in the kink and swinging spaces.
00:30:00.320Okay, so I've seen a lot of things like this and just explaining who their partners with, who their partners are connected to.
00:30:08.960I mean, really, this isn't that much of a new concept, is it?
00:30:12.320We've just kind of put a new trendy name on it.
00:30:15.620I mean, people have been promiscuous for a long time.
00:30:36.420So that polyamorous, you know, families will be established legally.
00:30:40.120They'll be given normative support culturally.
00:30:42.260And, again, the concern here is that it's going to make it harder for people who are trying to kind of live the sort of older model or the classic model when it comes to monogamous marriage because they're going to be, you know, exposed to this, you know, newer model.
00:30:58.340And it's going to be, you know, a temptation for some, you know, spouses.
00:31:02.860And then, again, who's going to be hurt the most by all this?
00:31:09.640I mean, as you already mentioned, kids are much more likely to be abused or neglected when there is a non-related adult, especially a non-related male that's in the home.
00:31:21.140And you have so much strife and even just exacerbated, I think, chaos and instability that goes on in these kinds of relationships that kids are just thrown in the midst of all of that.
00:31:34.780Kids, once again, have to bear the brunt of our social sexual experiments.
00:31:40.960Do you think this is the natural progression of Obergefell?
00:31:44.900I mean, evangelicals at the time said, oh, if we redefine marriage to be anything between a man and a woman, you're going to open up the door to all kinds of redefinitions that is, again, going to, you know, hurt the institution of marriage, which is the foundation of a free society.
00:32:00.440But it's also going to hurt children. And of course, we were mocked mercilessly for saying something like that.
00:32:05.020But is this one of the natural consequences of that?
00:32:08.900I think you can certainly make that argument, although, of course, many of the proponents of same-sex marriage, you know, were arguing for, you know, just a two-person arrangement.
00:32:17.640But I think it's part and parcel of just a broader shift away from kind of seeing marriage's core orientation to providing the ideal context for the bearing and rearing of children.
00:32:28.300And we've kind of been on this trajectory, you know, since the 1960s, including with the, you know, the advent of no-fault divorce.
00:32:36.620So we're just kind of headed in a moment where a lot of the norms and customs and laws that tended to sort of strengthen monogamous marriage, strengthen the intact family, you know, connect kids to their own parents, have, you know, basically either just eroded, disappeared, or are in the process right now of weakening.
00:32:56.580But on the good news front, I think it's important just to stress two points here.
00:33:02.140One is that we actually have seen a bit of an uptick in the share of kids being raised in intact married families.
00:33:08.000I think in part because, for better and for worse, marriage and parent have become more selective in recent years.
00:33:14.360And then, too, we are seeing on the sort of social science front, you know, just continuing evidence that kids benefit from marriage.
00:33:20.800And not just that they benefit, but they benefit even more from having married parents today than it was the case in one study 17 years ago and a different study about 30 years ago.
00:33:30.100So, for instance, when it comes, just to give you one example, when it comes to marriage and college completion, work that I've done with my colleague, Dr. Wendy Wang, shows that the connection between coming from a stable married family and going and graduating from college is stronger in more recent years than it was, say, 30 or 40 years ago with the baby boomer cohort.
00:33:52.820So I think that tells us that sort of the intellectual case for marriage is not just there today, but it's probably getting even stronger when it comes to the welfare of children.
00:34:04.420And Dr. Wilcox, could you remind us what the family diversity theory is?
00:34:09.920So the family diversity theory is this kind of idea that what really matters for families is love and money and that it doesn't really matter whether or not, you know, the parents are married.
00:34:20.340So any kind of combination is sort of equally good for kids and kids just need, again, their parents' attention and affection.
00:34:26.420That's love and enough money, financial resources to kind of thrive.
00:34:30.340And what this perspective, I think, doesn't recognize, doesn't appreciate is that, number one, we kind of look at different kids' outcomes.
00:34:38.040You know, in my book, we find, for instance, that boys who are raised in any kind of non-intact family, whether it's a single parent family or a step family or an adoptive family, are more likely to land in prison or in jail than they are to graduate from college.
00:34:52.520And by contrast, boys who are raised by their own married parents are more likely to graduate from college, about four times more likely, than they are to spend any time in jail or in prison.
00:35:01.900So this kind of family diversity perspective doesn't really kind of appreciate the facts on the ground.
00:35:06.660And then it also doesn't appreciate the ways in which married parents typically have more time to give their kids the attention and affection they need.
00:35:15.780They're more likely to give kids what's called authoritative disciplines, kind of constructive discipline.
00:35:19.740And they also have more money because family instability, you know, alley is often very expensive, you know, court costs, things like that.
00:35:26.620And single parents typically obviously have less money than married parents.
00:35:29.820So this family diversity theory doesn't kind of recognize that for ordinary kids, married parents are more likely to give them the attention and the affection that they need to thrive and have the money they need to support them adequately.
00:35:43.780Got it. OK, you talk about how marriage is necessary for the American dream.
00:35:51.660So what we know from the work of Raj Chetty, a Harvard economist, is that there are parts of this country where kids who are born poor are much more likely to stay poor and other parts of the country where kids who are born poor have a much higher likelihood of rising economically.
00:36:08.920Kind of that rags to riches story about the American dream kind of would be understood as.
00:36:13.500And so we know, for instance, that, you know, Salt Lake City metro area is a lot more mobility for poor kids than, say, a region like Atlanta, Georgia.
00:36:22.540And one of the big differences separating out Atlanta from Salt Lake City is there are many more two parent families in Salt Lake City and having a context, a communal context where your kids are surrounded by lots of two parent families is conducive to more mobility.
00:36:40.300So that's just kind of one example of the way in which the American dream is stronger in communities and neighborhoods and states where there are more married families, more two parent families in the mix.
00:36:51.700And tell me what can you define the closing of the American heart?
00:36:55.820That's a concept that you also discuss in your book.
00:36:59.300Yeah. So the good news, as I mentioned before, I think, is that we do see a lot of happily married folks today.
00:37:05.780We do see the share of kids who are being raised in stable married families.
00:37:10.980But the bad news is what I call the closing of the American heart is that adults are having so much more difficulty, so much more trouble in getting married, in dating and having kids.
00:37:28.700My colleague, Lyman Stone, estimates that about one in four of today's young adults will never have kids.
00:37:33.020I've seen research suggesting that about one in three young adults today will never have a spouse.
00:37:39.320So we're just seeing many more kinless adults kind of coming into our society.
00:37:44.360And that's problematic because they're much more likely to succumb to deaths of despair.
00:37:50.080This is based upon work by Jonathan Rothblatt from Gallup, whom you just referenced a little bit ago.
00:37:54.200And then when it comes to happiness, we're seeing evidence from the University of Chicago that the number one factor that accounts for falling rates of happiness in America, Ali, is the decline in marriage.
00:38:05.560So Jefferson talked about the pursuit of happiness as fundamental in the Declaration.
00:38:10.420And what we're seeing is that across America, more and more Americans are having difficulty realizing that pursuit, in part because they're less likely to be married.
00:38:19.240Hmm. And where can people find your book if they want to know more about this?