The Marriage Paradox: Understanding and remedying the paradoxical place of marriage in America

Abstract

Marriage has fallen upon hard times in the United States in the last 6 decades.

Demographically, in the wake of the divorce revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, and the ongoing decline in the marriage rate, this social institution has lost significant ground as the anchor of adulthood and foundation of family life (Cherlin, 2009; Wilcox, 2024). Culturally, support for the values and virtues that sustain marriage have dropped in recent years, as fewer Americans report they think marriage is important for men, women, and children or embrace virtues like fidelity and monogamy that sustain strong and stable marriages (Jones, 2020; Wilcox, 2024).

And yet. At the same time that marriage has lost demographic and cultural ground, the empirical evidence that marriage matters for the welfare of children, men, and women continues to mount (Kearney, 2023; McLanahan & Sawhill, 2015; Ribar, 2015; Wasserman, 2020; Wilcox, 2024). Children raised in stably married homes are markedly more likely to avoid poverty, flourish in school, and avoid incarceration (Kearney, 2023; Ribar, 2015; Wasserman, 2020). Men and women who are married are markedly more financially secure, less lonely, and report greater happiness than their peers who are not married (Wilcox, 2024). Even more surprisingly, there is growing evidence that the marriage premium in child and adult well-being is not only robust but growing for some outcomes (Iceland, 2021; Nock, 2009; Wilcox et al., 2023).

What we have, then, is a “marriage paradox” where culturally and demographically the institution of marriage is garnering less support even as its objective value remains high and may even be growing. This article will detail the paradox and suggest policy remedies to it. Because “marriage represents the keystone institution” not only for many men, women, and children but also for our civilization, to paraphrase the evolutionary anthropologist Joseph Henrich (2020), federal, state, and local policymakers should seek ways to advance the fortunes of marriage in America. Policymakers should specifically aim for cultural measures that increase the appeal of marriage to young adults and for economic measures that make marriage and family formation more accessible to ordinary men and women.

The American heart is closing to love, marriage, and family life. Here too is a curious paradox. While marriage remains an important life aspiration for a strong majority of Americans (Willoughby & James, 2017), dating is down (Twenge & Park, 2017), fertility is falling (National Center for Health Statistics, 2024), and marriage is in retreat (Wilcox, 2024). The causes of this shift away from intimacy and family formation are complex—from economic shifts that have undercut the marriageability of less-educated men (Autor & Wasserman, 2013; Wilson, 1987) to the rise of an expressive individualism (Bellah, 1985) that has reduced the normative status of marriage—but the demographic manifestations of this shift are striking.

As Figure 1 indicates, the U.S. marriage rate has fallen by more than 60% since 1970. In 1970, 85.9 men and women married per 1,000 unmarried Americans 15 and up. By 2021, that number had fallen to 30.5 per 1,000. Likewise, the median age of marriage has risen for men from 23 in 1970 to 30.5 in 2022 and for women from 21 in 1970 to 28.6 in 2022 (Census Bureau, 2023). The practical significance of this is that only about 50% of American adults are currently married, down from 72% in 1960 (Cohn et al., 2011). Moreover, demographers now project that a record share of young adults, about one in three, may never marry (Stone, 2024). The bottom line is that marriage is much less likely to ground and guide the lives of American adults than it once was.

To be sure, not all the news regarding marriage and family life in America is bad. The silver lining regarding the increasingly selective character of marriage and family formation in recent years is that children are more likely to be raised in intact, married families. Specifically, as the divorce rate falls and the share of children born to unmarried parents has leveled off since 2009, the share of children being raised by intact, married families has risen in the last decade (Wilcox, 2024). Now, more than 50% of children are being raised by stably married parents (Zill, 2024). At the same time, family instability is still markedly more common for today's children than it was for children raised in the middle of the last century.

When it comes to the well-being of children, the greater fragility of marriage and family life is noteworthy for three reasons. First, we know that children are more likely to suffer negative outcomes like poverty, depression, and incarceration when raised outside of an intact, married family. Children raised in single-parent families, for instance, are about 4 times more likely to be poor, compared to those raised in married families (Kearney, 2023). They are also more likely to experience social and emotional problems like early sex, depression, and suicide ideation (D'Onofrio et al., 2006). And young men raised outside of an intact family are more likely to be incarcerated than they are to graduate from college; by contrast, their peers from intact families are approximately 4 times more likely to graduate from college than end up in jail or prison (Wilcox, 2024). To be sure, on most outcomes, children raised outside of an intact, married family do fine but the social science is generally consistent with the conclusion, as noted by Sara McLanahan and Isabel Sawhill in the Future of Children (2015), that research “increasingly shows that family instability undermines parents’ investments in their children, affecting the children's cognitive and social-emotional development in ways that constrain their life chances” (p. 3).

The second point is that the research stands in tension with what has been called the “family diversity” theory (Wilcox, 2024). This is the idea that all family forms are equally valuable for children and that what really matters for kids is not family structure per se but a good family process and the requisite financial resources to flourish. Regarding the latter, sociologist Philip Cohen (2016) has said, “If people grow up with single mothers who have adequate income, [they] do fine on average. What we find is they do have a lot of challenges from the lack of resources but family structure per se is not as big a factor.” Regarding the former, sociologist Pamela Braboy Jackson (as cited in Chen, 2020) has argued that “All of our research points to the fact that it's the quality of the relationship that matters, and the handling of communication and conflict, and the number of people in the household is not really the key.” While they are right to underline the importance of financial resources and family process for children, they do not appreciate the ways in which stable, married families are significantly more likely to deliver those very ingredients to children.

Take money. On average, stable, married families enjoy markedly higher levels of financial security and resources than non-intact families, as the economist Melissa Kearney (2023) has noted. This is in part because family instability is expensive, with dynamics like separate households, court and legal fees, and child support payments all reducing income and assets for parents who are not stably married, even net of their underlying socioeconomic resources (Wilcox, 2024).

Or take attention, affection, and consistent discipline—all key markers of good family process. Stably married parents have more time to devote to their children, are less likely to be stressed by parenting, are more affectionate and authoritative with their children, and are less likely to be abusive (Darling, 1999; McLanahan & Sandefur, 1992; Wilcox, 2024). All this helps to explain why the quality of the relationship between intact parents and children tends to be markedly higher than the quality in non-intact families.

The third point regarding child well-being and marriage is this: not only do we have evidence that children benefit from being raised in a stably married home, but the benefit may well be increasing for some outcomes. The psychologist Nicholas Zill found that the relative risk of school suspensions for children from non-intact families has grown from 1996 to 2019, even net of sociodemographic controls (Zill & Wilcox, 2022). Kathleen Ziol-Guest at New York University and a team of education scholars (2015) discovered that “the estimated relationship between the single-parent family structure variable and educational attainment more than tripled in size” (p. 40) for years of education between 1968 and 2009; they also found the relationship between family structure and college graduation grew in this time frame. Likewise, Wilcox and colleagues (2023) have found that the links between family structure and college graduation are stronger for Millennials than Baby Boomers. This research suggests that the benefits of an intact, married family for children may be rising in the 21st century.

Many of the public discussions surrounding the value of marriage have focused upon the welfare of children, but a considerable body of evidence indicates that marriage also matters for adults (Waite & Gallagher, 2001). Men and women who are married are markedly better off financially, physically, and emotionally than their peers who are not. On the financial front, we know that married men are about 55% less likely to be poor and married women about 80% less likely to be poor, net of controls for factors like race, ethnicity, education, and the presence of children (Wilcox, 2024). Over time, they also accumulate markedly more assets than their never-married and divorce peers; stably married 50-somethings, for instance, have about 10 times the assets of their never-married peers (Wilcox, 2024). What's more: recent research by demographer John Iceland (2021) indicated the link between marriage and financial well-being for adults has grown stronger over the years. That is, the affluence gap between unmarried and married adults has widened in recent decades (Iceland, 2021).

The findings related to marriage regarding physical and mental health for men and women are also striking. Numerous studies indicate that married men and women generally enjoy better health and better outcomes in the wake of medical treatment for illness and disease than their unmarried peers (Martinuk, 2016; Waite & Gallagher, 2001). For instance, one meta-analysis of 95 studies found that single people had a 24% higher risk of early death compared to married people (Roelfs et al., 2011). Numerous studies indicate that married adults recover better from cancer than single adults (Martinuk, 2016), with one study reporting that married adults were 20% less likely to die from cancer and that for “prostate, breast, colorectal, esophageal, and head/neck cancers, the survival benefit associated with marriage was larger than the published survival benefit of chemotherapy” (Aizer et al., 2013).

When it comes to mental health, the evidence indicates that married men and women are less likely to suffer from emotional problems and more likely to flourish. Married men and women are significantly less likely to commit suicide than divorced, widowed, or never-married individuals (Denney, 2010; Smith et al., 1988). Longitudinal studies following young adults as they marry, divorce, and remain single indicate that marriage is linked to fewer emotional problems and better mental health for men and women (Horwitz et al., 1996; Marks & Lambert, 1998). And today, adult men and women who are married are nearly twice as likely to be “very happy” as their peers who are not married (Wilcox, 2024).

There is no question that children, women, and men who are in stably married households are better off than their peers who are not. But is this due to selection effects or to protective factors that flow from marriage per se (Martinuk, 2016)? Certainly some portion of the marriage effect is about selection, where the kinds of people who select into stable marriage are distinctive from other Americans. For instance, Americans who are college-educated, religious, conservative, or Asian American are more likely to select into marriage (Wilcox, 2024). These factors are, in turn, positively related to outcomes like financial security and happiness for children and adults alike. So, some of the positive effects of marriage may be attributable to factors like education, religion, and ideology.

But the most sophisticated research—from twin studies indicating that married men earn markedly more money than their single twin brothers (Antonovics & Town, 2004) to economic studies showing that children raised in states that adapted no-fault divorce did worse than their peers who grew up in states with more stringent divorce laws (Gruber, 2004)—has indicated that the effects of marriage upon children and adults do not arise only from selection. They also arise from the institution of marriage itself. Indeed, after conducting his own research and surveying the evidence on marriage and adult outcomes, Tyler VanderWeele (2017), a professor of biostatistics at Harvard, concluded the effects of marriage could not be attributed only to selection; in his words, “The effects of marriage on health, happiness and life satisfaction, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, close social relationships, and financial stability are thus profound” (p. 8152).

Among the likely mechanisms through which marriage exercises a causal influence are the ways in which the institution's values and norms foster economic cooperation and economies of scale, long-term commitment that stabilizes family life (noted above), a sense of meaning and direction, and ongoing social support (Kearney, 2023; Waite & Gallagher, 2000; Wilcox, 2024). These mechanisms foster financial security, stability, purpose, and solidarity in ways that redound to the benefit of children and adults alike (Table 1).

Even though marriage advances the welfare of children and adults, many scholars and policymakers think that government policy can do little to strengthen this core institution (Sawhill, 2014). But the evidence suggests government policies to reinforce a marriage culture and incentivize marriage financially can move the dial in the direction of more and better marriages. For example, the experience of the nation's largest federal agency is instructive: the U.S. Department of Defense provides a range of financial benefits to its married members that it does not extend to cohabiting and dating members. Consequently, marriage rates are markedly higher among men who currently serve or have served in the military—including African American and less-educated men (Lundquist, 2004). In fact, today, men who are serving or have served in the military are more than 20 percentage points more likely to be married than men who have not served, according to the General Social Survey (2018, 2022).

Accordingly, we are more optimistic that policies can reinforce cultural and economic supports for marriage. Here we provide five feasible policies that federal and state policymakers can consider.