Provocative title aside, let me start by saying how truly happy I am that feminist author Jill Filipovic “got wildly lucky and married someone who is brilliant, brave, kind, and talented, and who it feels like dedicates most of his emotional energy into making me feel brilliant, brave, kind, and talented.”
All women deserve to find such a man.
What troubles me about her Dec. 30 newsletter, however, is her insistence that “marriage really shouldn’t be the primary organizing relationship of American society” and her conclusion that “we really shouldn’t continue to treat it as the best way to organize a life, or even the best way to be in love.”
My big worry is that by rejecting marriage as “the primary organizing relationship of American society,” it will be even harder for the future Jill Filipovics of the world to find men that make them happy. But before we get there, her framing of our nation’s “marital malaise” obscures who is suffering from America’s very real decline of marriage.
Filipovic kicks her essay off by referencing pieces in the New York Times and the Atlantic, in which the first author asserts all wives hate their husbands, and the second author explains why she left her husband despite still loving him. Neither essay covered much new ground, but both are relevant in that they are written by wealthy white women.
The angst of these two women aside, to the extent our nation is suffering through a marriage crisis, the crisis is not afflicting the target audiences of the New York Times and the Atlantic. Marriage rates among the wealthiest Americans are virtually the same as they were in the 1960s, and the divorce rate has actually improved from the 1970s.
If you want to see, however, what a society where marriage isn’t “the primary organizing relationship” looks like, just look at the lives of those least well off among us. Just 26% of the poorest American adults are married, compared to 56% of those with average incomes and above.
Where marriage is absent, family life is often chaotic, with mothers slipping in and out of relationships with a carousel of men, who come into and out of children’s lives, often paying the most attention to the children of the woman they are currently sleeping with the most.
This is not a recipe for healthy human development, particularly for boys, who we all should want to grow up and become productive and responsible men. Boys have always been more likely to be suspended from school than girls, but the gap between boy and girl suspension rates is much higher for boys from single-parent homes. Boys without fathers are also more likely to get arrested before they become men, more likely to go to jail as adults, more likely to drop out of school, and less likely to complete college.
This imbalance of outcomes between boys and girls from single-parent homes drives more instability and less marriage in the next generation as women are not able to find partners who match their educational and professional attainment.
Consider two recent Wall Street Journal stories, both published on the same day, one of which went viral (“A Generation of American Men Give Up on College“), and one that did not (“More College-Educated Women Are Having Babies Outside Marriage“). These should have been combined into one story because they are absolutely connected.
It is not that these college-educated women are all of a sudden deciding they don’t want to get married before they have children. Most never-married women want to get married someday. They just can’t find the right men. “When I realized I was attracting the wrong men, and I really just wanted a child, I said, ‘Why not separate the two things?’” New York City special education teacher Jennifer Cruz told the Wall Street Journal. “I had all my life to find love, but I didn’t have all my life to have a child.”
Cruz’s hesitance to marry because she can’t find the right man is reflected in Pew polling documenting the rise of young unmarried adults. For women who have never married, the most important thing they are looking for in a partner is someone who has a steady job. This is not a concern for unmarried men, most of whom are just looking for “someone who shares their ideas about raising children.”
And as Pew later notes, there simply aren’t enough employed men to go around:
Five decades ago, marriage was “the primary organizing relationship of American society,” and there were plenty of eligible men for women to marry. Now that marriage has been deinstitutionalized for those that need its stability the most, there are not enough eligible men for women to marry. And since the cycle of single-parenthood and bad outcomes for boys feeds back on itself, the problem only gets worse every year.
“Marriage is itself an institution with hundreds of years of history and baggage, and all sorts of assumptions of roles and obligations,” Filipovic writes. “It is still an institution in which decisions are not universally individual but rather often made according to long-standing patterns, put into place before my mother’s mother’s mother was born, passed down through action, custom, and habit, so common and so ingrained as to be nearly invisible.”
Filipovic sees the “action, custom, and habit” of marriage as detrimental to female fulfillment. But if women want their lives to include any kind of meaningful relationship with a man of their educational and professional equal, then maybe those customs and habits are exactly what women need.
