Why you should get married: Brad Wilcox

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Brad Wilcox discuss whether more people getting married really would improve their lives; why we might need a political and cultural environment more conducive to marriage; and what explains the “happiness gap” between liberals and conservatives in the U.S.

Yascha Mounk: You point out a strange inconsistency in American attitudes towards marriage and particularly attitudes among the American elite, which is that, for example, at the University of Virginia where you teach, most students say that it's perfectly fine to have kids outside of wedlock, that there's nothing particularly important about being married. And yet they are much more likely than the average American to come from families that are stable in that way. They're extremely likely to say that if they came home and told their parents they're about to have a baby, their parents would freak out. What does that tell us about America today?

Brad Wilcox: In my piece in The Atlantic, I talk about the way in which a lot of my students would be very tolerant and affirming of a wide range of family forms and structures kind of as a public ethic. But when it comes to their own lives, they're very much still grounded in a marriage-focused ethic. And the vast majority of my students come from intact married households, about 80% depending upon the class. I'm just sort of commenting, in my Atlantic piece but also in the book more generally, about the way in which many of our elites talk left but walk right when it comes to family in terms of being much more marriage-minded in their own private lives and their own public lives. That's problematic to me because what ends up happening is that our elites in media and education and in Hollywood and other kinds of important culture-forming domains, from my vantage point, are not necessarily telling the truth to young adults across the country—the truth is that for most of us, marriage is the best way to ground your adult life and certainly to form a family around. And so I think the problem is that our elites personally and privately are benefiting typically from marriage for themselves and their kids, but they're not communicating in their public capacities as culture shapers.

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