This is the latest data from the American Community Survey data from the Census Bureau.
Over the last few decades, feminists thought that they could redefine many of the core aspects of marriage, and that men would still continue to marry. But the truth is that marriage used to be a pretty fair deal for men, now it just isn’t under the new rules.
Being the legally and socially recognized head of the household.
An expectation of regular sex.
Legal rights to children.
Lifetime commitment.
That you are guaranteed a chaste bride on your wedding night.
Feminism has destroyed all of these facets of marriage. Feminists want marriage to be all about them, and their needs. And they don’t want marriage to put any responsibilities, expectations or obligations on them.
I am pro-marriage, but for me pro-marriage means rolling back the feminist redefinitions of marriage. That’s the only way to get men to be interested in marriage. Today, men are responding to the anti-marriage incentives created by feminists. Feminists offered men free sex without commitment, and they made marriage into a dangerous legal deathtrap. Men aren’t going to take risks like that. Especially when they have lost the authority to lead the home, and the other benefits of marriage for men. It’s a lot of risk, without any of the benefits. It’s a bad deal.
But it’s not just the legal risks, it’s the fact that men can’t afford marriage in a socialist country. Socialism requires higher taxes, and that leaves men with too little to take on the husband and father roles.
When you look at marriage rates in Canada and Europe, you understand that men are even LESS likely to choose marriage when they have to pay over 50% of what they earn in taxes. And so the marriage rate is declining. I think young, unmarried women are excited by the idea of raising taxes in order to get free stuff from government. That makes it unnecessary to marry at all, so they are free to play the field and obey no man. But there comes a point where taxes are so high that men simply can’t affort to take on a wife and multiple children. We are at that point now, and I expect it to spread up to the higher income brackets so that the marriage rate declines even further.
One final reason for men not marrying is because men don’t like secular leftist women. Young people are sliding to the left, and those values and beliefs are UNATTRACTIVE to marriage-minded men. Just because a secular leftist woman is able to get attention and sex from men, it doesn’t mean that she is able to get a lifelong commitment to love her, protect her, provide for her, and so on. No one likes secular leftist women, and no one wants to marry them.
Evidence on parenting by same-sex couples is inadequate.
Evidence suggests children raised by homosexuals are more likely to experience gender and sexual disorders.
Same-sex “marriage” would undercut the norm of sexual fidelity within marriage.
Same-sex “marriage” would further isolate marriage from its procreative purpose.
Same-sex “marriage” would further diminish the expectation of paternal commitment.
Marriages thrive when spouses specialize in gender-typical roles.
Women and marriage domesticate men.
The eleventh one they missed is that a husband’s leadership is beneficial to a woman because it gives her direction and balances her emotional highs and lows. It’s not politically correct to say what women need from men in marriage, but it’s true. Just like men, women have weaknesses that can be corrected and compensated for by the opposite sex. The twelfth one they missed is that same-sex marriage is incompatible with religious liberty, as recent court cases have shown.
Anyway, here are the details on #7:
7. Same-sex “marriage” would further isolate marriage from its procreative purpose.
Traditionally, marriage and procreation have been tightly connected to one another. Indeed, from a sociological perspective, the primary purpose that marriage serves is to secure a mother and father for each child who is born into a society. Now, however, many Westerners see marriage in primarily emotional terms.
Among other things, the danger with this mentality is that it fosters an anti-natalist mindset that fuels population decline, which in turn puts tremendous social, political, and economic strains on the larger society. Same-sex marriage would only further undercut the procreative norm long associated with marriage insofar as it establishes that there is no necessary link between procreation and marriage.
This was spelled out in the Goodridge decision in Massachusetts, where the majority opinion dismissed the procreative meaning of marriage. It is no accident that the countries that have legalized or are considering legalizing same-sex marriage have some of the lowest fertility rates in the world. For instance, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Canada have birthrates that hover around 1.6 children per woman–well below the replacement fertility rate of 2.1.
I chose this one because I wanted to comment.
I think it’s common today for men and women to not put the production and development of children at the center of their marriage plans. They are not working a financial plan to prepare for children. They are not developing the skills they need to mentor and nurture others. They are resentful of any demands placed on them that restrict their freedom. And they want marriage to be about fun and self-fulfillment. This is not compatible with children, however. And that’s the point. The more we redefine marriage to be about adult selfishness – first with no-fault divorce, then with same-sex marriage – the less emphasis there is on the pre-marital preparations for making and raising children.
If you want to know what you should be doing with your life before marriage, then think of the process of having children and raising children. Think of how much it costs, what skills you will need, and how your character has to be trained. Many of the things that you see young people doing these days – binge drinking, hooking up, running up debt, cohabitating, avoiding things that are hard to do – are not preparing their character for the responsibilities, expectations and obligations that people face when they have children.
Suppose you have a friend who is not good at driving a manual transmission car or not good at weight lifting or not good at doing apologetics – are you able to help them do it, or are you incapable of taking responsibility? If you can’t take responsibility for helping an adult, you certainly can’t take responsibility for a child – children are much less capable. Now are you able to say no to doing things for your own happiness? If you are not able to give up your own happiness – and this is a thing that gets easier as you practice more – then you’re liable to look on your duties to your children with resentment – that you are being “manipulated” into it. You don’t suddenly learn how to put up with children just by walking down the aisle at a wedding. It takes training to get good at being generous with your time, money and effort. It takes practice.
In fact, a smart man who is courting a woman would be trying to get her to practice the behaviors of a wife and mother before he marries her. And the same for a smart women who is being courted by a man. For example, a man has to comfortable giving things to the people around him – he can’t be resentful about it. Even when he doesn’t particularly like those people, he has to focus on their needs, think about where he is trying to lead them, and then work a plan to provide for their needs so they get where he wants them to go. If a man doesn’t like the feel of caring for others who may not be grateful – or who may even hate him – then he should take steps to prepare his character to learn to like it. When a little kid says “I hate you!” to his father, who is paying thousands of dollars for him to grow up, it’s not an easy thing. Always being selfish before you marry is not good preparation for what children will demand of you. This is something I struggle with personally – being content to invest in others who turn out to be ungrateful, and even destructive.
So I think this focus on parenting is a wonderful way for people to work backwards from the goal (healthy, happy, successful children) to the interim tasks and required skills. It helps us to get away from thinking that marriage is about us – our happiness, our needs. Unfortunately, not everyone who runs around telling people that they want to get married “some day” is really taking steps to prepare for marriage and parenting right now. Marriage is a commitment to self-sacrificially love another person – however much they change – for the rest of their lives, and to love any children who appear, too. People don’t like to read about marriage and think it through. But just saying “I want to marry someday” is not a proof of preparation for marriage, as the divorce rate attests. To get married, you have to train yourself to think of others, and to do hard things that don’t make you feel “free” or “happy”. There is no path to a successful marriage that does not involve responsibilities, expectations and obligations for husband and wife. It’s not “happily ever after”. It’s hard work!
Have older women succeeded at teaching younger women about love and marriage?
I once dated a woman who had messed up her education, career and finances by following her heart. She confided in me that she had a hatred of “responsibilities, expectations and obligations”. She wanted to be guided by her feelings, moment by moment. Whenever she failed, she would blame others, or claim that the world was just too unpredictable to make good decisions.
She failed, and was unhappy, wishing that grown ups in her life had told her the truth about her bad decisions. And she’s not alone.
Look at this article posted on the UC Berkeley website:
A recent group of studies has found that women’s happiness levels have been dropping steadily over the last few decades, to the point that women now report lower happiness levels than men, a role reversal from the 1970s. Given social improvements in women’s lives over the intervening decades—increased work opportunities, higher salaries, and more reproductive choice, to name a few—these results have surprised more than a few commentators, with everyone from Barbara Ehrenreich to Rush Limbaugh trying to make sense of them.
That hasn’t been an easy task, even for the economists whose study, “The Paradox of Declining Women’s Happiness,” helped uncover this trend. Those economists, Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson, both at the University of Pennsylvania, analyzed data from several large-scale surveys that have tracked the general well-being of Americans and Europeans from as far back as 1972. They found that women’s happiness levels had dropped over time in each survey. To understand why, Wolfers and Stevenson looked at factors which in past research had been linked to unhappiness in women, such as marital status, income, educational level, and number of children. But none of these could account for the shift.
In addition to “increased work opportunities, higher salaries, and more reproductive choice”, women have also “benefited” from preferences in education, in education funding, in the workplace, and especially in the courts. They get favorable treatment in the criminal courts as well as in the divorce courts. They have been given everything they asked for that they felt would make them happier, and all of it (once obtained) has worked to make them less happy. The biggest part of their unhappiness problem is how their learned selfishness makes them incapable of – and undeserving of – commitment. The declining marriage rate is made worse by disincentives created for men to marry and have children when they are given sex for free, are heavily taxed, regulated by government bullies, and risk being financially raped by divorce.
Far-left and far-right defenders of marriage agree that it’s a “mystery” why women are so unhappy. After all, they say, third wave feminism has brought women nothing but fairness. We have to take it as a given, and solve the problem of women’s declining happiness some other way. Radical feminism can’t be rolled back.
Well, my bossy women advisors are always telling me that I should be positive and tell women how to do better. So I will.
In my own life, I had to escape the effects of growing up in a bad family, in a bad city, in a bad country. Everything I was told was a lie, and would have destroyed me if I had listened to it. In fact, it did destroy my brother. He did listen to it. He listened to our parents. He listened to the worthless public school teachers. He listened to the popular songs. He watched the popular movies. And most of all, he did what his friends told him to do. Don’t you be like him. What you need to do is resist the culture, and focus on doing things in ways that work. You need to make sure that your day-to-day decision-making gets you where you want to be.
The first and most important priority is to get an objective moral standard that can be used to judge the lies that are being told to you. That standard is in the Bible, and it has the great advantage of having been given to you by the same person who designed the universe, and you. Not only can you use it to judge the liars, keeping them and their lies at a distance, but it helps you to stop making mistakes yourself. The most important lesson I learned from the moral law was to embrace chastity, and not to waste my time and money pursuing casual sex relationships with godless women for “fun” or “self-esteem”. Having to play the fool for godless women in order to get sex is degrading for men, and destroys the natural leadership role that men have in moral and spiritual matters. It’s much better to leave bad women alone, and pay attention only to the ones who are interested in being led to achieve things that really matter. I think that raising influential effective Christian children, apologetics on campus, in-house apologetics discussion, and political engagement are really important.
Secondly, the classics. Instead of consuming books, music and visual entertainment made by secular leftists, turn instead to the classics and non-fiction. The best things to consume are evidential apologetics, economics, military history and the classics. Evidential apologetics teaches you to become focused on truth. Free market economics teaches you how the world works. Military history teaches you gratitude and humility. You can undo the nonsense that you learned about men, women and relationships simply by learning the lessons about human nature found in the classics – Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, etc.
Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.
If all your friends on social media are miserable failures in their relationships, lacking chastity, sobriety, charity and unselfishness, then cut them off so that they don’t drag you down with them.
The most common case I see is Christian-raised women abandoning their faith in high school or college because they would rather be liked by non-Christians than defend their faith and accept the unpopularity and exclusion that results. They shack up with atheist men, and give away their best years to them. They have no moral standard that would allow them to reject those men, when those men feel so good to them. And their “friends” support them in that. Don’t keep “friends” who only want to drag you down into the pit with them. Accept that it is normal to make judgments. Accept that it is normal to have enemies. Learn how to disagree with non-Christians in a way that is supported by reason and evidence. Don’t let godless people tell you what you should want. Don’t try to fit in with them.
WINTERY KNIGHT 