Why Is the Pundit Class Suddenly So Marriage-Obsessed?
January 6, 2024
Marriage, at least in the U.S., isn’t what it used to be. Over the past 50 years, marriage rates nationwide declined by 60 percent. Forty percent of U.S. children are now born to unmarried mothers, twice as many as in 1980. One widely covered poll last year found that 2 out of 5 GenZ-ers and millennials consider marriage an outdated concept.
Such stats have inspired a volley of columns, blog posts, think pieces and books, arguing why we should (or shouldn’t) care. The decline of marriage, after all, joins other social changes such as falling birth rates and a “loneliness epidemic” — the new crusade of Surgeon General Vivek Murthy — that arguably could be solved by more marriage. So conservatives, broadly, have preached a return to tradition: In the New York Times, David Brooks advised younger readers “to obsess less about your career and to think a lot more about marriage.”
