Perspective: The rise of ‘marriage deserts’ and what we can do about them

What makes a marriage succeed or fail?

To answer this question, psychologist John Gottman set up what came to be known as the “Love Lab” at the University of Washington in Seattle. Couples were invited to spend a weekend in a plush apartment with scenic views as Gottman and his team monitored their body language, conversations, blood pressure and even cortisol levels to figure out what makes for good marriages versus failed ones.

By monitoring hundreds of couples, Gottman discovered that certain behavioral patterns — like having at least five positive interactions for each negative interaction in the midst of a conflict — were linked to successful marriages, whereas patterns of regular defensiveness or criticism led to marital defeat.

Gottman’s research and the popular relationship advice books it generated (like “The Relationship Cure: A 5-Step Guide to Strengthening Your Marriage, Family, and Friendships”) is valuable, but does not explain why successful marriages are more likely to be found in some communities rather than in others.

As one of us (Brad Wilcox) asked in his book, “Get Married”:

“Why is it, for instance, that a neighborhood adjacent to Gottman’s Love Lab, the picture-perfect Laurelhurst community alongside Lake Washington in Seattle, has some of the strongest families in the nation, with nearly 90% headed by two parents? By contrast, why is it that a Seattle neighborhood just several miles south of the Love Lab, South Park, is dominated by single parents?”

These are more sociological questions and part of the answer to them is that some communities, like Laurelhurst, are populated by men and women who have lots of experience living in families and social networks where marriage is the norm.

In contrast, there are plenty of people in communities like South Park where men and women have little experience with marriage.

In fact, in recent decades, America has witnessed the rise of what could be called “marriage deserts”: entire neighborhoods where there are persistently low rates of marriage. These stand in contrast to other neighborhoods where stable married families are the norm.

Why do some neighborhoods support marriages while others don’t?

How marriage deserts are made

Relationships are role-modeled. If you have the privilege of growing up in a stable, good-enough married family, you get front-row seats for 18 years showing you how marriage works. But if you grow up with cohabiting or divorced partners, or parents who regularly were at war with one another, your perceptions are different and imagining a good marriage requires a lot more effort. This was the experience of so many Gen Xers who came of age during the divorce revolution of the 1970s and 1980s.

For anyone who grows up in a single-parent relationship, marriage is even harder to imagine. And if you grow up in a neighborhood where single-parent relationships are the norm for blocks on end, marriage is a fiction.

In 1968, only 13% of U.S. children lived with an unmarried parent, whether cohabiting or a single parent. By 2023, almost one-third of children were living in a home headed by single or cohabiting parents.

Accompanying this retreat from marriage has been a decline in the number of high schoolers who wish to marry in adulthood. The share of boys who say having a good marriage and family life is “important/extremely important” to them has gone from a high of 75% in the 1990s to 57% in 2021. For girls, it went from more than 75% throughout the 1980s-2000s and has now dropped to 69%.

Crucially, the share of high schoolers who report their ability to be a “very good spouse” has dropped by 8 percentage points for boys and 11 percentage points for girls in the past decade. This likely shows a decline in confidence shaped by a decline in available role models.

Take a good marriage off the menu for kids, and it is no longer an option for them as they head into adulthood.

Geography and income

As we have written on these pages before, one big factor shaping whether kids are raised in stable marriages or fragile families is class. There is a marriage divide between those who are high income and those who are low income. The share of prime-working-age adults who are married is almost three times higher for those who are high income versus those who are low income.

Marriage deserts are much more common in poor and working-class communities across America: in rural white working-class communities across Appalachia, Black communities adjacent to the Mississippi Delta, and Native American reservations in the Dakotas, for instance.

But marriage deserts also appear in America’s big cities, where whole neighborhoods run dry of stable, married relational role models for several blocks on end.

But how could marriage deserts appear next to neighborhoods with high rates of marriage? In Los Angeles, how can the single-parent rate for several blocks of Santa Monica east of Montana Avenue be at 67%, but just 15% in the neighborhood west of Montana Avenue?

Marriage deserts are by nature isolated and cut off from a pipeline of role models. What’s happening is that in cities like LA, neighborhoods are often very self-contained, with little mingling between people across neighborhoods, even in ones that are physically next to one another. The Opportunity Index Social Capital Atlas explains that Los Angeles has low economic connectedness: Only 37% of the friends of low-income people are high income.

This lack of exposure to those with higher incomes, according to the research, limits upward income mobility. Perhaps this is about role-modeling, too — high-income friends show what a high-income life looks like and how it is achieved. Practically, it opens up networks of people with high income, and perhaps new job opportunities.

If role modeling through exposure to high-income friends is so important for upward income mobility, then it likely follows that seeing relationship role models from communities where marriage is the norm is also important for succeeding at marriage.

You might be thinking, isn’t this a bit judgy?

However, saying that someone lives in a marriage desert, be it in White Sulphur Springs in West Virginia or Jefferson Park in Los Angeles, isn’t finger pointing. You wouldn’t blame someone living in a food desert for not having healthy groceries in their pantry. Nor would you blame someone living in an actual desert for being thirsty.

But those on the right have been too keen, historically, to blame those living in a marriage desert on a failure of moral character. And those on the left have been too keen to discount the importance of marriage because the institution is weaker in poor communities. But you shouldn’t get rid of good supermarkets everywhere just because they are nonexistent in some communities.

Instead, for those stranded in a food desert, you build better supermarkets. For anyone in an actual desert, you install irrigation to make the land habitable. This is usually done by a combination of public and private actors.

In the same way, rebuilding the norms and networks that support marriage requires the urgent work of government, business, culture and civil society.

Diversifying role models

Civil society — nonprofits, churches, voluntary groups, mentors — are well placed to improve the diversity of role modeling available to people living in marriage deserts. Many nonprofits make valuable interventions in people’s lives by providing relationships different in character to those previously experienced. A church child care program, youth mentoring and after-school clubs all provide venues for exposure to new role models. There are nonprofits, like For the Children, which help local churches partner with social services to provide summer camp interventions for children in foster care. Or Communio, the nonprofit boosting marriage in Catholic and evangelical churches that is now focusing on low-income adults in St. Louis, Missouri.

The breakdown of marriage rates in neighborhoods doesn’t just affect individual families. Again, quoting Chetty, in a report we wrote for the Social Capital Campaign, “Children of married parents … have higher rates of upward mobility if they live in communities with fewer single parents.” As lone parent rates grow as a share of a neighborhood, they have a downward-drag effect on upward mobility.

Outside of marriage deserts, the happiest, healthiest and most financially secure Americans are married. Churchgoers, Asian families, college graduates and Republican voters each enjoy the benefits of a stable, married family. Here there are abundant networks of role models for entire neighborhoods. What this variety shows is that marriage is “doable” for people from many backgrounds. No one needs to be excluded from it. Let’s work to end marriage deserts so that kids from all kinds of communities have a shot at one of the things that matters most: a good marriage.

Chris Bullivant is a senior fellow of the Social Capital Campaign. Brad Wilcox is a professor and director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies and the author of “Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization” (Harper Collins).