Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization
By Brad Wilcox.
Broadside Books, 2024.
Hardcover, 320, $32.
Reviewed by Nicholas R. Swanson.
The University of Virginia’s Brad Wilcox might be the world’s leading academic proponent of marriage. Wilcox, the son of a single mom, is a married father and sociologist, and he’s out with a new book about marriage that combines the latest social science metrics with supporting anecdotes from qualitative interviews. The title, Get Married, summarizes the advice Wilcox would give to young people, including his students at UVA, who he says tend to excel at so-called “resume virtues” while underperforming at “eulogy virtues.”
Wilcox acknowledges that marriage has been the subject of scorn since the divorce boom of the 1970s. But today, it faces particular derision. On the left, elite outlets relentlessly crank out articles suggesting that marriage is overrated, polyamory is worth trying, and childlessness is healthy, among other claims. In short, some on the left either dismiss marriage outright or propose innovations that would make marriage something else entirely. On the right, marriage is denounced by a highly online group of influencers such as Andrew Tate and Pearl Davis, whose target demographic is screen-addicted single men under 40. Unsavory figures such as Tate and Davis counsel their followers against marriage primarily on the guise that it’s a trap for men.
Attacks on marriage and traditional family life often originate in the academy. Wilcox highlights examples of academic social science studies getting picked up by mainstream outlets and promoted as concrete truth rather than speculative (and often debunkable) findings. My favorite example he discusses is a 2015 study by Jean Decety and coauthors arguing that “religion negatively influences children’s altruism” while calling into doubt “the view that religiosity facilitates prosocial behavior.” Seizing on the study, The Daily Beast ran the headline “Religious Kids Are Jerks” while the Guardian proclaimed that “Religious Children Are Meaner than Their Secular Counterparts.” The problem: the study was methodologically flawed and later retracted. But by the time that happened, as Wilcox writes, “the damage was done.”
Unfortunately, it often takes a rare scholar like Wilcox, who has ample time and requisite training, to evaluate and debunk studies like Decety’s. Misleading information and popular myths about marriage and family life are easy to disseminate, and Wilcox seems to believe that Americans are bombarded with anti-marriage propaganda all the time. Thus, the temptation can soon emerge for proponents of marriage to retreat to a “leave us alone” mentality. A culture characterized by what Catherine Pakaluk has termed “marriagelessness” makes the temptation all the more enticing.
Alas, Wilcox is here to do something unusual. Thankfully, he is aimed at much more than debunking a few dubious studies or absurd headlines. He intuits a need for an updated social scientific apologia of marriage—something that champions marriage comprehensively from a social scientific perspective in the way Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher did nearly 25 years ago in their book The Case for Marriage.
The question implicit throughout the book is why some marriages succeed and others fail. Success is defined by (1) endurance (i.e., avoiding divorce) and (2) reported long-term fulfillment (as opposed to short-term euphoria). Wilcox boils down what he calls the “masters of marriage” to four non-mutually exclusive groups: Asian Americans, religious Americans, conservative Americans, and what he dubs “strivers.” Wilcox tells us that strivers tend to be conscientious, well-educated adults who embrace professional life while practicing delayed gratification.
Wilcox then seeks to deduce what characteristics make such marriages successful. What is it that these groups have that others lack? What manifests itself is hardly a surprise to those who might be characterized as old-fashioned. Consider a sample of Wilcox’s conclusions:
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- Successful marriages are those in which the spouses display a “we-before-me” approach to family life. Marriages in which the wife takes the husband’s last name tend to be more successful, probably because taking the husband’s last name is evidence of a latent “we-before-me” mentality.
- Women still prioritize men who are seen as safe and good providers. Marriages in which the wife thinks of the husband as such are more likely to endure.
- There is a habit, particularly amongst the “strivers,” to “talk left but walk right.” In other words, it is not uncommon to hear a (typically progressive-minded) married couple say they have no objection to practices such as polyamory or separate bank accounts while in practice maintaining strict monogamy and joint bank accounts.
What thus emerges as Wilcox’s cheval de bataille is what he calls a “neotraditional” understanding of marriage. It’s traditional because it largely reaffirms old wisdom about what makes a happy, enduring marriage. It’s “neo” because, compared to the past, “today’s women have high expectations that their man will be emotionally and practically attentive to them and any children they have.” Nowadays, husbands are expected to show up and be engaged in family life.
The primary value of Wilcox’s work is in providing a fresh social scientific foundation for truths often espoused on religious, philosophical, or moral grounds. Some examples: Joint bank accounts create trust and lessen the chance of divorce. To borrow a Catholic phrase, “near occasions of sin” when it comes to spouses’ relations with the opposite sex tend to increase the risk of adultery and divorce. Prenuptial agreements pit soon-to-be spouses against each other and are a predictor of divorce.
To the extent some marriage defenders are disappointed with Get Married, it is important to understand what Wilcox’s book is not: a theological or philosophical defense of marriage, a roadmap to comprehensive family flourishing, or a complete rejection of a less institutional model of marriage.
Still, the broader question remains about what can be done to restore a marriage culture. Wilcox dabbles into this terrain in the penultimate chapter, and his analysis is mostly correct.
For one, he’s right to chide people on the left for attempting to spend billions “to get more kids out of their homes and into day care centers.” Doing so is neither in the best interest of the kids nor the parents, who would prefer the care of interested parties, like grandparents or a stay-at-home mom or dad, in lieu of day care. Still, Wilcox trades in popular myth when he insinuates that “the elites” sabotaged the American family by enacting trade deals that sent jobs to China and elsewhere. Contra the so-called “China shock” theory, trade expert Douglas Irwin has explained that the loss of jobs in certain sectors, especially manufacturing, is largely the result of gradual productivity gains stemming from new technologies and domestic competition rather than trade deals sending jobs overseas. Nevertheless, Wilcox’s point is taken when he argues that utopian-minded libertarians are misleading when they say that free market policies will solve all family issues.
Perhaps one of the most pressing dilemmas to work out if a marriage culture is to be restored is in the marriage market itself. Allow me to make an argument: American culture has dethroned virtue and hard work and replaced them with the idols of intelligence and credentialing. Being smart (or at least seeming so) is now more valued than being an upright guy. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the clamor by policymakers to get everyone to go to college. This all has ramifications for marriage.
In practice, not all young adults are suited for college, often because, to be frank, they’re intellectually unsuited to the task. But nowadays, young women are more likely than young men to stick it out and earn a college degree.
In the past, most people didn’t go to college, and it was socially acceptable not to have a college degree. But young men today who find themselves unsuited for college are lost because our college-for-all culture prizes things out of reach for them—intelligence and credentials—while hardly anyone champions things they can achieve, such as hard work and personal virtue. Hence, these men are frequently found to eschew work altogether and thus come to embody the stereotype of the thirty-something playing video games full-time in his parents’ basement.
Female college graduates are unlikely to marry someone without a college degree both because having a degree is a status bonus (and, as Wilcox tells us, women prefer to marry up) and because men without college degrees are frequently not perceived as good providers. Couple this with the fact that young women today are earning more college degrees than young men, and you have a bit of a gender imbalance in the marriage market. There are not enough men deemed suitable by college-educated women for marriage, and there are not enough women willing to marry men without college degrees.
The problem is hard to crack. But Wilcox is on the right track when he proposes we “defund college” and “refund vocational education.” Wilcox seems to think of this proposal as a way of injecting a financial footing to those lower down the socioeconomic ladder, balancing the scales, thereby making it easier for those without college degrees to marry. But beyond this, such a proposal should evince a deeper attitude shift: a need to restore a sense of dignity to non-intellectual work—teaching men and women that what matters much more than credentials and IQ is being a person of integrity and industriousness. And one way to make this attitude shift concrete is for the government to withdraw from the student loan game.
Doing so would help send a powerful message that young people can forge a respectable path without a college degree. Perhaps that would encourage more men without college degrees to make themselves suitable husbands, even if it means embracing, at least at first, less-than-glamorous work. Ending the college-for-all cultural mentality might also give women the social breathing room to consider a man without a college degree a suitable spouse.
Let’s hope people skeptical of marriage read Wilcox’s book. It’s the best social science can do to make the case for our most important natural institution.
Nicholas R. Swanson is a PhD student in economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA.
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