Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 953 ｜ Andrew Tate Is Wrong About Marriage ｜ Guest： Dr. Brad Wilcox

00:00:00.000 Academics 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.

00:00:24.300 That the happiest people are married people, that the happiest people having the most fulfilling sexual lives are actually Christian married people. 0.65

00:00:36.900 And here today to talk about all of this is Dr. Brad Wilcox.

00:00:40.760 He is a professor of sociology and director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia.

00:00:46.920 His 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.

00:01:03.040 So 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.

00:01:09.260 Go to GoodRanchers.com. Use code Allie at checkout. That's GoodRanchers.com, code Allie.

00:01:16.920 Dr. Wilcox, thanks so much for taking the time to join us again.

00:01:26.560 So you have a new book out, Get Married, Why Americans Must Defy the Elites Forged Strong Families and Save Civilization.

00:01:35.940 You're really, in my opinion, like the foremost voice, one of the most prominent advocates of getting married and having kids in an age

00:01:45.240 where 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.

00:01:55.760 So tell us a little bit just why you wrote this book in the midst of all of that.

00:02:00.660 Yeah, 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.

00:02:07.540 But 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,

00:02:13.680 is kind of a pervasive sense of concern, of fear about the future for them when it comes to relationships and especially marriage.

00:02:22.440 And 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

00:02:30.180 and would make a good, you know, husband down the road.

00:02:34.080 So 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.

00:02:45.740 And so that's what kind of led me to do this book.

00:02:47.820 It'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.

00:02:57.720 You talk about this New Yorker article that argues that not only is marriage maybe inhibitive for people's happiness,

00:03:08.400 but 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.

00:03:21.100 And so what do you say to something like that?

00:03:23.320 That really is the popular narrative today.

00:03:25.340 Yeah, there's just so many media pieces out there, Allie, that are, you know, basically giving people a pretty negative view of marriage

00:03:33.520 and a negative view of the role that religious faith plays typically in Americans' lives.

00:03:38.520 So this New Yorker article basically was suggesting that Christian men are porn-addled, their wives are upset with them, 0.62

00:03:45.200 and this is leading to any number of, you know, pathologies in their relationships, their lives, and their marriages,

00:03:50.800 and that, you know, Christian men are divorcing their husbands more in terms of, you know, because they're upset with their use of pornography.

00:03:58.420 Now, I think we all understand and appreciate that Christian men using pornography does create real challenges both for them and for their marriages.

00:04:05.540 So I'm not going to deny that idea.

00:04:07.900 What was striking about this New Yorker piece was that it had kind of no broader context.

00:04:12.600 It did not tell the audience that on average, Christian men are less likely to use pornography compared to men who are secular.

00:04:20.640 That on average, Christian couples are less likely to get divorced if they go to church than couples who are secular or non-attending.

00:04:29.620 And 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.

00:04:39.460 So when you're attending church together, what I find is that about 65% of church-grown couples have sex at least once a week, 0.78

00:04:46.540 and less than half of secular couples have sex once a week.

00:04:50.740 I was really kind of blown away by that finding.

00:04:53.580 Didn't expect to see that difference.

00:04:55.200 And then when it comes to sexual satisfaction,

00:04:57.720 we see again that religious couples are much more likely to be sexually satisfied than secular couples.

00:05:04.040 So 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.

00:05:13.680 And yet we see in the data is that on average, the link between faith and family is strong,

00:05:19.440 including when it comes to this most controversial topic,

00:05:23.360 and that is sort of sex, marriage, and faith in America.

00:05:26.100 I mean, what is the motivating factor behind trying to paint marriage and monogamy,

00:05:45.260 particularly Christian marriage, as something that is an obstacle to happiness, 0.99

00:05:51.000 rather than just echoing what the data actually says, as you said,

00:05:57.100 that people in these marriages are much more likely to be sexually satisfied and just happy in general?

00:06:04.240 Is it kind of like, in your assessment, a misery loves company thing going on here?

00:06:09.840 Or is it just kind of the progressive biases we see playing out in the media?

00:06:15.760 Yeah, I think there are a couple of factors here.

00:06:17.400 So in the book, in fact, in the preface, I kind of detail how for a long time,

00:06:22.520 the left has been kind of taking, you know, swipes at marriage.

00:06:27.620 And I talk about a piece in Bloomberg that suggests that women are richer if they forego marriage.

00:06:32.580 I talk about a piece in the New York Times that suggests that marriage is a route to misery for women.

00:06:40.140 So that's kind of, I think your audience would kind of be aware of that.

00:06:42.960 But there's also kind of a neurodynamic here playing out as well.

00:06:45.240 And that is the online right, people like Andrew Tate and Pearl Davis are also now attacking marriage.

00:06:50.100 And they're saying that marriage is a bad deal for men.

00:06:52.900 You know, there's so much divorce out there that, you know, men are basically taken to the cleaners by their wives on many occasions. 0.94

00:06:59.460 So what we have now, Ali, is that the sort of the online right is attacking marriage.

00:07:04.240 And then the sort of the mainstream left is attacking marriage.

00:07:07.560 The online right is sort of targeting men.

00:07:09.980 And the mainstream left is targeting women.

00:07:12.660 But their bottom line basically is that folks should just steer clear of marriage.

00:07:16.260 And I think that they're doing this in part from a place of pain.

00:07:19.800 I think there are plenty of men who've been divorced unwillingly and they're upset.

00:07:24.480 And they gravitate towards this online right perspective.

00:07:27.740 And 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.

00:07:39.300 And they're more likely to take a very dim view of marriage as well.

00:07:42.400 But finally, you kind of touched on the progressive angle here.

00:07:45.680 And 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. 0.81

00:07:58.900 You know, that we should always kind of embrace that which is new.

00:08:01.560 And 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.

00:08:12.940 Yes.

00:08:13.580 Okay.

00:08:13.800 I definitely want to talk about polyamory and what you said about the kind of progressive assault on marriage.

00:08:21.960 And I think you made a really good, insightful distinction there that I'm so interested in fleshing out more.

00:08:27.580 That 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.

00:08:38.220 But 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.

00:08:54.840 They're saying, look at how women and specifically feminists have taken advantage of men and look at how everything is stacked against men. 0.91

00:09:07.960 Men are blamed for everything, but really women are the problem. 1.00

00:09:11.620 Really women are the ones exploiting men. 1.00

00:09:13.980 Really women are the ones taking advantage of men in the relationship. 1.00

00:09:17.560 Really it's women who are the problem in all of this. 1.00

00:09:21.860 So why would you even get married?

00:09:23.540 Just have fun with you, who you want to have fun with.

00:09:26.060 Why even make that investment?

00:09:27.260 Why even take that risk when a woman, because of the divorce laws in this country, could walk away with everything? 1.00

00:09:32.960 That's kind of the narrative that you hear.

00:09:35.800 I'd love to hear just more from you on that, like where you think that comes from, if you think that this is going to be a fad that lasts.

00:09:43.640 Is there any truth to what they're saying?

00:09:45.920 What are your thoughts?

00:09:46.780 So I think this is going to be with us for a while, unfortunately.

00:09:51.920 And 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.

00:10:02.280 And even more women are moving to the left. 0.99

00:10:04.800 And so, you know, this dynamic creates, you know, a kind of separation between the sexes and a skepticism and even hostility between the sexes.

00:10:13.580 There'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.

00:10:28.720 And so this kind of feeds into the audience for this red pill, right, as you described it.

00:10:34.060 And then, too, there are, you know, men who've been divorced unwillingly and for reasons that wouldn't be counted, I think, as legitimate.

00:10:39.560 You 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.

00:10:51.020 And he wasn't treated very well in family court in Virginia.

00:10:54.180 So 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.

00:11:02.820 So these are some of the factors that are driving this.

00:11:05.060 And 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.

00:11:20.620 Yeah. And I just see this mentality on both the right and the left, but in different ways.

00:11:27.440 This disbelief that strong, happy marriages exist where both the man and the woman, yeah, sure, they have arguments and conflicts, but they're happy.

00:11:38.480 They're satisfied. They have a good life.

00:11:40.980 They've kind of figured out as much as they can the dynamics.

00:11:43.580 And 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.

00:11:59.380 It's a total disbelief that there are people that exist who are happily married and just live normal, truthful, honest, productive, responsible lives together.

00:12:10.180 They like being moms and dads. They like being husbands and wives.

00:12:14.080 They're OK with their roles.

00:12:16.280 It'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.

00:12:31.120 It's difficult to believe that there are people who are happily married and in relationships out there.

00:12:37.640 Yeah, 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.

00:12:47.800 And 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.

00:12:59.660 But 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.

00:13:07.500 And 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.

00:13:18.840 And 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.

00:13:29.700 Divorce is down since 1980.

00:13:31.500 And that means practically that we're not seeing a one in two pattern where one in two couples are getting divorced in this country.

00:13:39.180 And when you account for, we hear very often that divorce inside the Christian church is the same rate as divorce outside the church.

00:13:49.820 But 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?

00:14:02.780 Yeah, that's striking.

00:14:03.520 In 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.

00:14:11.000 I am relying here in part on Tyler Vanderbilt, a professor at Harvard of Biostatistics, who has done work in this space.

00:14:16.880 So 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.

00:14:29.040 And one of the broader points here is that birds of a feather flock together.

00:14:34.640 And what we know from work done by Nicholas Christakis at Yale is that basically divorce is sort of highly socialized.

00:14:44.980 It sort of is transmitted from one friend to the other, from one family to the other.

00:14:49.660 And 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.

00:15:00.260 And so if your best friend is getting divorced in the face of an ordinary challenge, you're more likely to do the same thing.

00:15:04.920 But 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.

00:15:19.660 You talked about this trend of kind of like polyamory.

00:15:32.220 But 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.

00:15:46.000 I think watching this podcast probably more than they're familiar with kind of like the red pill side.

00:15:50.920 And 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.

00:15:59.580 And I came across this TikTok video that I thought typifies this progressive mentality.

00:16:07.100 Maybe she wouldn't even see it as progressive.

00:16:08.780 It's more like self-love, self-fulfillment, self-satisfaction, which I do deem to be progressive.

00:16:14.900 But this, I think, typifies so much of the mentality about marriage and singleness.

00:16:19.500 And so I just wanted to play this TikTok and have you respond to it.

00:16:23.780 A day in the life of a single woman who doesn't believe in marriage or want children. 1.00

00:16:27.960 I 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.

00:16:34.620 For years, I ignored my gut feeling that I was deeply unhappy and hoped it would somehow magically get better.

00:16:39.100 At the time, I couldn't fathom being happily single because I didn't even know it was a possibility.

00:16:43.120 I've never seen it represented before.

00:16:44.500 It 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.

00:16:49.760 In the current political and economic climate, there is no guarantee that I can successfully raise a child with the life of abundance they deserve.

00:16:56.400 And I'm enjoying spending my hard-earned money on me.

00:16:59.940 I thought that last part was funny.

00:17:02.000 Oh, I want to give a child the abundance they deserve, and I want to spend my money on me.

00:17:07.020 That's really kind of what it comes down to.

00:17:08.980 So this is, I mean, this is everywhere on social media, totally being glorified.

00:17:13.320 What's your take on it?

00:17:14.720 Yeah, I talk about this as a kind of a Midas mindset, Allie. 0.64

00:17:17.540 We'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.

00:17:32.160 So it's all about freedom from family rather than freedom for family.

00:17:35.780 And 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.

00:17:51.180 In fact, there's no group of Americans today who are happier than married fathers and married mothers.

00:17:57.500 And that story is told, obviously, in my book, Get Married, but it's not told in many mainstream media platforms, as you all know.

00:18:04.780 Yes, 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.

00:18:21.520 And 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.

00:18:34.580 Married adults who did not attend high school evaluate their lives more favorably than unmarried adults with a graduate degree. 0.74

00:18:41.920 Very often we're told, like, the measure of happiness is through education, the measure of happiness is through how much money you make.

00:18:48.440 And really, that's not what the, what the data shows.

00:18:53.620 Yeah, so that's, that Gallup Poll is really on the money.

00:18:56.460 My 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.

00:19:05.200 Not sex, not money, not, you know, not anything.

00:19:08.300 And so that story is, I think, not being told enough to our young adults and to, you know, Americans more generally.

00:19:16.220 Yeah, and it's, it's really such a shame.

00:19:18.860 It's so interesting in a culture that prioritizes, or we say that we prioritize happiness more than anything else.

00:19:25.860 That's what you hear, especially among young people.

00:19:27.680 I just want to be happy.

00:19:28.480 I just want to be happy.

00:19:29.280 I just want to be happy.

00:19:30.440 And yet we're, it's conflicting messages.

00:19:32.440 So 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.

00:19:53.060 And 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.

00:20:05.580 Yeah, that's certainly true within Christianity. 0.92

00:20:07.900 He who was willing to lose his life will find it.

00:20:10.880 And 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.

00:20:23.060 So I'm interested in talking to you about polyamory.

00:20:36.780 There was this big piece, I think it was in the New Yorker, a practical guide for the curious couple.

00:20:44.020 This 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,

00:20:52.900 I don't know, anti-human and not, you know, it's not with the times anymore.

00:20:59.300 It's not catching up to what people really want and how we really are.

00:21:04.360 And so we need to just be free to have multiple relationships at once.

00:21:07.800 What's the truth about polyamory?

00:21:10.520 Yeah, so I think it's, you know, it's one example of the way in which the media and many other cultural elites are kind of advancing

00:21:17.620 this idea that we need to maximize sexual choices, maximize relationship choices for people,

00:21:23.960 you know, keep every option open.

00:21:26.900 And it's also, I think, part and parcel of, again, a kind of progressive assumption that every new fashion that comes down the pike

00:21:33.920 needs to be baptized as, you know, holy and good.

00:21:38.200 The problem, of course, with polyamory from an adult's perspective is that I'm married.

00:21:43.540 I've been married 28 years.

00:21:44.780 And, 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?

00:21:52.620 And 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?

00:22:02.280 So that's, I think, part of the challenge.

00:22:03.980 But I think also there's no recognition that this would be a disaster and is a disaster for children.

00:22:10.320 You 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.

00:22:18.540 There's a lot of evidence on this score.

00:22:20.160 We 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.

00:22:32.320 So 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.

00:22:43.040 There's a Harvard scholar named Joseph Heinrich who's just written a lot about how monogamy has actually powered the rise of the West.

00:22:50.160 So this whole push for polyamory is just so naive.

00:22:54.540 And 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.

00:23:12.780 So, 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.

00:23:18.880 Yes. 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.

00:23:33.740 There's a lot of what I would call cope.

00:23:35.740 Like they are, they talk about untraining their minds from, you know, the remnants of monogamy that are still in there.

00:23:48.620 And, 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.

00:24:00.980 But 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.

00:24:11.640 I mean, they're just pushing down their right and basic instincts that is crying out for stability and monogamy. 0.87

00:24:20.400 Right. And the thing is, is that all the polling tells us, you know, that women are much less interested in this than men are.

00:24:28.020 And 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.

00:24:39.560 And 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.

00:24:54.320 Yes. 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.

00:25:05.000 I guess that's marriage in which, you know, you can have other relationships outside of the marriage.

00:25:09.100 And 20 percent of all Americans report experimenting with some form of non monogamy.

00:25:14.980 Well, that's very troubling. I assume that it's troubling to you, too.

00:25:18.080 Yeah, it is. And one of the things that my book talks about, too, is sort of the power of commitment, the power of fidelity.

00:25:24.760 And what I find in my book is that couples today who would embrace sort of this classic, this classic ethic of fidelity,

00:25:34.160 of saying to what's called the general social survey that, you know, infidelity is always wrong.

00:25:40.300 Right. They are significantly more likely to be happily married.

00:25:45.080 And, 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.

00:25:58.580 And so couples who are doing that successfully are just more likely to be flourishing.

00:26:02.620 And 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.

00:26:12.980 Yes. And you retweeted this tweet from someone named Shari Hamid.

00:26:17.320 And 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.

00:26:23.040 He said a self-fulfilling prophecy might be at work when it comes to polyamory.

00:26:26.320 Polyamory becomes more widespread because we think it's already widespread.

00:26:31.080 Norms around sexuality change because we think they've changed even if they haven't.

00:26:35.300 Gosh, I think that's true about a lot of things when it comes to the progressive sexual revolution.

00:26:39.420 You start hearing about it more and more and more and you think, wow, this is happening.

00:26:43.900 It must not be that big of a deal.

00:26:45.760 Things become destigmatized.

00:26:48.200 And so you're more likely to engage in it when really it was just a tiny portion of society to begin with.

00:26:56.320 Exactly. I think this is how a lot of the cultural changes that have kind of washed over our country.

00:27:01.500 There's a similar story when it comes to the divorce revolution, for instance, in the late 60s and early 70s.

00:27:07.540 You 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.

00:27:13.780 And that's, I think, now happening with polyamory as well.

00:27:16.260 So 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.

00:27:29.620 And their kids are going to pay the biggest price for all of this.

00:27:32.000 Yes. And so you did this thread and you were refuting some points that have been made about the dangers of monogamy.

00:27:46.760 And what you said was that monogamy actually reduces things like rape, murder, assault, robbery and fraud, or it can.

00:27:57.980 And it actually increases economic activity, child protection, child investment.

00:28:04.200 It reduces rates of child neglect, abuse, accidental death.

00:28:10.640 Monogamy does that, not just having the two presence of loving adults or the presence of two loving adults, but actually monogamy does that.

00:28:19.160 That's amazing.

00:28:20.440 And again, this is the Harvard evolutionary anthropologist, Joseph Heinrich, who's, you know, who's making these claims.

00:28:28.540 I don't think he's a conservative.

00:28:30.060 I 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.

00:28:43.760 So, 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.

00:29:13.760 Here's an example of someone who says, her, her description on her page says, my life as a solo poly person is extremely fulfilling.

00:29:28.220 So here she is explaining that. 0.97

00:29:31.220 I'm poly as fuck y'all, but I know that many of you don't understand what that means. 0.95

00:29:34.900 So I'm going to draw you a diagram to explain what my life looks like as a solo poly person. 0.98

00:29:41.900 So I am at the center and I am my primary partner.

00:29:45.620 There 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. 0.83

00:30:00.320 Okay, so I've seen a lot of things like this and just explaining who their partners with, who their partners are connected to.

00:30:08.960 I mean, really, this isn't that much of a new concept, is it?

00:30:12.320 We've just kind of put a new trendy name on it.

00:30:15.620 I mean, people have been promiscuous for a long time.

00:30:18.500 That's basically how you get STDs.

00:30:20.480 So I'm not really sure why this is becoming like a trend on social media.

00:30:23.620 Yeah, I mean, I think part of the dynamic here is that we're just building on past trends.

00:30:30.120 But I think where this is headed, right, is towards a new legal regime and a new cultural status.

00:30:36.080 Yeah.

00:30:36.420 So that polyamorous, you know, families will be established legally.

00:30:40.120 They'll be given normative support culturally.

00:30:42.260 And, 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.

00:30:58.340 And it's going to be, you know, a temptation for some, you know, spouses.

00:31:02.860 And then, again, who's going to be hurt the most by all this?

00:31:05.500 It's going to be kids.

00:31:06.720 Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking.

00:31:08.360 That's what terrifies me the most.

00:31:09.640 I 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.

00:31:21.140 And 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.

00:31:34.780 Kids, once again, have to bear the brunt of our social sexual experiments.

00:31:40.960 Do you think this is the natural progression of Obergefell?

00:31:44.900 I 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.

00:32:00.440 But it's also going to hurt children. And of course, we were mocked mercilessly for saying something like that.

00:32:05.020 But is this one of the natural consequences of that?

00:32:08.900 I 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.

00:32:17.640 But 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.

00:32:28.300 And we've kind of been on this trajectory, you know, since the 1960s, including with the, you know, the advent of no-fault divorce.

00:32:36.620 So 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.

00:32:56.580 But on the good news front, I think it's important just to stress two points here.

00:33:02.140 One is that we actually have seen a bit of an uptick in the share of kids being raised in intact married families.

00:33:08.000 I think in part because, for better and for worse, marriage and parent have become more selective in recent years.

00:33:14.360 And then, too, we are seeing on the sort of social science front, you know, just continuing evidence that kids benefit from marriage.

00:33:20.800 And 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.

00:33:30.100 So, 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.

00:33:52.820 So 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.

00:34:04.420 And Dr. Wilcox, could you remind us what the family diversity theory is?

00:34:09.920 So 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.

00:34:20.340 So any kind of combination is sort of equally good for kids and kids just need, again, their parents' attention and affection.

00:34:26.420 That's love and enough money, financial resources to kind of thrive.

00:34:30.340 And what this perspective, I think, doesn't recognize, doesn't appreciate is that, number one, we kind of look at different kids' outcomes.

00:34:38.040 You 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.

00:34:52.520 And 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.

00:35:01.900 So this kind of family diversity perspective doesn't really kind of appreciate the facts on the ground.

00:35:06.660 And 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.

00:35:15.780 They're more likely to give kids what's called authoritative disciplines, kind of constructive discipline.

00:35:19.740 And they also have more money because family instability, you know, alley is often very expensive, you know, court costs, things like that.

00:35:26.620 And single parents typically obviously have less money than married parents.

00:35:29.820 So 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.

00:35:43.780 Got it. OK, you talk about how marriage is necessary for the American dream.

00:35:50.860 What is meant by that?

00:35:51.660 So 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.

00:36:08.920 Kind of that rags to riches story about the American dream kind of would be understood as.

00:36:13.500 And 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.

00:36:22.540 And 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.

00:36:40.300 So 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.

00:36:51.700 And tell me what can you define the closing of the American heart?

00:36:55.820 That's a concept that you also discuss in your book.

00:36:59.300 Yeah. So the good news, as I mentioned before, I think, is that we do see a lot of happily married folks today.

00:37:05.780 We do see the share of kids who are being raised in stable married families.

00:37:09.240 It looks like it's ticking upwards.

00:37:10.980 But 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.

00:37:23.080 And so we're seeing dating is down.

00:37:25.420 Marriage is down.

00:37:27.220 Fertility is down.

00:37:28.700 My colleague, Lyman Stone, estimates that about one in four of today's young adults will never have kids.

00:37:33.020 I've seen research suggesting that about one in three young adults today will never have a spouse.

00:37:39.320 So we're just seeing many more kinless adults kind of coming into our society. 0.98

00:37:44.360 And that's problematic because they're much more likely to succumb to deaths of despair.

00:37:50.080 This is based upon work by Jonathan Rothblatt from Gallup, whom you just referenced a little bit ago.

00:37:54.200 And 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.

00:38:05.560 So Jefferson talked about the pursuit of happiness as fundamental in the Declaration.

00:38:10.420 And 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.

00:38:19.240 Hmm. And where can people find your book if they want to know more about this?

00:38:25.460 Get Narrative is available on Amazon.

00:38:27.980 My website is bradwolcox.com.

00:38:30.520 And then familystudies.org is a great place to see lots of different family reports and blog posts.

00:38:36.960 Well, Dr. Wilcox, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today.

00:38:40.580 And I do encourage people to read your book and also follow you because you're also always tweeting a lot of interesting statistics.

00:38:47.080 So thank you so much.

00:38:48.880 Okay. Thanks, Sally.

00:38:49.940 I appreciate it.

Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - February 19, 2024

Ep 953 ｜ Andrew Tate Is Wrong About Marriage ｜ Guest： Dr. Brad Wilcox

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