Can Marriage Bridge the Sex Divide?

In a cold black night under sheets of fast-moving clouds, my neighbor walks the dog—the one that lives alone in the house across the street because his owner, Rickey, died by suicide. Part-huskie, his eyes are pellucid like the moon: one blue, the other green. Seeing the dog reminds me of when I sat with Rickey’s mother last year. I was writing a piece about the challenges facing working-class men, and I had a list of questions about Rickey’s work history and economic prospects. His mother had her own explanation: “He grew up without a father. His father didn’t want nothing to do with him.” 

Since we began interviewing working-class Millennials in 2010, my husband David and I have heard others make similar connections. Before Rickey and his dog moved there, David once sat on the porch of that same house, talking to another young man who worked at a packaging plant and was struggling in his relationships.

That young man told us: 

I was never all for marriage…. ‘Cause I can’t hardly trust people so that affects the marriage thing. My belief on marriage is you totally have to trust that person. What really f***** me is the dad situation.  Of course, that’s gonna make me grow up and feel like I can’t trust nobody. My father that was never in my life. Like, he turned his back on me. You know what I mean?  

I later sat on that same porch with a young woman who had a similar blunt analysis of her troubles: “I've seen it so many times: girls who grow up without their dads have daddy issues.” She traced a line from her parent’s breakup to her own “trust issues,” and to her addictions and bad relationships.

It’s a sentiment we can try to dismiss as pop psychology—indeed, I’d never want to suggest that our fates are sealed by birth. But a solid body of sociological evidence points to what many intuit by common sense: that their early experiences in the family shape their lives more profoundly than almost anything else.

Most people don’t tell their own stories in economic jargon. As much as jobs and money provide crucially important supporting context—for example, a recent IFS study found that almost 80% of the class-based marriage gap is attributable to differences in men’s work—people tend not to frame their lives that way. In working-class culture, especially, love is the glorified end, and economic stability, the necessary means. 

Life is construed as a constellation of relationships, some bright, others dim. And when the light of the relationship between men and women burns out—first in a particular relationship, then metastasizing into generalized distrust between the sexes—it leaves too many of us staring into a cold black night. 

Why Young Men and Women Don’t Trust Each Other

When my husband and I first started our research, it was popular to opine about where all the good men had gone—and to conclude that men were no longer interested in getting married and having kids. Yet that wasn’t really adding up with what we were hearing, at least among the working-class young men in the small Ohio town where we live. Indeed today, young men are actually more likely than young women to say they want to get married and have kids.

Instead, we heard and saw aspirations for committed relationships that coexisted with genuine confusion, distrust, and often well-founded apprehension of commitment. (If your dad had married and divorced five times, would you feel ready to get married?) We’d hear a woman decry her partner’s lack of interest in their child and his general irresponsibility; then we’d sit with that man outside the bar while he chain-smoked and complained about how she wouldn’t let him see his kid, and how the restaurant where he worked had cut his hours. 

A common complaint—from the working-class women and men we spoke to—was that society had changed for the worse, making it harder to find a reliable partner. A common meme on social media went like this: “Stuck in a generation where loyalty is just a tattoo, love is just a quote, and lying is the new truth.” 

“The way society is,” Mark, a contract laborer in construction, lamented, “it’s all about sex and sex.” As a blue-collar Democrat who came of age in the wake of the Great Recession, Mark felt that economic forces were keeping him down but that there was another force at play, too: the idea that sex was a free for all. Relationships so unintentional that they “just happened,” expectations so varied and communication so vague as to be meaningless. 

“Now, people’s morals aren’t the way they used to be at all,” he told us. “So, everybody’s moral lackadaisical. Not carefree, it’s almost careless,” Mark added, biting the end of a pen, struggling to articulate that even in the realm of romance, there were forces working against him. When he talked about work, he could point to the loss of union jobs, deindustrialization, diminishing real wages for working-class men, the high cost of college degrees. But when it came to relationships, he was still trying to connect the dots, though his intuition said, “It has to do a lot [with] society.”

It was a sentiment we heard repeatedly. “People nowadays, it’s just not that way,” Rob, a 20-something roofer, told us, pointing out the difference between relationships today and the relationship he observed between the old woman who raised him and her dead husband, whom she still loved. “Society’s just a lot different than it was before,” he added. 

In working-class culture, especially, love is the glorified end, and economic stability, the necessary means. 

Theoretically, for these young adults, dating and marriage involved private and individual decisions—you could still get married if you wanted to—as many still did. But in a world of trendlines bending towards distrust and breakdown, and where you hadn’t seen your own parents successfully navigate marriage, getting married felt increasingly uncharted, idealistic, naïve even—not unlike jumping to the moon. Pushing back down was the weight of social gravity. (And this all before the widespread adoption of the smartphone, which exponentialized these dynamics.)

How do we solve a problem of distrust so widespread that it’s seeped into the marrow of society?

Before he died of a heroin overdose at age 35, Mark made attempts at love. He vacillated between trying to date, and swearing women off completely, making jokes about his celibacy. In the aftermath of a failed relationship, he’d be #doingme. At the beginning of a new one, he’d reach for the adage that an older mentor told him, “Behind every great man is a great woman.” Of a new relationship, Mark said, “She’s waking me up to what I need to be, and I’ve been waiting for it.” But when that ended, like the women who opined about the scarcity of good men, Mark joined in the chorus of men bemoaning the difficulty of finding a good woman. 

The Polarization of the Sexes

This past June, country singer Oliver Anthony's song "Scornful Woman" received millions of views and jumped to number 1 on the US iTunes chart shortly after its release, propelled by a plug from Joe Rogan. The song, inspired by band members’ experiences and the singer’s unwanted divorce, is raw anger and hurt. 

Well Eve grabbed the apple
And Adam took a bite
And now all these years later
And the math still ain't right

This theme echoes in some of Anthony’s other music, which I once heard my neighbor blaring from his truck when he and his girlfriend were at odds. In “Long Gone,” a man sits alone in a holler crying out that “a good-hearted woman is hard to find”—in a tone that is simultaneous lament and longing. 

A female counterpart is Elizabeth Nichol’s 2025 EP “Tough Love”—and especially her recent single “Oh the Things Men Do,” which satirizes romantic gestures as man’s strategy “to get laid.”

The twin genres of masculine and feminine grievance take me to a scene that unfolded in the apartment of a young cohabiting couple I once knew, the two of them standing in the bathroom looking at a positive pregnancy test—each vehemently blaming the other.

Some things become too painful to emphasize. It’s more straightforward to talk about impersonal forces than intimate ones. Yet complications between the sexes and the retreat from marriage are part of the reality that underlies so much in our current context, including male malaise and the mental health crisis. Often, when we trace a story of violence or dysfunction, at its origin or at its end, we come to a place of ruptured relationship between a man and a woman. Be it mother and father, as it was in Rickey’s case, or girlfriend and boyfriend, as in Mark’s. It’s as if the sex divide is the original polarization, the division from which so many other divisions spin.

And yet, sexual difference has within it a creative energy unlike anything else. How many stories of great men involve the drama of love with a woman who has both inspired and reformed him, encouraged and restrained him? Without such love, the human species would literally cease to be.

Often, when we trace a story of violence or dysfunction, at its origin or at its end, we come to a place of ruptured relationship between a man and a woman.

One of 2025’s most popular songs—Alex Warren’s “Ordinary”—gives stirring tribute to this love, with one version of the music video featuring Warren’s actual wedding. “The best decision I ever made was asking you to marry me,” Alex tearfully tells his wife, Kouvr, adding “if we’re ever lucky enough, I can’t wait to watch you become a mother… I promise to always put you and our family first.” 

Of course, this love reaches fruition only if a couple can find harmony in their differences, which is challenging in any context and especially so without a coherent social script and support. For men and women to get along is as unnatural as it is natural, as ordinary as it is out of the ordinary. 

How Do We Bridge the Sex Divide?

Which is why civilizations from time immemorial have crafted norms around sex and ceremony around marriage, some form of which has been universal in human societies. As David Blankenhorn once wrote, “More than any other human relationship, marriage bridges the sexual divide in the human species.” As Gen Z is discovering, when marriage recedes, the dating scene gets more polarized, and men and women become less happy.

Marriage, as an institution with norms and expectations, can help men and women navigate the sex divide. But in an era of low trust, men and women are less likely to marry. As the young man on the porch told my husband, marriage requires trust, but if your parents split and now you “don’t trust nobody,” it’s going to be difficult to get married.  

For men and women to get along is as unnatural as it is natural, as ordinary as it is out of the ordinary.

Given this, what old norms might be reinforced, or what new norms might we forge in order to build the kind of social structure that can help young men and women to do the brave commonplace: fall in love, marry, have children, and sustain and let themselves be sustained by these bonds?

Four ideas come to mind, though the means to them are debatable and this list is by no means exhaustive: 

1.) A cultural mindset that embraces marriage as formative and foundational, a place from which to build, something for everyone not just the privileged few—and that tells a more realistic story about love as something you work at, not something you simply find;

2.) Better access to work that pays a family wage with family hours, a predictable schedule and family benefits, especially for young men without college degrees;

3.) An acknowledgment that addiction—whether to substances, phones, porn, or gambling—is not a fringe issue but a widespread challenge with public policy implications.

4.) The personal formation necessary to prepare a young person for work and for marriage (whether through family life, friendship, education, religious institutions, sports, scouts, service, or other opportunities for models and mentorship in character and commitment—because formation is not something a person can bootstrap alone).

Conclusion

In today’s status quo, children bear the weight the old norms and supports used to hold. A single dad on my street, having difficulty making ends meet, recently moved his stuff to a storage unit, as he and his kindergarten son moved to a homeless shelter. 

Another single dad on my street lives with his mom, and one day I’m visiting on their driveway when the two of them start discussing the mother of his children. Wringing their hands, it is what it is. 

We stand there talking, confronted with the sense that when men and women no longer cooperate to raise the next generation, everything else begins to fall apart. Thank God for resilience, for the weed-like tenacity of the human longing for love—pluck it or mow it over, yet still so often it grows back amidst the concrete and against the odds. 

At that moment, my neighbor looks up. “I just seen someone up in that attic,” she says, gesturing to what was once Rickey’s bedroom window. “Maybe not,” she squints and hesitates, for the house has been empty over a year now.

Then, I remember—it’s probably just the dog.

Amber Lapp is a research fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, a contributing writer at American Compass, and co-investigator of the Love and Marriage in Middle America Project, a qualitative research inquiry into how working-class young adults form relationships and families.

*Photo credit: Shutterstock