Marriage Is Under Attack ｜ Proof For Your Liberal Friend
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Summary
In this episode, Ben Shapiro explains why he thinks men should abandon modern marriage and family life and go their own way, and why women should do the same. He also explains why a woman who is in her mid-twenties and childless, and yet full of opinions about modern marriage, is a bad idea.
Transcript
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I think marriage can be successful, of course. It's just not something that's as scalable as we
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as a society are trying to pretend it is. Marriage is like the lottery, probably not gonna win.
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I've spent a lot of time in my career defending the institution of marriage. And I defend it because
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it's the bedrock of civilization, so it deserves defending. And I defend it because it's under
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constant attack, so it needs defending. And one of the most troubling developments in recent years,
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which we've discussed on this show in the past, is that these attacks are increasingly waged not
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just from the left, but from certain noisy segments of the right as well. Some right-wing influencers
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with legions of young, mostly male fans, have decided that men should abandon marriage and family
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life and go their own way. And these influencers, many of whom consider themselves a part of the
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so-called red pill movement, pretend to despise feminists and yet have essentially arrived at the
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same conclusion as feminists, which is that we should give up on the family. The two sides hate
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marriage almost as much as they hate each other. Now, one of these influencers is a woman named Pearl
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Davis, who has garnered a relatively large following on YouTube and various social media platforms.
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She's in her mid-twenties, single and childless, and yet full of opinions about modern marriage
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and family life, a subject that she has no personal insight into whatsoever. She spent the past few
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days on the internet complaining about quote-unquote trad cons like myself, who she says promote the
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nuclear family despite not understanding what it's really like. Yes, we men who actually have wives and
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children don't know what it's like to be married, but a woman who is not married and has no children
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does know what it's like. In one of her tweets, she wrote, quote, the trad cons push marriage because
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they aren't old enough to know better. They don't know the reality of what they're pushing.
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This is accompanied by a picture of myself, Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles. We aren't old enough
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to know better and don't know the reality of what we're pushing, yet a woman who is younger than us
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and single does know better and does understand this reality. In other posts, she goes on to say that
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marriage is a terrible deal for men. And she later explains, quote, would you ever sign a contract that
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fails 75% of the time where your business partner is paid to break the contract? Why would you
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encourage men to sign that contract until the terms are fixed? Now, you may be surprised to learn
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that marriages fail at a rate of 75%. The figure that people like this normally use is 50%. And the
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claim that 50% of marriages end in divorce is already spurious, and we'll have more on that in a moment,
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but 75%? I was wondering where that number came from, so I scrolled down and I saw something
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that she reposted from an alleged lawyer who said this, quote, it's not 50-50, that only accounts
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for divorces. Another 25% on the negative side for miserable men trapped in cheaper to keep her
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marriages unwilling to risk financial destruction and loss of their children. 75% chance of a devastatingly
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bad outcome is just a bad plan. No sane person would enter into a commercial contract on such terms.
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Now, I did ask him where he got this 75% figure from, and he wouldn't say. Apparently, the magic
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statistic fairy came and whispered it in his ear. Now, for her part, Pearl later tweeted a picture of
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Pierce Brosnan with his wife of 20 years, and she questioned whether the marriage counts as successful
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since Brosnan's wife has put on some weight at the age of 60. So, apparently, even if they're happy
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and have remained married for two decades, they still might fall into that 75% failure rate because
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they have not both remained in supermodel condition into their 60s. This debate on social media brought
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out the rest of the marriage skeptical crowd on the right. A bunch of these red pill influencers
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decided to hop on an emergency Zoom call and spend two hours talking about me and the rest of the Daily
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Wire crew and our reckless promotion of society's most fundamental institution.
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Now, there's one clip here that you should see. This is apparently a divorce lawyer who says that
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the failure rate for marriage is not 50% and it's not 75%. It is, in fact, even higher. Listen.
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I think marriage can be successful, of course. It's just not something that's as scalable as we,
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as a society, are trying to pretend it is. Marriage is, and I've said this a hundred times and I'll say
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it a hundred more. Marriage is like the lottery. You are probably not going to win. Okay? You're
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probably not going to win. Don't make that your 401k. You're probably not going to win. But if you win,
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what you win is so great that I don't blame you for buying a ticket and trying. I personally don't
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buy lottery tickets. But when somebody says, yeah, I played a lottery. Hey man, somebody's got to win.
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And you know what? As long as you're not blowing money that you need for food or to put shoes on
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your kid's feet, you're not hurting anybody. Go out, give it a try. So I always tell people, listen,
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marriage, when it works, when you have somebody who's married 20 plus years and they're still crazy
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about each other, that is the exception, not the rule. But when you do it, it's phenomenal. It's
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phenomenal. So why not buy the ticket, take the ride, but have a prenup? Wear a seatbelt, guys.
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You can be a safe driver, but wear a seatbelt. So a happy marriage, he says, is like winning
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the lottery. And the thing about the lottery is that almost everybody loses. This is a perfect
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summation of how this entire club views marriage and the message that they're sending to young men
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in particular. Sure, it can be great, they concede, but only if you're insanely lucky.
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Everybody else is screwed. This is a rather bleak view of marriage, and thankfully,
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it's also nonsense. First of all, the claim that marriage isn't scalable is obviously ridiculous
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because marriage has served as the bedrock of human society since time immemorial. It has already
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happened at the scale of civilization for thousands of years. Now, the divorce lawyers come along and say
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you know this thing that society has been doing forever? Turns out it doesn't work.
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Unless you're the one in a million. It's ridiculous. It's a ridiculous claim.
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Now, what about the failure rate of marriages in our culture? We've heard 50%. We've heard 75%.
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We just heard that they fail at a rate similar to the rate that people lose the lottery,
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which would mean higher than 99%, a lot higher. Yet, these kinds of astronomical odds are not based
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in anything but the doom and gloom speculations of the people inventing them. There is no evidence
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that having a happy marriage is as unlikely as winning the lottery or that 75% of marriages end in
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misery. And what about the 50% number? Well, this is at least is a familiar statistic. It's something
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that you've probably heard before. 50% of marriages end in divorce. It's familiar, but it is bogus.
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And one way that you know that it's bogus is that people have been claiming that 50% of marriages end
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in divorce since I was a kid. I've been hearing that my whole life. And that would mean that divorce
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rates are static across time. But of course, that isn't the case. In fact, we know that divorce rates
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have gone down in recent years. So where does the 50% figure come from? Apparently, it's a holdover
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from the 1980s, which is when people first started citing that statistic. It's not true today. And it's
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actually not clear that it was true even in the 80s either. So what is the actual divorce rate?
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It's a little bit hard to determine. Probably our best guess is based on U.S. census data,
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which according to the most recent figures, says that about 35% of American adults who have been
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married have been divorced. So it's not exactly going to give us a precisely scientific figure of
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what the divorce rate is, but it's as close as we're going to get, 35%. And 35% is high. I mean,
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it's way too high. It's not 50% though. And it's not 75%. And it's not 99%. And it's definitely not
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lottery odds. Still, isn't it terrifying to think that if you get married, your chance of failure is
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35% and the chance of success is only 65% at the most. You know, even if we go with that number,
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isn't that still very, very scary? Isn't it high enough that it should dissuade anyone from attempting
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it? The answer to that question is no. And here's why. If the divorce rate is 35%, or even if it's 50%,
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it does not follow that your own particular marriage has a 35% or 50% chance of failure.
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Now, I'm not saying that you should be cocky or reckless, or that you should see yourself as
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invincible. I am saying that you shouldn't, on the other extreme, see yourself as passive debris
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floating helplessly on the tide of statistical likelihoods. Because you are an individual.
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Your marriage is an individual thing. And its chances of failure are not set by society at large.
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So here's an example to illustrate what I mean. And this is really, really important
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to understand. Because as marriage rates fall, and those are falling, the thing that convinces so
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many people to not marry in the first place are numbers like this. And this misconception that,
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well, look at the divorce rate, and that is my own specific chance of getting divorced.
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And I'm here to tell you that that's not how it works. So here's, I think this illustrates it.
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The obesity rate in the United States is over 40%. Does that mean that your own chances of becoming
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obese are 40%? No, it doesn't. Your chances might be 5%. They might be practically zero. Or they might
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be quite a bit higher than 40%. That's because obesity is the result of behavior and choices.
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If you do not engage in the behavior or make the choices that lead to obesity, you will not become
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obese. The fact that 40% of people around you are fat does not mean that you automatically have a 40%
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obesity risk. Now let's take another example. Car accidents. Americans get into car accidents at a
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certain rate. I'm not sure what the rate is. It doesn't matter for our purposes. What does matter is that
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your own individual chance of getting into a car accident is not the same as every other driver
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on the road. The people who compile statistics will say things like, motorists have an X percent chance
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of getting into a collision. But you are not just a generic motorist. You are an individual.
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Now you can never bring your own chance of dying in a fiery car wreck down to zero.
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But if you're responsible, if you're a responsible driver, then obviously your chances of getting into
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an accident are much lower than the chances of someone who is not responsible. All of those
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stupid drivers who don't understand the basic rules of the road and like to tweet and eat while they drive
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and everything else, they're inflating the numbers for everyone. Now they're also making the roads more
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dangerous for everyone. They are actually actively making your own chances of getting into a car accident
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higher because the roads are filled with stupid people. But your chances are not as high as their
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chances. You do not share their level of risk unless you're as dumb as they are. Because again, you are an
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individual, not a mere statistic. So what about marriage? It's true that even if you do everything right,
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things can still fall apart if your spouse doesn't follow that program. Now if you both do everything
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right or even most things right, then your chance of divorce is basically zero. But you can do
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everything on your end and maybe your spouse doesn't do the same and then it falls apart anyway and that
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happens and it's terrible, but it happens. It's also true that there are many, many things you can do
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in your marriage and before your marriage to make it much more secure than the average.
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Obvious things. Like you can marry someone who shares your same fundamental values. Not everyone
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does that. In fact, a lot of people don't. A lot of people go into marriages knowing ahead of time
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that they're marrying someone who doesn't share their fundamental values.
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Their chances of divorce are going to be somewhere much higher than yours if you don't make that
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basic entry-level mistake that they have made. You can do other things. Like you can state from
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the outset that you both in principle don't believe in divorce and won't consider it as a viable option
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for solving any marital difficulties you may experience down the line. You can have a strong
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and shared faith. You can establish from the beginning a habit of honest communication. You can make time for
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each other. You can continue to date even or especially as your lives get busier and you start
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having kids and so on. You can make a strong effort to be patient with and grateful to each other. You
00:15:06.440
can take care of your body and your appearance. You can do all these things and more. Now, I'm not saying
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that if you do all of this, it will bring your divorce chance down to zero. I'm not denying that there
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are plenty of people out there who did all this, at least on their own end, and yet still ended up
00:15:21.380
divorce. That's not my point. My point is that the divorce rate doesn't take any of that into account.
00:15:27.560
The people who take none of these basic steps are lumped in with the people who do all of it,
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and we're supposed to believe that both groups have an equal chance of marital failure. That's just not
00:15:37.160
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expressvpn.com slash walshyt. We opened the show yesterday with a discussion about the crisis of
00:17:01.940
masculinity and the rise of Andrew Tate. And to very briefly summarize the key points made in that
00:17:07.500
conversation, boys are growing up in a culture that is openly hostile to masculinity, and many are forced
00:17:13.080
to navigate the minefield without the benefits of strong male role models to show them the path. And this
00:17:18.900
crisis is self-perpetuating. It grows exponentially because the young men with absentee fathers
00:17:24.980
eventually become absentee fathers themselves, repeating the cycle indefinitely unto infinity.
00:17:30.600
And into this field of confusion and man hatred steps guys like Andrew Tate and others, quickly
00:17:37.020
earning an enormous following of young men who understandably flock to somebody who has a message
00:17:41.820
that embraces masculinity rather than treating it like a disease. Andrew Tate, very often good at
00:17:48.440
identifying the problems in our culture as they pertain to the situation that men face,
00:17:52.620
and deserves credit for speaking up in defense of masculinity rather than denigrating it and calling
00:17:57.760
for its eradication, essentially. But in my view, he misses the mark when it comes to the remedy. He
00:18:02.840
seems to basically understand the disease, but he doesn't have the right prescription for it, or at
00:18:07.280
least the full prescription. Yes, men should reject the programming that our culture wants to subject
00:18:12.920
them to, programming which seeks to neuter and feminize them. Yes, they should work hard. They should take
00:18:18.240
care of their minds and their bodies. Yes, they should strive for success, including financial
00:18:22.400
success. But a life of hedonism and materialism and luxurious wealth, remaining unmarried while sleeping
00:18:29.600
with dozens of different women and so on, is not the ideal to strive towards. Rather, what men are
00:18:36.800
called to and created for, and the only sort of life that will be truly happy, that they'll find true
00:18:42.600
happiness and joy in, is a life of service as protector and provider. Men, the vast majority of
00:18:49.840
men anyway, are called to be husbands and fathers, to be leaders of their families. Now, they may be
00:18:54.700
called to lead in other ways too, but first they must care for their families. If there's any saving
00:18:59.620
our civilization at this point, which I think there is, but if there is, this is how it will be done,
00:19:06.900
and this is who will do it. It's not going to be saved by influencers who are sitting in front of
00:19:12.760
cameras, whether the guy in front of the camera is Andrew Tate or me or anyone else. It'll be saved
00:19:18.460
through the formation and preservation of strong, intact, loving, and well-led families. That is the
00:19:26.940
only way. It is the only way forward. If every man in the country starts going to the gym and starts
00:19:34.420
making lots of money and starts having sex with lots of attractive women, and yet they don't get
00:19:40.060
married and stay married and have children and raise and love those children, then we will still
00:19:47.520
be headed to ruin. It'll be a slightly different kind of ruin, but ruin all the same. Those men
00:19:54.120
themselves will ultimately find the happiness that they are able to derive in that lifestyle.
00:20:00.480
They'll find that it's shallow and it's fleeting, and in the end, they'll die alone, loved by no
00:20:06.160
one, loving no one, remembered by no one, leaving no legacy behind. The feminized and neutered and
00:20:14.160
effeminate man that our left-wing culture seeks to create, and then this other sort of man, both
00:20:19.200
unmarried, both childless, will look very similar in the end, having taken two very different paths
00:20:26.420
just to arrive together at essentially the same place. It's the family man, the devoted father
00:20:32.740
and husband, whose different path actually leads to a different and much better conclusion.
00:20:40.480
Now, I've of course been preaching this message for as long as I've had an audience to preach to,
00:20:45.500
and I have found that there are like two or three basic responses or rebuttals, I guess, that
00:20:50.960
I always hear from young men who may, for the most part, line up with me ideologically, but who doubt
00:20:56.260
the wisdom of the get married and have kids prescription. And I was greeted with these same
00:21:02.800
responses after the show yesterday and many messages and comments. What I'd like to do today is answer
00:21:07.760
the objections, or at least what seems to be the one principal objection. The claim that I so often hear
00:21:16.020
is that, well, marriage and family life is a trap. It's a scam, especially for men. The whole thing
00:21:23.560
is rigged against us. There is nothing for a man to do, but give up on the entire enterprise and go
00:21:29.420
his own way. In fact, there's a whole movement online, men go their own way. And that's basically
00:21:34.900
the idea. Just give up on this stuff and do something else. This argument was summarized in a
00:21:41.860
comment from a listener named Joshua, which I'll read, because I think it just is representative
00:21:45.880
of this sort of mentality. He says, still sounds like Matt and most trad cons definition of what
00:21:51.640
masculinity means is exclusively through the lens of women and children's wants and needs.
00:21:56.800
Unfortunately, that ideal will no longer work in the modern world with birth control, hookup culture,
00:22:01.760
social media, and court systems that favor women and the denigration of traditional masculinity.
00:22:07.180
I don't agree with all of Tate's views, but it sure beats Matt's prescriptions for young men.
00:22:12.340
Again, I've read a great many comments making the same kind of point. A private message from another
00:22:16.300
listener has a similar theme. It says, Matt, I agree with many of your opinions, but your message
00:22:20.000
to men is off base. Young men follow Andrew Tate because his lifestyle is the ideal, whether you
00:22:24.540
admit it or not. Wealth, fame, status, beautiful women were biologically programmed to want those
00:22:29.960
things. Marriage is a losing game. The only solution in modern society is to reject the life of service,
00:22:35.820
as you call it. So what is the problem with this view? Well, to begin with, it's nothing less than
00:22:44.460
a full, unconditional surrender to the culture. It's true that the culture has increasingly made
00:22:50.540
difficult for both men and women to form and maintain strong, intact, lasting families. And
00:22:57.220
that's because the elites who run our society don't want you to live that kind of life.
00:23:02.720
They prefer that you focus on your individual wants, on fulfilling your own needs and satisfying
00:23:11.060
your own desires. That's what they prefer for you. That's the life they want for you. A self-focused
00:23:17.300
life is precisely the sort of life they wish for you. Makes you easier to manipulate, less of a threat
00:23:24.460
to their agenda. Not really a threat at all. I mean, if you're just out there focused on yourself,
00:23:31.200
you know, being a consumer, buying lots of things for yourself, consuming things for yourself,
00:23:36.920
you know, and all the rest of it, you're not a threat to their agenda at all. I mean, you're
00:23:42.840
going along with it. All of the things mentioned by Joshua in his comment,
00:23:50.920
all of those things represent a conspiracy against the family. He's right about that.
00:23:57.780
The way the family court systems are set up, birth control, all the rest of it.
00:24:02.000
It's an attack on the family. So what is the answer? To give up? To give the conspirators
00:24:09.600
exactly what they want? To reward them for their efforts by turning your back on the very thing
00:24:15.360
they've been assaulting for decades? The family is the fortress that they have been attacking.
00:24:22.940
And you can defend it with your life or you can wave the white flag. But if you choose to surrender,
00:24:29.700
then at least be honest about what you're doing. Be honest. This is not a rejection of the left's
00:24:36.400
agenda, of a cultural elite's agenda. You are submitting to it. It is a submission.
00:24:42.140
It is certainly not the strong or masculine response to run away and abandon your post.
00:24:50.760
To stop fighting because the fight is too difficult. I mean, that approaches many things,
00:24:56.120
but it certainly isn't manly. And where do you go instead? I mean, what is the next move?
00:25:03.380
To give up on the family is to give up on human civilization, seeing as how there cannot be a
00:25:08.620
human civilization without the family. So what's plan B after you've given up on civilization?
00:25:14.340
What's next? You're also giving up on yourself, on your own legacy, your own bloodline. You are
00:25:20.880
descended from a long line of men stretching back thousands of years who formed families and raised
00:25:26.920
children, often under circumstances far more dire than what we face.
00:25:32.040
And you're giving up on them too. You are surrendering your future and your past. You're
00:25:40.800
giving up on everything. And what is your consolation prize? Finding financial success?
00:25:48.740
I mean, the unfortunate irony is that many of the people that, many of the men who give up on these
00:25:53.800
things in favor of, well, I'll just focus on myself and try to be financially successful.
00:25:57.320
Many of them are never even going to be financially successful. So they end up with just
00:26:01.340
nothing. They end up broke and alone with nothing. But even if you find it, the financial success,
00:26:11.960
so what? I mean, who cares about money if you have nothing meaningful to spend it on?
00:26:17.020
I have money. I don't have Andrew Tate's money, but I have money. And nearly all the joy and happiness
00:26:23.000
I derive from having money is that it allows me to provide for my family.
00:26:28.840
That's pretty much it. That's the entire thing. That's why I like having the money is that I find
00:26:34.080
great pleasure in being able to care for a wife and six kids. Proud of that fact. If I didn't have
00:26:40.260
them, the money would mean very little to me. I mean, I could buy nice things and drive a fancy car
00:26:45.220
and live in my nice house alone. But for what? Now, does that mean that if you start a family that
00:26:54.020
you're guaranteed to live a joyful and fulfilled life? Well, of course not. It's a risk.
00:27:00.200
And yes, the risks are in some ways much greater in modern times. We have all been poisoned by this
00:27:06.460
demonic culture to one extent or another. We are all poisoned.
00:27:10.020
Poisoned. If you marry someone, you are marrying someone who has been poisoned, who has ingested the
00:27:17.300
poison, who has taken a drink from the well of modern culture. Everybody has, as have you. And yes,
00:27:26.580
if things go sideways, if you're a man, you marry a woman and your wife turns out to be a disloyal
00:27:32.980
vulture, or if you turn out to be a disloyal vulture, or you both do, the deck will be stacked against
00:27:40.820
you in court. There's no question about that. Divorce may ruin your life. And if you give your
00:27:49.460
heart to someone, if you bind yourself to them, not only through the marriage vow, but then also
00:27:53.460
through children you conceive together, then they will have all they need to rip your guts out and burn
00:28:01.240
your life to the ground. That is absolutely true. That's the risk. Okay. But it's a risk worth taking.
00:28:10.160
Every great joy can become a great tragedy if you aren't careful or if you have very bad luck.
00:28:18.120
That's true. So is the answer then to forego all joy? To say, forget about joy because it might not
00:28:26.120
work out? To embrace a life of loneliness and misery because you're worried that if you aim higher,
00:28:32.480
you'll end up lonely and miserable? You're worried that in the end, you'll end up in this state. So
00:28:40.240
instead you say, well, I might as well just live in this state to begin with. It doesn't make any sense.
00:28:46.200
So you take the risk and you mitigate the risk at the same time by being smart about who you marry and
00:28:53.720
by grounding your marriage and your family in faith and mutual devotion and by working hard every day
00:29:01.040
to hold up your own end of the bargain. Because yeah, there are some men out there who do everything
00:29:06.060
right and they're great men and they're devoted to their families and they're intensely loyal and all
00:29:12.540
of that and their families fall apart anyway because they accidentally married a soulless disloyal
00:29:17.560
scumbag. I mean, that does happen and sometimes it happens in the reverse. But that's not, that's not
00:29:25.440
the majority of cases. Most of the time it takes two to tango, two to get married, two to ruin the
00:29:32.300
marriage, which means that marriage is not a mere roll of the dice. There's quite a lot you can do to
00:29:40.420
secure your good fortune. That's why I never cared about the statistics. You know, when I was getting
00:29:46.080
married and I heard about this statistically, this is, I'm not a statistic. I'm not just some number
00:29:52.100
on a spreadsheet and neither is my wife. We're human beings. I'm not subject to statistics.
00:29:59.940
Not merely subject to them. Because the one thing statistics don't take into account are choices.
00:30:09.140
It's about the choices you make. Whether your marriage works or not, it's about choices that
00:30:14.220
are made in the marriage. If one or both of you make bad choices, your chances are going to be very
00:30:23.400
poor. If you make good choices, they won't be. That's what it is. And yet the risk is always there.
00:30:29.940
So will you live in fear of it? Or will you have the courage and go forward anyway?