Highlights
For years, I have given my single friends a very specific piece of dating advice: “find yourself a corn-fed Midwestern man.” My advice was never particularly scientific. The supporting evidence consisted mostly of my own Midwestern bias, an adoration for my husband—who is from Ohio—and the knowledge that Abercrombie & Fitch reportedly used to scout Midwestern football teams for models. The Midwest, I reasoned, was clearly doing something right.
Then IFS released the Marriage Map. Curious, I started playing with the filters. I selected men ages 22-39 with full-time employment. Suddenly, “find yourself a corn-fed Midwestern man” had data to back it up.
The map lit up with varying shades of red and purple, with purple representing a higher density of men who met my criteria. While pockets of purple existed across the country, the Midwest represented the largest geographic concentration of eligible men by the standards I selected.
Of course, I had smuggled one rather important qualification into my definition of “eligible”: full-time employment. As it turns out, the IFS Marriage Map suggests I was right to do so. For women ages 22-39, simply having lots of single men around isn't as predictive of marriage rates as having lots of single, full-time-employed men around. Apparently, it helps if the single men have jobs.
The geography of marriage itself tells a similar story. For Americans ages 22-29, many of the country's highest marriage-rate regions are found across the interior. Meanwhile, eight of the 10 lowest-rate regions are in the New York and Los Angeles metropolitan areas. Some of that is timing. Among thirty-somethings, those same coastal metros make their way to the top. Still, middle America doesn't treat marriage as something you should get around to later.
While no map can tell you whom to marry or explain why two particular people fall in love, this one does lead me to wonder why marriage seems to flourish more in some places than others. The obvious temptation is to make this a reflection on dating markets. But dating markets exist in cultures.
Middle America doesn't treat marriage as something you should get around to later.
Despite being Midwesterners ourselves, my husband and I met far from the small towns that formed us, in Washington, DC. Still, I recognized a familiar sensibility in him from the start, and it was clear our values aligned on all the things that matter. He was ambitious but steady. Family came first. Home mattered.
We ended up not dating right away, despite mutual interests. He was about to deploy to the Middle East, and he thought it best not to start a new long-distance relationship with a girl he’d just met. He was interested, but he was also serious enough about relationships not to begin one carelessly. (There was that pesky sensibility again.) Not one to show my cards first, I assumed his lack of pursuit meant we’d just be friends, and so I carried on with my own life.
In the meantime, we became close friends. I began dating someone else, and he kept his feelings to himself. When that relationship ended, he was still overseas, but he apparently decided he wasn't going to miss his chance twice and confessed his interest. The distance hadn't changed, but months of friendship had given us something more substantial than the initial connection we'd felt in DC, and enough of a foundation to believe the distance was worth the trouble. When the time came, commitment was not frightening because neither of us were afraid of permanence.
This is where my joking advice to friends becomes more serious. We talk about dating as though finding a spouse is simply an exercise in finding a person with the correct collection of individual traits. Dating apps incentivize us to think this way. Filter by height, education, politics, hobbies, income, and religion. Apply the right combination of filters, swipe the magic number of times, and then your algorithm will produce a husband.
But a filter can only tell you what—or even where—a man is. What matters more is much deeper: why he is that way. We are formed somewhere, and the communities that hold on to their values are best able to pass those values on to the next generation of men and women.
Places teach us things. Families teach us things. Churches and neighborhoods and schools teach us things. The values and expectations surrounding us showcase what adulthood and success should look like, what we owe other people, and whether marriage and children represent the beginning of a meaningful life (yes) or an obstacle to one (no).
A filter can only tell you what—or even where—a man is. What matters more is much deeper: why he is that way.
Geography is not destiny, of course. The data on the Marriage Map doesn't mean every man from Iowa is husband material, and plenty of wonderful husbands come from Seattle, Scottsdale, and everywhere else in between. And of course, even the Midwest has its underperforming markets: Illinois, for example. Filter for single men in their twenties employed full time, and much of that state turns red.
But culture does matter. And the Marriage Map is interesting because it shows that communities matter both for getting married and raising a family, and these communities form us all.
The lives of our peers can make marriage easier or harder to imagine. There is some truth to the idea that we become the sum of the people we spend our lives around. When your friends are getting married, putting down roots, and starting families, it becomes easier to envision that life for yourself. These choices establish our sense of normal and shape our aspirations.
These conditions also shape what we believe must be in place before marriage can begin. As the maps show, living somewhere with more single men earning at least $60,000 is strongly associated with marriage rates among women in their thirties. For women in their twenties, that relationship essentially vanishes.
There is a bit of old-fashioned romance in this, in choosing someone before all the pieces have fallen into place. Women marrying younger may be evaluating a man's future earning potential rather than waiting for that potential to be fully realized. In many ways, marrying young requires less attention on what someone has already built and more faith in what you might achieve together.
Perhaps that is what my “marry the Midwesterner” advice has really been about. My husband and I met long before either of us had a finished life to offer the other. What we have now, though, is a life we have built toward, struggled for, and chosen together. The successes are ours, but so are the difficult years, the mistakes, uncertainties, and growing pains.
Maybe what I've been recommending all these years isn't really a Midwestern man so much as a Midwestern disposition: a willingness to choose before every option has been exhausted, to put down roots without constantly wondering if there might be better elsewhere, and to treat a good life as something made rather than found.
Though, yes, if he happens to be corn-fed, I continue to regard that as a promising sign.
Danielle Franz is the chief executive officer of the American Conservation Coalition (ACC). She lives in Lexington, Kentucky, with her husband and young son. Follow her on X @DanielleBFranz.
*Photo credit: Shutterstock
