What approach should social conservatives take to solve the problem of the declining marriage rate? A naive approach would be to just order young people to “Get Married!” without analyzing and defusing the reasons why young people are declining to approach, date and marry like they used to. Most social conservatives go for the naive approach. But which approach really works?

So, let’s focus on men. Why are men staying single? Why aren’t men approaching women, paying for dates, and proposing marriage?

Here’s a short list of some disincentives that men are facing:

• no-fault divorce (alimony, child support, father alienation)
• domestic violence laws assume the man is at at fault
• false accusations to gain child custody
• paternity fraud
• massive student loan debt by women
• national debt / deficit
• lack of accountability for false accusations made by women
• women’s focus on working full-time after having kids means that kids have go to daycare and public schools
• women’s much higher rates of spending on non-essentials
• unrealistic expectations of men caused by social media
• commitment instability caused by past sexual history
• women’s hard swing to the political left

So, again, the response of naive social conservatives is to say “let men fix it”. I was having a conversation with a social conservative who researches marriage, and I asked him how many of these factors he’s considered. He hadn’t considered any, because women good, and men bad. Why would you ask bad men why they are not doing what the good women want? Just tell the bad men what the good women want them to do. And if it doesn’t work, try again. And if it doesn’t work, try again. That’s been the dominant approach by social conservatives since the start of the Sexual Revolution. They just keep trying to make men fix it.

But what if social conservatives decided to try an intelligent, problem-solving solution? Something that a software engineer might think up, that actually engineers a solution over the long-term, by changing the incentives that men face?

Here’s the story from the Daily Caller:

In a pioneering move in 2018, Kentucky passed the first law making joint custody the default in divorce and separation cases.

The common-sense approach to divorce and child custody cases has had a major effect, with the state’s divorce rate dropping by 25% from 2016 to 2023, surpassing the nationwide decrease of 18%, the National Center for Family & Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University found.

Following Kentucky’s lead, Arkansas, West Virginia, Florida, and Missouri enacted similar bills, with about 20 other states considering such legislation, according to the National Parents Organization (NPO).

“There is no law that affects more people other than taxes or traffic. Giving kids equal access to both their parents is just common sense,” Matt Hale, vice chair of NPO, told The Wall Street Journal in its feature on Kentucky’s law.

Hale attributes the decline in divorce rates to the custody law, saying that parents are now more inclined to remain together since shared custody requires couples to work things out and communicate. Hale also shared accounts of couples who chose not to divorce due to the shared custody presumption and later valued that decision.

This is a common-sense solution, as Kentucky’s law does not state that 50/50 custody be blindly granted in every case. Rather, it sets the baseline presumption that, upon divorce, the mom and dad will split custody.

When you make it less attractive for women to initiate divorce, then women divorce less. When women divorce less, men marry more. It’s very simple. Men today do not want to be financially ruined in divorce courts by child support, to pay for children that they don’t even get to see. I think if you added mandatory paternity testing, and removed the ability to make up false accusations that were never investigated by the police, that would be two more good reasons for men to come back to marriage. And that’s how these problems need to be solved. Not by telling men what to do, but by giving men a good deal.