Are We Witnessing a Marriage Comeback?

The Atlantic

6 days ago

'There is zero statistical advantage' to getting married if you are a man in America today, Andrew Tate argued in a viral 2022 video on 'why modern men don't want marriage.' Women, he believes, are worthless anchors—'They want you monogamous so that your testosterone level drops,' he posted on X last fall—and your marriage is likely to end in ruin anyway. 'If you use your mind, if you use your head instead of your heart, and you look at the advantages to getting married,' there are none.
The loudest voice in the manosphere is infamous for many things, including criminal charges of human trafficking, rape, and assault. (Tate has denied these charges.) But he is also notorious for launching a new front in the culture wars over marriage, aimed mostly at teenage boys and young men.
Tate believes that men no longer receive the deference they deserve from women in marriage, and bear more risk in divorce. He argues that men should focus on getting strong, making lots of money, and using—but not investing themselves in—the opposite sex. His evident appeal—clips of Tate garner hundreds of millions of impressions on YouTube and TikTok—would seem to be yet one more sign that our oldest social institution is in trouble.
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Critics on the left have been questioning the value of the institution for much longer, albeit from a different angle and with less venom than Tate. The realities of marriage in recent decades no doubt provide fuel for several varieties of criticism. Before divorce became widely permissible in the 1970s, difficult marriages—and even dangerous ones, for women—were by no means rare. Many women's career dreams were thwarted by the demands of marriage, and some still are today. Many men have been hit hard financially and sidelined from their children's lives by divorce. Innumerable children of divorce have had their faith in marriage extinguished by their parents' inability to get along (a pattern that may help explain Tate's animus toward the institution; his parents divorced when he was a child).
Some of these dynamics are both a cause and a consequence of the great family revolution of the late 20th century—one in which divorce and single parenthood surged. The share of prime-age adults (25 to 55) who were married fell from 83 percent in 1960 to 57 percent in 2010, according to census data, and the share of children born to unmarried parents rose from 5 to 41 percent.
These trends have left Americans bearish about marriage. Until 2022, the share of prime-age adults who were married was still on a long, slow downward march. According to a 2023 Pew Research Center survey, a plurality of men and women were 'pessimistic about the institution of marriage and the family.'
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But reports of marriage's demise are exaggerated. Rather quietly, the post-'60s family revolution appears to have ended. Divorce is down and the share of children in two-parent families is up. Marriage as a social institution is showing new strength—even among groups that drifted away from the institution in the 20th century, including Black and working-class Americans. And contrary to criticisms on the left and right, that's good news not only for America's kids, but also—on average, though not always—for married men and women today.
'If the ongoing revolution in family and gender arrangements is largely irreversible,' the progressive family historian Stephanie Coontz said in an address to the National Council on Family Relations in 2013, 'then we have to recognize divorced families, single-parent families, and married-couple families are all here to stay.'
At the time of her talk, the divorce rate was about twice as high as it had been in 1960, though it had come down somewhat from its 1981 peak. Nonmarital childbearing, meanwhile, had recently climbed to a record high. But even as Coontz spoke, two important shifts in family dynamics were under way.
First, the decline in the divorce rate was accelerating. Since the early 1980s, the divorce rate has now fallen by almost 40 percent—and about half of that decline has happened in just the past 15 years. (Unless otherwise noted, all figures in this article are the result of my analysis of national data.) The idea that marriage will end in failure half the time or more—well entrenched in many American minds—is out-of-date. The proportion of first marriages expected to end in divorce has fallen to about 40 percent in recent years.
Second, nonmarital childbearing, after almost half a century of increase, stalled out in 2009 at 41 percent, ticking down to about 40 percent a few years later, where it has remained. For children, less divorce and a small decline in childbearing outside wedlock mean more stability. After falling for more than 40 years beginning in the late 1960s, the share of children living in married families bottomed out at 64 percent in 2012 before rising to 66 percent in 2024, according to the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey. And the share of children raised in an intact married family for the duration of their childhood has climbed from a low point of 52 percent in 2014 to 54 percent in 2024.
A third shift may now be under way as well, although it is much less established than the first two. The rate of new marriages among prime-age adults, which hit a nadir during the pandemic, has risen in each of the three years of data since 2020. In 2023, the most recent year available, it was higher than in any year since 2008. At least some of this increase is a post-pandemic bounce, but the share of all prime-age adults who are married has also leveled off in the past few years, which suggests that the decades-long decline in the proportion of Americans who are married may have reached its low point.
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Some of these shifts are modest. Coontz was surely right that couples and families in the U.S. will continue to live in a variety of arrangements. And particular caution is warranted as to the number of new marriages—it is quite possible that the longer trend toward fewer people marrying will reassert itself. But as a likely success story for those who do wed, and as an anchor for American family life, marriage looks like it's coming back. Stable marriage is a norm again, and the way that most people rear the rising generation.
The Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich has observed that 'marriage represents the keystone institution for most—though not all—societies and may be the most primeval of human institutions.' On every continent and in every era, in more patriarchal societies and more egalitarian ones, it has governed family relationships. As an institution, it seems to build on the 'evolutionary psychology of both men and women,' writes Nicholas Christakis, a sociologist at Yale, which 'is to exchange love for support.'
The institution's record contains no shortage of injustices. In many times and places, marriage has been bound up with the oppression of women. (This article focuses mostly on heterosexual marriages, because marriage was not legal for same-sex couples until very recently.) Still, given the long history of marriage's persistence, its recent resilience in the U.S. should not be shocking. Nor should the reasons for that resilience. As it has before, marriage in the U.S. is adapting to changing circumstances and expectations. It is different now from the institution that looked so troubled in the late 1960s and the '70s.
One notable example is family care. Most marriages in the United States today are not throwbacks to the '50s when it comes to domestic responsibilities; husbands are more willing to lean in. The amount of time that American fathers spend on child care increased from 2.5 hours a week in 1965 to nine hours in 2024, according to Pew and the American Time Use Survey. Over this same period, the share of time spent on child care by dads rose from 25 to 62 percent of what moms provided.
Indeed, one reason the United States' birth rate may be higher than those of East Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea—where the fertility rate has fallen to 1.15 and 0.75 babies per woman, respectively, well below the U.S. rate of 1.6—is that men in those countries do much less child care and household labor than men in the U.S. Even as women around the world embrace the 'egalitarian frontier,' in the words of the social scientist Alice Evans, men in some cultures have maintained their old habits. 'As a result,' Evans writes, 'the sexes drift apart.' This may help explain why South Korea has seen marriages tank and its fertility rate fall to the lowest in the world.
There is no single model for a good marriage in the U.S. today, and most couples have their struggles. Men still do less child care and housework, and disagreements over the division of household labor are a source of tension for some couples. Many women still value some traditional traits in men, such as breadwinning, and some men's unreliability as breadwinners is a source of strain for them and their wives. A 2016 study on divorce published in the American Sociological Review found that when a husband was not employed full-time, his risk of divorce shot up by 33 percent the following year; when a wife was unemployed, her odds of divorce did not change. Employment difficulties among less-educated men are a big reason marriage rates are lower among the working class than among college graduates.
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But on the whole, marriage confers benefits to women and men alike. According to the 2024 General Social Survey, married men and women ages 25 to 55 are more than twice as likely to be 'very happy' with their life as their nonmarried peers. Married people—men and women both—live longer, are more financially secure, and build more wealth than single Americans.
In 2022, I worked with YouGov to survey some 2,000 married men and women, asking about their overall marital happiness and how they'd rate their spouse on a range of indicators. The happiest wives in the survey were those who gave their husbands good marks for fairness in the marriage, being attentive to them, providing, and being protective (that is, making them feel safe, physically and otherwise). Specifically, 81 percent of wives age 55 or younger who gave their husbands high marks on at least three of these qualities were very happily married, compared with just 25 percent of wives who gave them high marks on two or fewer. And, in part because most wives were reasonably happy with the job their husband was doing on at least three out of four of these fronts, most wives were very happy with their husband, according to our survey. In fact, we found that more than two-thirds of wives in this age group—and husbands, too—were very happy with their marriage overall.
I believe it's important for teen boys and young men to hear the entirety of this message. Marriage changes men, but not in the nefarious ways Andrew Tate might think. Men work harder and find more success at work after they get married; they drink less as well. And marriage can channel noble characteristics and behaviors that have classically been identified with masculinity: protection, provision, ambition, stoicism. That's good for both men and women—and can help young men identify and work toward a model of prosocial masculinity that diverges from the one being peddled by manosphere influencers such as Tate.
Marriage's comeback is good news for society: Children raised in two-parent homes are much more likely to graduate from college than those raised in other families, and less likely to be incarcerated. Kids who don't live with both of their married parents are far more likely to be depressed than those raised in intact families. After surveying the research on child well-being, the economist Melissa Kearney concluded that the 'evidence is clear, even if the punchline is uncomfortable: children are more likely to thrive—behaviorally and academically, and ultimately in the labor market and adult life—if they grow up with the advantages of a two-parent home.' Her view reflects the mainstream academic consensus on family structure and children today.
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But marriage's comeback is, of course, incomplete. Although the trend may be starting to reverse, the share of all Americans who get married has fallen significantly since the '60s, and there is abundant evidence that many young adults today are reluctant to marry, or are having trouble finding partners they want to marry. In particular, marriage has become more selective over time socioeconomically. A majority of college-educated Americans ages 25 to 55 (62 percent) are married, versus a minority of less-educated Americans (49 percent), according to the 2023 American Community Survey. This bifurcation did not exist half a century ago and is one reason marriages are more durable today: Money makes everything easier.
The plight of working-class men in the labor force is worth underlining here. Among prime-age men, the less educated are nearly twice as likely not to be employed full-time as those with a college degree. And as working-class men's connection to the labor force has frayed, so too has their connection to the ties that bind. If, as a society, we want more adults to see their way into a lasting and happy marriage, then we would do well to focus on helping these men find their way to good jobs first.
But the idea that successful marriages are attainable only by certain groups today is misguided. Since 2012, divorce rates have been falling for working-class Americans and Black Americans, too—and the share of kids being raised in married families for these two groups has stabilized. (In fact, the proportion of Black children being raised in a married-parent family rose from 33 percent in 2012 to 39 percent in 2024.) And across both class and racial lines, marriage is linked to greater happiness, household earnings, and wealth for women and men.
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In the past, American society has readily advocated for behaviors that can improve lives and reduce social problems—campaigns against smoking and teen pregnancy are two examples. We should at a minimum strive to ensure that young people have an accurate understanding of marriage today, not one that's outdated—and certainly not one supplied by cranks and zealots.
Marriage is not for everyone—of course it isn't. But men and women who are flying solo—without a spouse—typically report their lives to be less meaningful and more lonely. The share of unmarried men ages 25 to 55 who say they are unhappy in the General Social Survey more than doubled from the late 1990s to the 2020s. That fact alone highlights just how wrong Andrew Tate is about men and marriage.