The Marriage Paradox

Editor's Note: The following post is excerpted from an essay published in The Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. The journal hosted a debate between professors Brad Wilcox/Alan Hawkins and Paula Fomby regarding the value of marriage and the potential place of marriage-friendly public policy in American life today. In this first installment from Professors Wilcox and Hawkins, they argue that marriage is both important and can be advanced via policy measures. Professor Fomby takes the opposite position. Below is a portion of the essay from Wilcox and Hawkins (read the full essay with citations here).

Marriage has fallen upon hard times in the United States in the last 6 decades. Demographically, in the wake of the divorce revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, and the ongoing decline in the marriage rate, this social institution has lost significant ground as the anchor of adulthood and foundation of family life.

Culturally, support for the values and virtues that sustain marriage have dropped in recent years, as fewer Americans report they think marriage is important for men, women, and children or embrace virtues like fidelity and monogamy that sustain strong and stable marriages.

And yet, at the same time that marriage has lost demographic and cultural ground, the empirical evidence that marriage matters for the welfare of children, men, and women continues to mount. Children raised in stably married homes are markedly more likely to avoid poverty, flourish in school, and avoid incarceration. Men and women who are married are markedly more financially secure, less lonely, and report greater happiness than their peers who are not married. Even more surprisingly, there is growing evidence that the marriage premium in child and adult well-being is not only robust but growing for some outcomes.

What we have, then, is a “marriage paradox” where culturally and demographically the institution of marriage is garnering less support even as its objective value remains high and may even be growing. This article will detail the paradox and suggest policy remedies to it. Because “marriage represents the keystone institution” not only for many men, women, and children but also for our civilization, to paraphrase the evolutionary anthropologist Joseph Henrich, federal, state, and local policymakers should seek ways to advance the fortunes of marriage in America. Policymakers should specifically aim for cultural measures that increase the appeal of marriage to young adults and for economic measures that make marriage and family formation more accessible to ordinary men and women.

THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN HEART

The American heart is closing to love, marriage, and family life. Here, too, is a curious paradox. While marriage remains an important life aspiration for a strong majority of Americans, dating is down, fertility is falling, and marriage is in retreat. The causes of this shift away from intimacy and family formation are complex—from economic shifts that have undercut the marriageability of less-educated men to the rise of an expressive individualism that has reduced the normative status of marriage—but the demographic manifestations of this shift are striking.

As Figure 1 indicates, the U.S. marriage rate has fallen by more than 60% since 1970. In 1970, 85.9 men and women married per 1,000 unmarried Americans 15 and up. By 2021, that number had fallen to 30.5 per 1,000. Likewise, the median age of marriage has risen for men from 23 in 1970 to 30.5 in 2022 and for women from 21 in 1970 to 28.6 in 2022. The practical significance of this is that only about 50% of American adults are currently married, down from 72% in 1960. Moreover, demographers now project that a record share of young adults, about one in three, may never marry. The bottom line is that marriage is much less likely to ground and guide the lives of American adults than it once was.

Figure 1. U.S. Marriage Rate Close to an All-Time Low in 2021

Source: Wang et al. (2022). Note: Number of newly married people per 1,000 unmarried Americans aged 15 and up.

To be sure, not all the news regarding marriage and family life in America is bad. The silver lining regarding the increasingly selective character of marriage and family formation in recent years is that children are more likely to be raised in intact, married families. Specifically, as the divorce rate falls and the share of children born to unmarried parents has leveled off since 2009, the share of children being raised by intact, married families has risen in the last decade. Now, more than 50% of children are being raised by stably married parents. At the same time, family instability is still markedly more common for today's children than it was for children raised in the middle of the last century. . .

Continue reading at The Journal of Policy Analysis and Management . . . .