Is Marriage Actually Worth It? - Brad Wilcox

Brad Wilcox is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia and Director of the National Marriage Project. Many online discussions are casting doubt on the role of marriage. Is it actually a bad deal for men and women? Is it dangerous for people to get into? However, what does the evidence actually suggest, especially in the face of widespread scepticism about the institution of marriage? Expect to learn if marriage is a terrible deal for men in the modern era, the correlation between your marital status and financial status, what happens to men and women’s bodies after they get married, why you shouldn’t be scared as a man or woman if you want to get married, the most shocking statistics Brad has come across on marriage and much more... - 00:00 Is Marriage a Bad Deal for Men & Women? 04:29 Causes of Society’s Lack of Marriage 07:40 What Normal People Are Saying About Marriage 12:07 Is Marriage a Bad Deal Financially? 18:48 Does the Happiness of Marriage Outweigh the Sacrifices? 30:42 The Mimetic Nature of Marriage 38:48 The Role of Desiring Children in Marriage 43:23 Being Raised by Married Parents 46:31 How Political Affiliations Impact Marriage 55:19 Are Soulmates a Real Thing? 1:01:44 The Importance of Male Income in Marriage 1:04:02 Brad’s Advice to His Sons 1:09:59 Is the Manosphere Getting Anything Right? 1:12:14 Dating & Marriage Advice for Women 1:15:16 Where to Find Brad - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  What do you think about people on the internet who say that marriage is a terrible deal for men and women?

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, Chris, you know, I've been sort of playing the marriage porn for a long time and it's primarily been kind of a critiquing folks on the left and the mainstream media. As you know, I've kind of gone after folks at Bloomberg and New York Times and elsewhere. What's kind of new is we're getting all these voices from the online right, from the red pill right, you know, like Andrew Tate and Pearl Davis, who are, you know, saying things like in Pearl's words, that marriage is a death sentence for men, or, you know, in Andrew Tate's words, that basically there's no return, you know, on marriage, there's zero advantages, his terminology, you know, for, from men when it comes to getting married.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  So we're kind of getting it now from the left and the right here. And I think it's in some ways emblematic of the difficulties that, of course, comes primarily from the women on the left and primarily in the men on the right. And it's partly kind of a reflection of the difficulties that a lot of younger adults are facing in finding, you know, a spouse, finding a partner who would be worthy of marriage. And so that's probably kind of an expression of frustration. But I think it also kind of conveys what I call kind of the Midas mindset. And that's this idea that what really matters in life is work, it's money, it's kind of building your own brand. And I think in different ways, these folks too are kind of, you know, propagating this

• 1:35Speaker 01

  Midas mindset because, you know, they think that, that real action is where, you know, your work is at, you know, where your, your brand is at, where your bank account's at.

• 1:47Chris Williamson?

  You definitely see this from the left, women on the left, in a perhaps surprising way that you wouldn't have done 50 years ago, whereby it is all about financial security and being a boss bitch and being independent and I don't need no man. And, you know, if he comes to me, fine, but I'm not going to go looking for him. So that seems to be the equivalent, that odd horseshoe theory where some elements of the right and some elements of the left end up kind of saying very similar talking points, even though they don't agree on everything else.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, what's striking is sort of how similar their message is. I mean, they're kind of encouraging women and men separately to kind of stay free of family encumbrances, stay free of marriage and to, you know, to pursue individualism, to pursue money, pursue career in different ways. And that that's sort of the pathway towards fulfillment, when in fact, the data lead us obviously in a very different direction.

• 2:40Chris Williamson?

  What is happening with current marriage rates? Give me the 30,000 foot view.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think that's certainly one of the, one of the, the pieces of bad news that I convey in the book. That is that the marriage rates come down about 65%. What we're seeing now in the adult population is just under 50% of folks are married. So we're kind of, you know, that's a, that's a new record or new low. And we're projecting-

• 3:03Chris Williamson?

  Where would that have been if it's at 50% now or just under? Where would that have been 30 years ago, 50 years ago, whatever?

• 3:10Speaker 01

  75%, you know, we're talking like, you know, the, the late 60s, early 70s, basically. So, um, so that's obviously a big change in recent decades. And then we're also projecting to, um, you know, between 80, 90% of folks would have been getting married, you know, coming of age, um, in, you know, in the, in the 70s, you know, give or take. Whereas today, we're projecting that probably more than one in four young adults, you know, in their 20s today will never get married. This is kind of record demographic territory that, that we're entering into. And this means there can be a lot of kind of permanent bachelors and permanent bachelorettes, at least when it comes to sort of having put a ring on it in, in this culture today.

• 3:55Chris Williamson?

  What is driving this? We've talked about, you know, some cultural forces that are going on and some memes and some movements and stuff like that. But from my position, they usually seem to be in reaction. It's a cope. Not always. There are people who genuinely believe these things, but there's a lot of people retreating into their inner citadels of, I have struggled to make this work. Therefore, this is the philosophy that I find. And if what you say is correct, that you're going to have more people who are potentially participants of this new party than people who aren't, that's going to allow it to proliferate more and get more and more popular. But like structurally, what's happening? What are the other big dynamics that are causing this increase in, uh, lack of marriage?

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think, you know, obviously, there's an economic story here. On the one hand, as a society, we've kind of were very affluent, so we don't depend upon marriage, you know, economically like we did in earlier centuries. That's that's part of the story. At the same time, the economy has kind of moved in directions that have made a whole class of men less economically valuable, less needed in today's world, and so they're less attractive as as husbands. They're more likely to get divorced if they do end up married down the road. So I think the fact that men who are not kind of oriented towards the information economy are struggling more is part of the economic story. When it comes to policies, a lot of our policies end up kind of penalizing marriage unwittingly, things like Medicaid, for instance.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  I've talked to, just recently here in Charlottesville, I talked to a, you know, we were having a marriage event at a restaurant, and so one of the waitresses was kind of engaging me afterwards, and she was kind of saying, well, yeah, she and her husband are together, but they're not legally married. They've got two kids. And I'm like, what's the story? Well, you know, she gets her insurance through Medicaid, and were they to get married, they'd move above that threshold and lose access to Medicaid for her and for her two, her two kids. So there's ways in which our public policies unintentionally penalize marriage culturally. I think, obviously, we've seen a big shift towards individualism since the late 1960s that have, you know, made us think more about ourselves and less about others, and that plays into marriage and family in obvious ways.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  We've also seen a parallel shift away from religion, which is also a big factor, I think, in the decline of marriage, since religion is a big predictor both of getting married and staying married and having children.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  And then I think there's just been this kind of, what I just described earlier, is a kind of a Midas mindset, where I think, in part, the rise of the internet, the rise of smartphones, urbanization as well. There's a lot of good work that's been done on this in in in Asia, from psychologists in Asia, kind of just basically have made people focus a lot more on... On status and on kind of their prospects sort of in the mating sector, but less on kind of like actually putting a ring on it and transitioning into, you know, having kids and having a family. So there's a kind of arrested, it's not adolescence so much as kind of an arrested sort of young adulthood,

• 7:05Speaker 01

  where people, you know, are just focusing on that sort of 20 something stage of life and not transitioning into into marriage and parenthood. And that's also, I think, and that's just kind of magnified, you know, accelerated by the way in which technology is allowing people to kind of, you know, live the life, the online life, you know, Instagram life. And all the kind of, you know, I'd say kind of transient and short term values that are magnified on platforms like Instagram and now TikTok too.

• 7:40Chris Williamson?

  What are the self reports saying? You know, this is your assessment, looking at the data with your biases and all the rest of it.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Sure, right.

• 7:48Chris Williamson?

  What what are people saying when they are asked by psychologists and sociologists? Why are you not yet married? Why don't you want to get married if you don't want to get married? What's the word on the ground?

• 8:01Speaker 01

  Well, there certainly are people who are saying, you know, that they're, they're, they're, they're not ready for marriage yet. They're not ready to kind of settle down. They're, you know, enjoying their 20 something years, having fun. They're trying to get their job, their career kind of launched successfully. They think there's some kind of obstacle, you know, between being married and being focused on, you know, on their work. People on the lower income strata, like I mentioned, some of them will talk about the way in which public policy penalizes marriage.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  A lot of folks say it's hard to meet someone who kind of meets their standards, both in terms of, you know, having their stuff together. A lot of women say that men in their lives, you know, aren't sufficiently,

• 8:44Speaker 01

  you know, grown up, don't have that, that's a clear sense of mission and direction, that kind of capacity to kind of, you know, care for themselves and care for others.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  You know, there are men who would report to you that the women of lives are too materialistic. They're looking for, you know, um, just a breadwinner or provider, but not someone who's going to really be a partner to them. So there's just a whole range of different reasons that you hear from people when it comes to why they're either not able to marry or why marriage is not right now appealing to them, or why marriage is not even on their their longer term horizon.

• 9:23Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. And what about divorce rates? What's the, what's the insight there?

• 9:27Speaker 01

  Well, divorce has come. So the statistic people sort of think is still, you know, true is that they think that one in two marriages today will end in divorce. But what we actually see in the research is it's probably closer to around forty percent, a little bit north of forty percent of marriages wind in divorce today. The divorce rates come down since nineteen eighty by about forty percent. It rose dramatically from the late sixties to nineteen eighty, you know, basically more than doubled in that era. So I think what's important for people to realize is that sort of, um, all the tumult that we saw with the divorce revolution of nineteen seventies and early eighties has kind of settled down.

• 10:05Chris Williamson?

  But that's in line with decreasing rates of marriage.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 10:10Chris Williamson?

  So we have a selection effect going on here.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Correct. So the kinds of people today who are getting married are more educated, they're more affluent, and they're relatively more religious. They're also in a country like the US, maybe a country too, like the UK. They're more likely to have, you know, the immigrants, you know, non-natives, right? So, um, in my book, I talk about how Asian Americans are disproportionately married in the US. And we've seen a lot of immigrants coming from Asia, obviously in recent decades, for instance. And they're more likely to be married than native born Americans, but just in general immigrants are more likely to be married in the US than native born Americans are as well.

• 10:47Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Yeah, that is interesting. So recent years have seen a rise in unpartnered Americans as well, especially young men. Thirty-four percent of young women between eighteen, twenty-nine are single, sixty-three percent of young men in that same age bracket are also single. So it's not just a no marriage culture, it's a no dating culture as well.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  So we have seen dramatic declines in dating. Well, that statistic that you mentioned has been challenged by my colleague Nick Wolfram. He thinks that there's a gap between, you know, young women and young men there, but it's not quite that. Or young men are more likely to be single, but it's not quite that that dramatic. But still, it is the case that we're seeing kind of record shares of young adults who have not gotten married. Higher among young men, obviously, than young women, because men tend to marry guys who are a bit older than they are. And we have seen evidence from people like Jean Twenge that dating is is down. And so I talk about kind of like the closing of the American heart unfolding where again, we're seeing, you know, for twenty somethings, a record share of them projected never to marry more than more than one in four.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  And then when it comes to fertility, we think that that there'll be, you know, also kind of continued declines in infertility in the US as well.

• 12:08Chris Williamson?

  One of the biggest memes, one of the most common memes that you hear about on the internet, especially for men, but also in some regards for women, given that they're socioeconomically more viable on their own now, is that marriage is a bad deal financially. What what does the data actually say?

• 12:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it was striking that, you know, when I was finishing up this book, Bloomberg had a, you know, an article that said, women who get single and don't have kids are getting richer. And it kind of claimed that, you know, women who are kind of foregoing marriage and motherhood were, you know, better off than women who are married. And that's that's not not true. What we do see is that women who are married are markedly more likely to be well off. And they're also much less likely to be poor. So they're about eighty percent less likely to be poor, even controlling for things like, you know, race and age and education. And then they have about 10 times the assets heading into retirement, you know,

• 13:07Speaker 01

  in their 50s compared to their their single female peers. So and the story for for men is is is pretty similar. It comes to assets in one's 50s. And then men earn between sort of 10 and 25% more as married men than their their single peers. Now, part of that's a selection effect where the kinds of men who are getting married are more likely to have the kind of ethic that would lead to financial success. We also see evidence though, too, from twin studies that men who are who are married are doing better financially than than their twin who is not married. So it's pretty rigorous evidence that something about marriage

• 13:52Speaker 01

  per se is associated with men flourishing financially.

• 13:57Chris Williamson?

  What do you think's the mechanism?

• 13:59Speaker 01

  So what actually a colleague of mine here at UVA found was that men who are married are less likely to get fired, for instance, even controlling for things like, you know, race and age and education. She also found, too, that men who are married are less likely to quit a job without having first found a replacement job, whereas single guys are just more likely to say, you know, that's it. I've had it. I'm out of here. And then they're unemployed and struggling to find a job. So I think being married just makes guys more prudent about their approach to, you know, their approach to to finding work.

• 14:36Chris Williamson?

  What do you say to the guys that have serious concerns, getting married is a huge risk because she's going to leave me and take half of everything that I own and I'm going to be stuck paying either her life or child support or something for the rest of my life. Prenups are not even worth the paper that they're written on. You know, I see a lot of this on in comment sections and on the internet. What's the truth and what's your take on it?

• 15:09Speaker 01

  Well, I think the tough thing about this, right, is it's there's a kind of mindset thing, which I'm sure you're familiar with, kind of in a metaverse, like, and so if your mindset is kind of revolving around fear, if you're thinking about the D word divorce, you know, heading into marriage, in your marriage, um, you know, you're more likely to end up getting divorced, right? So if you get a prenup, you know, my own book indicates that folks who have prenups have lower marital happiness and they're more likely to be, you know, thinking that divorce is, um, is on the horizon. So I, it's one of those things where like, if you have more of an all in mindset, you know, like I am fully in and, and you obviously marry someone who shares that,

• 15:51Speaker 01

  that mindset where you're not talking about divorce, you're not thinking about divorce, you don't really see it as an option, you're much more likely to be not just avoiding divorce court, but flourishing in your marriage because you're going to have a greater, you know, foundation of security and trust in your marriage. Um, but beyond that, it's, it's worth pointing out, as I do in the book, that there are ways in which it looks like people can kind of solidify their marriage and reduce their risk of divorce. So we see, for instance, is that people who go on regular date nights, um, over one study had about 25% less, uh, risk of getting divorced. Um, people who are religious, especially who attend church together are between

• 16:32Speaker 01

  30 and 50% less likely to get divorced. Um, folks who don't commit infidelity are markedly less likely to get divorced. But my, my point simply is that there are things you can kind of do, right? And if you're not religious, you know, the thing I would say is, is, um, you know, surround yourself with couples who are stably married. We know from the work of, um, Nicholas Christakis at Yale, for instance, that if your sister gets divorced,

• 17:00Speaker 01

  If your best friend gets divorced in the face of kind of, you know, ordinary marital difficulties that, you know, most of us have if we've been married for five, 10, 15, 20 years, whatever, your odds of divorce, you know, skyrocket. But if your sister, you know, is stably married and has kind of navigated the inevitable challenges associated with married life, if your best friend has, you know, stably, remained stably married and navigated those challenges successfully, your odds of getting divorced, you know, go way down. So there's a birds of a feather flock together thing here, right, Chris? And so you need to be really, I think, deliberate once you're married or as you're heading into marriage about picking friends who are, you know, with you and for you in your marriage

• 17:45Speaker 01

  and who are kind of, you know,

• 17:48Speaker 01

  living the kinds of lives that lend themselves to stable families. So if you surround yourself in, you know, or surround yourself in networks that are more family friendly, that's also a protective factor as well.

• 18:01Chris Williamson?

  Pick your couples' date night partners carefully then is the, is the advice.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you know, we, we've had like, you know, Governor Mark Sanford, right? You know, that Republican governor in South Carolina, you know, he, he, he was hiking the Appalachian Trail was the story he gave to one journalist, right? Well, it turns out he was in, in South America, ramencing a woman who wasn't his wife because he and his buddies would go every year on some kind of international trip that was just kind of crazy. And so I think in Mark Sanford's case, part of the reason that he ended up divorced was he, he wasn't good about picking friends who were, you know, gonna be kind of leading him down the, the best path marriage wise.

• 18:46Chris Williamson?

  So the obvious, I guess, criticism or, or question here that gets opened up is, why should I, as a man or a woman, let go of these things that make me happy? I want to go to South America with my boys. I don't want to spend my time playing fucking backgammon or Scrabble or charades with this bunch of other couples. I don't want to restrict my freedom and my opportunities to choose what I want, to sleep with, who I want to go where I want to work, how I want to leave a job when I want. All of these things sound like restrictions on my freedoms. What's in it for me? Why should I, if I'm so happy doing all of these things?

• 19:32Chris Williamson?

  Why, like, what about happiness? What are the happiest people from a relationship status perspective?

• 19:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think it's important just to kind of basically stress that, yeah, getting married does mean taking options off the table, both in terms of romantic partners, in terms of your free time. You know, it does mean you're sacrificing a lot in terms of your freedom. But the point that I would make is that we are social animals. That's Aristotle's term. We're hardwired to connect, right? And so it ends up being the case that friendships and family relationships are the things that are most important for our sense of meaning, purpose, happiness. And there's just no question today that married men and women, especially married fathers and married mothers, are the happiest folks out there in the prime of life. I'm looking at folks 18 to 55.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  And, you know, finding that when it comes to reports of being kind of very happy with your life, that both women and men who are married moms and dads are about twice as likely to be very happy with their lives compared to their single and childless peers. So that's a pretty big difference. And then when it comes to kind of arrangement indicators from money to career success to sexual frequency,

• 20:52Speaker 01

  to religious attendance, to self-rated health, these are all things that predict happiness, you know, for ordinary Americans and pretty powerfully so. But none of those factors, Chris, kind of compares to a good marriage. Women and men who are happily married are about 545% more likely say that they're very happy with their lives. And as I've looked at this data set called the GSS, the General Social Survey, it's kind of like the gold standard for, you know, social attitudes and behaviors in the US. I can't find any variable in the GSS that predicts global life satisfaction like a good marriage. And when I've kind of mentioned that statistic, the pushback that I get from, you know, more progressive academics is, well, yeah, it's a selection effect, Brad.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  The kinds of women and men who are happy. Are going to be happily married. But my response to that is, well, you would expect then that you would see kind of a similar story playing out for, you know, like a career satisfaction indicator in the G S S. And while it's true that people who are, you know, happy with their jobs are also happy with their lives. Again, there's no factor that predicts happiness in the G S S, um, you know, like a good marriage. We see other data sets too, you know, from Harvard, for instance, um, tracking men longitudinally, you know, um, that come to kind of similar conclusions as well. So I think it's just kind of important to underline that, yes, marriage requires sacrifices, lots of them.

• 22:22Speaker 01

  Um, but there are major returns on, on that investment for most folks. And the final piece I would say about the happiness story is that I looked at generosity in marriage a number of years ago. And what I found was that having a spouse, a husband or wife who was generous towards you boosted, you know, your happiness in the marriage in ways that'd be, I think, you know, expected. But being generous towards your wife, generous towards your husband, was an even better predictor of your happiness in the marriage. And again, if that's one of the best predictors of happiness overall, it's, I think, suggests to us that kind of living for others, um, as long as you make a good choice, and that's

• 23:03Speaker 01

  always a huge caveat, um, living for your spouse, living for your kids, uh, living for your kin and living for your friends to an important extent. These are the things, obviously, that gives our lives meaning, direction, purpose, and a sense of happiness. And living for ourselves, I think, often ends up making us miserable.

• 23:21Chris Williamson?

  One of the things that people who are reticent about getting married or concerned about it have the same way as the financial concern is, well, I'm rolling the dice. You know, a, um, At least if I'm single, my happiness lies exclusively in the power of my own hands. Whereas if I get into a marriage, I am now, my happiness is contingent on this other person. And we try and do our best to screen whoever it is and work out how crazy or not crazy they might be. But we, there is a non-zero chance that we get that wrong. And that now means that I have sacrificed, um, okay, singletonness for unhappy marriedness.

• 24:03Chris Williamson?

  Rolling that dice, that that sort of roulette spin is, it causes trepidation for people.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, Chris, I think it's a legitimate concern. And as, as we discussed before, about 40% of folks getting married today will get divorced. So it's, it's, it is a major, I think, concern. But I think there is, um, you know, there are two other things that I would say to, to that kind of person. Number one is that nothing in life worth having, you know, I think, doesn't require a measure of risk. And, uh, you know, potential for real failure in terms of whether it's professional success, whether it's, you know, being a great athlete, whatever it might be, all these things that, you know, I think, tend to lend our lives a sense of meaning, direction and happiness often require risk. And that's true, I think, for love and marriage as well.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  The other thing that I would say too, is that, um, even when marriages fail, and I certainly have, you know, friends whose marriages have failed, both women and men.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  What I also see though is oftentimes they have kids. And, and in the immediate aftermath of divorce, that can be extraordinarily difficult, both for them and for their children. But as they kind of move into their, you know, 50s and 60s and 70s, you know, if, if they're, deliberate about kind of continuing to be a good father, a good mother. You know, these friends that might have gotten divorced derive a tremendous sense of meaning and satisfaction from their relationship, um, relationships to with their, with their kids and then their grandkids. So that's also, I think, can be a kind of a consolation for folks who have gotten divorced. And actually, one more thing I would add too, is that, again, I think there are,

• 25:47Speaker 01

  you know, I talk about in the book, four groups of folks who have much, um, greater odds of, of being kind of both happily married and for the most part, stably married. And those groups are Asian Americans. They are religious Americans, they're college educated Americans, and they're conservative Americans. And so there are things that, again, you can kind of do both as a spouse and in terms of just being cognizant of the communities where you're

• 26:17Chris Williamson?

  Married and Asian, is that your advice?

• 26:19Speaker 01

  No, I'm just saying, the point I would make about the Asian finding is that there are certain kinds of values and certain kinds of communities, right? And so, you know, what Asians have is, among other things, like a keen recognition oftentimes of how much marriage matters for their kids. And so that sort of conditions how they deal with marital difficulties and challenges, right? They tend to be surrounded by kin who are stably married. They often are kind of taking advice from kin about who to marry, especially obviously from Indian contexts, right? So if you're not Asian, you can kind of take some lessons there too for your, you know, for your own marital path.

• 27:02Chris Williamson?

  How, all of that data that you've just come up with there to do with happiness and marital status, how robust is it? Are we going to find out that this is replication crisis in 10 years' time? Because that's obviously, oh, well, that data doesn't seem to be sufficiently this or that or the other. How much are you able to bet that that's accurate and correct?

• 27:22Speaker 01

  Well, I think when it comes to things like marital stability, there's just no, I mean, I've looked at a lot of data sets when it comes to looking at the role of ethnicity.

• 27:31Chris Williamson?

  No, no, no, sorry. The relationship between married, whether or not you are married or single, and your happiness in life and your life outcome satisfaction?

• 27:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, again, lots of data sets, you know, the GSS, the American Family Survey, you know, Midas, there are lots of data sets that show that there's a strong association. Now, the question is whether or not it's causal. I think that's where the debate comes. There's just no question that folks who are married are more likely to say that they're satisfied with their lives, they're putting more meaningful lives and less loneliness. And just, you know, in England, the US, Europe, it's, you know, it's definitely a common story.

• 28:15Chris Williamson?

  How does this relationship between marital status and life satisfaction, happiness, loneliness, how does that change across time and with age?

• 28:28Speaker 01

  So I think the best story that I saw, the best study on this that I saw was actually from Britain where you are from. And I just, what it suggested was a kind of like the biggest, there's, there's obviously there's a honeymoon kind of premium where people when they're first married, they enjoy kind of, especially kind of large premiums when it comes to happiness. But this particular study from the UK, which is kind of tracking women and men over time, and there's kind of like a midlife piece where the the premium was biggest for folks kind of in in midlife, I think in their 40s and 50s. That's, I think, a part too, because often there are challenges associated with raising kids, with, you know, changes in your, obviously, your health, you know, your, your, people are becoming aware of their mortality,

• 29:14Speaker 01

  career changes, all that kind of stuff is all kind of coming out, you know, in your 50s oftentimes. And so to have like, you know, the benefit of a co-pilot, I think, can be really valuable for folks.

• 29:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there's this strange smile shaped graph to happiness and life satisfaction. So for the people that are just listening, if you imagine, it's not a particularly smooth smile, it's more like a Joker, a Joker smile. But if you had the beginning of life on the, I think it's probably like 13 or 16 or something on the left, and then you've got 80 on the right. And it does seem to really dip down, you know, 40s, basically, most of your 40s seems to be pretty rough. And then it kind of picks, picks back up through your 50s. I think I'm right in saying, there's at least some data that suggests the single biggest risk of suicide, suicidality

• 30:03Chris Williamson?

  are men aged 40 to 45. It's this very particular demographic of men. So it's specifically again for men, I'm going to guess that being married is prophylactic against this period of lower mood.

• 30:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, and one of the biggest factors predicting both suicide and more broadly deaths of despair for men is marriage. So married guys are much less likely to end up, you know, dying from drinking or drugs or suicide more directly, right?

• 30:34Chris Williamson?

  What about divorced guys, though?

• 30:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, they have a higher risk of all those bad things as well. Definitely.

• 30:42Chris Williamson?

  So again, we're talking about this. It seems like a bit of a theme. It's this risk reward ratio, I think that a lot of people are looking at. You sort of hinted at something earlier on with the stat around if your sister or your best friend gets divorced, then the likelihood of you getting divorced goes up too. There is definitely this sort of memetic thing that's going on. I think motherhood, a lot of motherhood can be laid at the feet of this. If you are not around mothers, you don't see the joy that motherhood brings to mothers. Therefore, what do you see? Well, you see what everyone else sees, which is Instagram, which is a trip to Bali and brunch with the girls and wearing cute heels and not getting stretch marks and all the rest of the things. So you you kind of absorb

• 31:27Chris Williamson?

  the aggregate culture as opposed to the micro culture, because the aggregate culture doesn't optimize for like things that aren't flashy and easily displayed on the internet. And I think that there is that you must have thought of this too, this sort of memetic nature of the R naught number of marriage being either above or below one, based on how many people are getting married at the moment.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I think definitely this goes back to kind of the power of the smartphone, social media and the internet. And I think one reason we have, you know, seen, you know, marriage come down and fertility come down in recent years is that people don't kind of fully appreciate how much, you know, putting a ring on it can can matter in positive ways. So there was a study done recently that was sort of was suggesting that today, a lot of folks think that, yeah, actually, men benefit from marriage, but women do not. And when you look at the happiness, you know, story in the general social survey. What you see basically is that, as I, as I mentioned before, married moms are twice as likely

• 32:34Speaker 01

  to be, um, you know, very happy as a single and childless women. Um, what you see in, you know, basically different data sets is that 60% of married moms see that their lives are meaningful most or all the time compared to only 36% of single and childless women. Um, they're also much more likely to see that they're lonely, right? So when it comes to things like meaning, loneliness and happiness, what you're seeing on Instagram or TikTok doesn't correspond to what we see in representative population surveys of men and, and women.

• 33:10Chris Williamson?

  But it, it is difficult to convey that in a 280 character tweet or in a cool TikTok video. And there's this interesting trade off between happiness, pleasure and meaning and satisfaction in some ways that it's very difficult to portray meaning and life satisfaction through a cool Instagram post. It's pretty easy to show pleasure and happiness through that, or at least present pleasure and happiness through that. So yeah, it's a, in that regard, I think anything, and this is anything that's difficult, um, anything which is a little bit more subtle, you know, if, if someone can get the gains of appearing to have the

• 33:53Chris Williamson?

  thing without having to do the hard work of getting the thing, they're going to optimize for that. It's.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Right. And that's the problem with being online too much, right, Chris? Obviously, that, you know, there's some work done by a famous psychologist at Toronto, um, and I'm forgetting his name right now, but it's sort of just basically talking about how, um, folks who are kind of experiencing both a lot of suffering, which wouldn't surprise us, but also like virtually no suffering are the worst off. And folks who kind of experience some kind of that middle range of suffering are actually the best off. They're like the most emotionally resilient, kind of the best, you know, spirit. So we're actually, we're built to some extent, right? To experience some degree of, of pain, some degree of, of,

• 34:41Speaker 01

  uh, you know, of suffering, some drama in our lives. And if all you're doing is kind of, you know, um, eating well, drinking well, you know, and spending all your day on, on, on this device, you know.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  Doesn't actually end up well for you longer term is the point.

• 35:01Chris Williamson?

  How does being married change or impact mental and physical health?

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Well, um, yeah, in terms of things like depression and anxiety tend to go down. Happiness goes up. As I said before, loneliness goes down. When it comes to physical health, there the story is a little bit more complicated. On one indicator in particular, women and men who are married do worse. And that is their weight.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  When you're married, you're off the market and you're, you know, you're kind of be eating it. Maybe eating at home more and whatever maybe snacking more, et cetera. So you're not, you're not kind of like making that same effort to, you know, to keep the pounds off. And so we do see that's why, but generally speaking, folks who are married are doing better health wise. For instance, space of looking at

• 35:53Speaker 01

  indicate that people are more likely to recover and, and do okay in the wake of, you know, some kind of cancer diagnosis. If you have parents, older parents, um, been to the hospital, you know, um, you see that oftentimes that spouse is really kind of working the, the nurses and doctors in ways that tend to redound to the benefit of, you know, her, her husband or his wife. So there's just no question that folks who are married, um, do better on the vast majority of health outcomes and live longer, especially true for guys. And they think it's

• 36:30Chris Williamson?

  What's the, tell me the stats then?

• 36:32Speaker 01

  Eight, nine years is what I've, what I've read and, um, and work done by Linda Wade and Maggie Gallagher. You know, that men who are stably married live in eight to nine years longer than their peers who don't get married or who get divorced. So, um, and women who, who are married live longer too, but they don't enjoy the same kind of, of premium as married men do. That's a part we think too, because, you know, men who are, are single are just much more likely to, um, you know, do crazy things like ride motorcycles, getting fights in, in bars on a Friday or Saturday night. You know, what have you. So, um, men are just more prone to engaging the kinds of risky behaviors

• 37:16Speaker 01

  that put them at risk of an earlier death. But married men tend to steer clear of a lot of those behaviors.

• 37:21Chris Williamson?

  And there must be a mediating effect of loneliness here as well. I had Robin Dunbar on the show a while ago, and he was talking about this inner circle. He says that you can keep around about five friends in the inner circle, but a relationship takes up two of those five slots. So if you have a partner, a significant other, you've maybe only got space for three other people. But the most common answer at the moment when people are asked, how many close friends do you have to call on in emergency is zero. That's not the average, but it's the most common. It's more common than any other number is zero. I think the number of men who say that they have no close friends tripled, no, five Xed

• 38:00Chris Williamson?

  from 3% to 15% from 1990 to 2020. So, you know, in the wake of this atomized, individualized, bleep, bleep, Cyberpunk 2077 hellscape, having one person that's always going to be in your boat with you rowing seems like a pretty good fallback.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. I mean, there's, you know, there's certainly been sociologists and psychologists who want to sort of talk up the virtues of living single. And obviously, not everyone who's single is doing badly. Plenty of folks are doing great. And there are plenty of folks who are married who are miserable. But on average, I think that's because we're hardwired to connect. People who are married are more likely to be, to be flourishing. And that's, you know, that's sort of the average story.

• 38:46Chris Williamson?

  What role does wanting kids have in encouraging people to get married? Have you been able to pass out someone early on knows that they want kids, therefore they get married in order to be able to have kids? Is that like a predictor?

• 39:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we do see today in a more secular world, people are less motivated to kind of get married, you know, just for religious reasons or to kind of, you know, legitimize their relationship, you know, in terms of living together, whatnot. So I think once they begin to think about having kids, they're more likely to think about doing that in the context of marriage, wanting to kind of give their kids the gift of married parents. And we see even, you know, in Northern Europe where marriage is sort of much more optional, that after, either after the first child or, you know, before the first kid, you know, as folks kind of Um. Think about parenthood or they want to kind of give their kids that, you know,

• 39:42Speaker 01

  that experience of married parents, um, you know, they'll get married. So I think there's still a way in which people who are kind of more child centered, um, think about marriages as the ideal place to bear and rear kids. And of course they're right. There's just no question that kids are more likely to be benefiting uh when their parents are married than kids who are in other, um, you know, other situations.

• 40:09Chris Williamson?

  What impact do kids have on marriage, marriage success and then on happiness as well?

• 40:17Speaker 01

  So, um, there's no question that, um, kind of having a baby is a hugely stressful thing for couples. Um, and so you do see marital quality dip, especially off, you know, after the first child comes along. Um, but I think what often happens is that kind of couples reach a kind of equilibrium, you know, some six months, year, whatever it might be after the, you know, the baby comes and they begin to adjust to this new, um, this new creature and this new reality. Now, I think this, this adjustment can be harder for people who've spent a very long time living without children, um, because kids do take a lot of time and energy and effort and, you know, they can be obviously

• 41:02Speaker 01

  extremely difficult and frustrating in different ways. So I think, um, the transition to parenthood is certainly a challenge. Um, but what's interesting though, Chris, is that there was a lot of research before kind of 2000 that indicated that parents were less happy than their childless peers. And since 2000, we've seen that relationship switch. So that parents today are happier than childless adults.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  And of course, no group of parents are happier than married parents. So again, you kind of look, when you look at the general social survey, what you find is that the happiest group of women and men, particularly kind of in midlife and sort of thirties, forties, fifties are married parents. And I think what's happening here in part might be that childless adults have fewer of those sort of resources, social resources or connections, you know, school connections, sports connections for folks who are religious, religious connections that tend to flow from being a parent. So I have a lot of kids and my days are often very busy and, you know,

• 42:15Speaker 01

  I can be stressed out, but I'm never lonely, you know, I, I'm going to a, you know, basketball practice, I'm dropping off kids at school in the morning, you know, going to church with, with a family on Sunday morning, you know, so there's all this social stuff happening. I'm saying sociologists, that's, that's worth kind of noting. And my peers who are single and childless, you know, they don't have those child-related activities. And then when it comes to just kind of like free time too, like you just, you can't spend, you know, too much time on a device. If you're halfway decent husband, wife, father, mother, right? So I think that's also-

• 42:52Chris Williamson?

  So you're saying that, that getting married or having kids is a anti-phone use technology?

• 42:59Speaker 01

  Totally, totally saying that. I think so. I think, you know, the rise of smartphones and screens in the last, you know, decade or so, I think maybe, and I haven't, I, I need to, I haven't seen any really good evidence on this, but my hypothesis is that, you know, married parents may be less likely to get sort of sucked down that electronic rabbit hole than folks who are single and childless.

• 43:23Chris Williamson?

  What about the reverse relationship? What are the differences and outcomes for kids from married versus non-married homes? You know, there's a lot of people that would say, well, I don't need to get married in order to be able to raise a child. It's useless. It's just a piece of paper in any case. Look at how many people get divorced. What's even the point?

• 43:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's been, I think, really since the 1970s, Chris, with the dramatic rise in divorce and non marital childbearing, a lot of folks have been kind of making the argument that what matters for kids is not, you know, their parents' marriage, but, you know, just, you know, getting love and maybe money as well. So kind of what matters for kids is not, is not marriage, but it's, it's money and, you know, and a loving family. And that can take many different forms. I was raised by a single mom and I think I turned out okay. My sister turned out okay. You know, many kids turn out okay, you know, from different family forms. But I'm also a sociologist and on average, what I can tell you is that kids are more likely to flourish, you know, educationally, socially and emotionally, when they have the benefit of married parents.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  I think, you know, in my book, probably the most striking statistic that I came up with, just in kind of running the numbers with my colleague Wendy Wong, is that we find in the National Logitudinal Survey of Youth, that young men today in America are more likely to spend some time in prison or in jail before they turn 30 than they are to graduate from college, if they're from any kind of non intact family. And by contrast, you know, guys from intact families are, you know, about four times more likely to graduate from college than they are to land in prison or in jail. So that's kind of probably the most dramatic statistic,

• 45:10Speaker 01

  which kind of just gives you a sense of like, how much a stably married family matters socially and emotionally, especially for, for our kids.

• 45:20Chris Williamson?

  I've been a fan of your Twitter for quite a while and some of the stuff that I've seen over the last couple of years, I think, from you. Young black women from intact two parent families are more likely to graduate from college, 36% versus young white women from one parent families, 28%. Young black men from intact two parent families are less likely to be incarcerated, 14% than young white men from one parent families. Boys who grew up, apart from their biological father, are about two times more likely to land in prison or jail by age 30. Fatherlessness is a better predictor of incarceration than race or growing up poor. And 95% of upper income moms are married, 76% of middle income moms are married,

• 46:04Chris Williamson?

  and 35% of lower income moms are married. So fascinating.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, these are the statistics and it's important, I think, to just remind folks that, you know, oftentimes the biggest privilege that kids have is not how much money their parents make, but whether or not their their parents are married and in a decent relationship. It's important to kind of add that caveat. Important to acknowledge that kind of a decent marriage or a great marriage is is the best context for our kids.

• 46:31Chris Williamson?

  What role does political affiliation have here with seeing an increasing amount of data talking about young Gen Z, Gen A boys skewing skewing aggressively right and that the girls are kind of going left. But when we get into the older age brackets, what's the political affiliation role?

• 46:49Speaker 01

  Well, Chris, you know, when it comes to marriage, a lot of folks in the media and the academy understand and appreciate that, you know, education and money matter. The folks who are college educated folks who are in that upper middle class bracket are more likely today to get married and stay married. What they don't realize, though, is it's not just class, it's also culture. So a majority of of college educated Americans in the US in that 1855 bracket are married, but also a majority of folks who are religious and a majority of folks who are conservative. Whereas a majority of folks who are not religious are not married and a majority of folks who are either self identified as moderates or liberal are not married as well. So what I'm saying to you, Chris, is that it's both

• 47:30Speaker 01

  class and culture today that predict who is getting married and who is staying married. Now, on the sort of politics point more concretely, what we see is that for single adults, about one in five young adults under the age of 30 are not going to be able to find someone, at least right now, who kind of shares their ideological commitments. And so what that means more concretely, too, is that, you know, liberal women are going to have difficulty oftentimes finding enough liberal men and conservative men who are single are going to find, you know, or have difficulty finding enough conservative women who are kind of sharing their.

• 48:13Chris Williamson?

  There's an increase in an unpreparedness of people to date across the aisle as well. I saw you tweet about that.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so I think the hard thing about this too, right, is that I think.

• 48:26Speaker 01

  Particularly when it comes to sort of how you think about work and family and how you want to organize the division of labor in your own household, you know, how much you think it's important for moms to care for young children, for instance, or for, you know, for men to be good breadwinners. Couples who are not on the same page on those issues really struggle. So what I would say to couples who are dating is it's fine to date someone who doesn't share your politics, but you know, it's really important to kind of come to roughly common ground when it comes to thinking about how you want to raise your kids and divide up work and family because those things are very real issues for couples today, once they have children.

• 49:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so you could have somebody who doesn't share your particular political ideology, but does agree with you about how family life should be set up inside of the house. And that might just make for spicy Thanksgiving Day dinners, but outside of that, the structure of how all of this stuff is put together is interesting. I had a conversation with a friend who I'm not going to name, but this was their controversial thesis, which they have no intention of sharing publicly, that the current dating and mating crisis is good in overall cultural evolutionary terms. Many are called to propagate their genes beyond the demographic pinch point. Few are chosen. Whoever manages to propagate their family

• 49:51Chris Williamson?

  in the face of a structurally anti-natalist anti-culture will manage to do so by virtue of having developed strong enough immune response to toxic messages. A celibate clergy is good because it screens out a propensity for fanaticism out of the gene pool. And that's from Carl Sagan.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the only thing that I will say there, I think, is that, you know, I'm conservative, as you know, but I think, and I would certainly acknowledge that, you know, in the last seven years, there are plenty of things that conservatives, you know, can and should be concerned about in their own tribe, right?

• 50:29Speaker 01

  I think what progressives don't appreciate, though, is that they have their own challenges in their own tribe, right? And I think what for progressives, they're some of their biggest challenges surround marriage and family. And so we do see, you know, in my book and elsewhere, some evidence when it comes to getting married and having children that kind of not only is there a gap between conservatives and liberals in their likelihood of getting married and having kids, but that that gap is growing. Because I think progressives, for a wide number of different reasons, are less oriented towards marriage and less oriented towards parenthood.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  And they have fewer of the kind of the norms, you know, that would sort of steer them into marriage in the first place. And then allow them to sort of more easily navigate marriage in the second place. So one concrete example of what I'm talking about is we've seen, for instance, in recent years, growing kind of interest in polyamory or support for polyamory. And less kind of support for like the classic marriage norm that you should be faithful in marriage. And yet we see in the, in the, you know, in the data and the general social survey that couples who were husbands and wives who believe that, you know, that sex outside of marriage is always wrong.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  Are more likely to be happily married. And I certainly see, you know, they're also more in other data sets, they're more stably married. So I think the challenge for progressives is that some of the newer ideas, some of the newer norms that have kind of filtered into their into their tribe, into their camp in recent decades are ones that are kind of profoundly

• 52:11Speaker 01

  either are profoundly anti-nuptial and anti-natal. And so that's a challenge that I don't think progressives have fully kind of wrapped their heads around. And that is the way in which a lot of their newer commitments are making it more difficult for them to, you know, to find a spouse, to prioritize getting married. And then to have a family.

• 52:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. And also, there's a good chunk of data that suggests people who are left of center are more unhappy. Presumably this could be done whilst controlling the marital status as well. So you have someone who's worldview or psychology or lifestyle predisposes them to being less happy than their centrist and right of center counterparts.

• 52:57Chris Williamson?

  It also discourages them from getting precisely the kind of union that seems to be very robust in improving their level of happiness. And then for the people who are doing it, you know, for the the movement, because I want to be sort of a good liberal, whatever, whatever that means, because political orientation is moderately genetically heritable, like all of our traits are. If you are someone who genuinely cares about propagating liberal ideology long term, but you are anti-natalist in your philosophy, you are creating a dying future for the philosophy that you say that you care about, which is this sort of, it's still, as far as I can see, that because also people left of center reject behavioral genetics largely, or a

• 53:41Chris Williamson?

  lot of the time. That is a hammer blow that I think hasn't hit yet properly. And I think that if people on the left fully understood and realized that, they would have a different approach.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  So a couple of things I would say in response to that. One is that I have looked at the sort of gap in happiness between conservatives and liberals and do find that, you know, a large minority of that gap can be attributed to differences in the likelihood of being married and the likelihood of being happily married. So that's, that's certainly a real thing, that there's a kind of, conservatives are happier in general, and part of the reason that they're happier in general is they're more likely to be married in the first place and then happily married in the second place and their, their progressive peers. And in terms of kind of like the long-term implications of all this, I think the, obviously the one fly in the ointment for conservatives is that many of their kids end up, you know,

• 54:39Speaker 01

  kind of leaving the, you know, the tribe once they hit, you know, young adulthood. And so there are plenty of obviously progressives out there who were raised in conservative or religious homes who are now, you know, no longer conservative and or no longer religious. So that's where we do get obviously kind of new waves of progressives and new waves of more secular folks kind of emerging. But again, what's striking about some of the newer data on marriage and fertility is that the gap seems to be growing between conservatives and liberals in ways that might have long-term implications for the ideological makeup of a place like the United States.

• 55:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So one of the things that we haven't Necessarily spoken about here are the dynamics when it comes to choosing a mate. What's the soulmate myth?

• 55:28Speaker 01

  So the soulmate myth is this idea that what really matters when it comes to love and marriage is finding someone who kind of fits you perfectly and who is going to kind of make you happy and fulfilled almost all of the time. It's a very romanticized view of love and marriage. It's one that you kind of get in, you know, sometimes Taylor Swift songs. It's one that you can get in plenty of movies. It's one that you get in books like Eat, Pray, Love, right? And so the problem, of course, with this, with this idea, with what I call the soulmate myth, is that we know just physiologically, the butterflies, Chris, fly away within a few months or within a year or two of, you know, of either dating or marrying someone.

• 56:13Speaker 01

  There's just kind of like, there's physiologically a high when you first meet someone, when you first connect with someone, and a lot of those hormones just kind of like, you know, go away after a period of time. And so that, that sort of that magic that you first experience in a romantic relationship begins to dissipate. And so the challenge is how do you kind of move beyond that and recognize that there are other things that connects you to that person? So I think having a, you know, a more realistic view of marriage, that yes, you kind of try to cultivate the romance in your, in your relationship, and that's why regular date nights are really valuable, for instance, but you also recognize that marriage is about more than just those feelings.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  It's about things like money, things like companionship, things like kids. But beyond that, I would say it's, it's kind of a recognition that love is about not feelings, but seeking the good of the other. And so couples who kind of have that, I think, richer view of marriage, one that's not as romanticized, are more likely not just to kind of go the distance to avoid divorce court, but they're also more likely to enjoy a higher quality marriage because they just have a richer view of what marriage is all about. And they're not as sort of, you know, likely to be susceptible to the ebbs and flows

• 57:38Speaker 01

  of of those romantic feelings, you know, in a relationship.

• 57:42Chris Williamson?

  Did you see Mia Khalifa trended, I think it was about two or three months ago on TikTok for saying, marriage is nothing special, it's a piece of paper, and if the person that you are with isn't helping you grow, then it is time for you to move on?

• 57:59Speaker 01

  I didn't see that particular comment, but again, I think this is the hard thing for people who are kind of who have that mentality to wrap their heads around. If that's your view, then your odds of failing at marriage are extremely high. But if your view is instead that you love this person and that you're committed to this person and that you will the good of this person, you know, come hell or high water, your odds of of making it are extremely high. And your but and your odds of actually being happy within the in the marriage and in life more generally are going to be high too, most of the time.

• 58:39Chris Williamson?

  The problem is that we are not able, it is very difficult to make ourselves believe something. We can make ourselves do things all the time. You can stay in a marriage. There are millions and billions of people probably that have stayed in unhappy marriages. But believing that marriage is not supposed to be what a recent guest taught me is the confluence era. For as long as you can benefit me and I can benefit you, this relationship works. And at the moment that that stops happening, the confluence is gone and therefore we don't need to stick about. So it's all well and good saying, look, the thing that is best for you is to believe that marriage is supposed to be more than just about this

• 59:19Chris Williamson?

  confluence or about the butterflies or whatever. But we are inextricably linked to the culture and the cultural moment and the memes and the trends that we find ourselves in and extricating ourselves from that is difficult.

• 59:33Speaker 01

  Completely agree with you. I think the challenge here, Chris, and this is why my book is subtitled Defy the Elites. That's part of the the subtitle, right? And, you know, I've gotten pushback on that from folks who, well, the elites are actually the ones who are, you know, more likely today to get married in the first place and to be stably married in the second place. And my own data indicates to be reasonably happy, right? And that's, I think, in part because they talk left. And walk right oftentimes, right? They talk left, walk right. It's what I mean by that.

• 1:00:01Chris Williamson?

  It's a luxury belief. It's a.

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, they, you know, so there's, you know, they don't live the kind of individualistic lives that they kind of propagate in, you know, on Twitter, or if they're heading up a school board, or, you know, in some kind of mainstream media publication. They actually, they're more likely to sort of honor some of these older traditions that tend to reinforce strong and stable marriages in their private lives. So, you know, so for instance, I, you know, I mentioned like the importance of fidelity. That would be one example. Or we could talk about, you know, for instance, joint checking accounts. These things are linked to happier marriages, more stable marriages. They even have experimental evidence. This really fascinating study in the university found that couples who are randomly assigned to joint accounts, and then other couples

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  who are randomly assigned to separate accounts, you know, the folks who were assigned to joint accounts did much better in the first years of marriage than those who were assigned to the, you know, the individualistic, kind of more, you know, often, I think, elite kind of strategy that we're hearing today. Whereas, you know, kind of a lot of the traditions that we have about, you know, marriage and family, kind of grew up for reasons that there was a kind of social utility to them, a wisdom to them that emerged. So, yeah, I think the challenge is that culturally, you have to defy many of the elite messages that are more individualistic, more me-first kind of thinking, you know, both in media and then

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  online and social media today. And if you can kind of steer clear of a lot of that me-first thinking, and a lot of those me-first norms, you know, in your marriage, you're more likely to flourish in your marriage and to have happily married husband or wife, you know, on the journey.

• 1:01:44Chris Williamson?

  How important is male income and providership when it comes to being an eligible mate? Obviously, this is one of the meta memes of the internet. And, you know, I tried to sort of meme it into existence with an idea of the tall girl problem, that socioeconomic success amongst young women means that there is an ever decreasing pool of eligible mates for them in the male side. But how, just how important is it? Like, what is it? What, what makes women happy? What do they want?

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  Well, there's just no question that that men's sort of status as breadwinners is very important in both kind of predicting entry into marriage, marital stability and marital quality, although it's it's has changed in recent years, kind of in this in this way. So what I'm kind of seeing in the more recent data is it's not necessarily sort of who earns how much money in the marriage so much as it's he is stably employed full time. Okay, that's what seems to predict, for instance, marital quality and marital stability in important ways. And what I found was that kind of the precise division of who earns what was not as important in predicting her marital happiness as it has been in some previous research on this

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  topic. Then when it comes to divorce, we see is that when she loses her job, there is no effect on the stability of their marriage. This is work done by Sasha Killowall at Harvard in sociology there. But when he loses his job, his risk of divorce increases, I mean, their divorce increases risk by about one third. So there's something about kind of that stability, that sense of identity, I think, for men that comes from full time employment, the respect that often, I think, accrues them from their wife. And when he doesn't have that full time job, it's just much more likely to be a problem, both in kind of getting a relationship started and sustained.

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  So I think people don't appreciate that there still is a very gendered story when it comes to work and marriage. And that story is that women are looking for and respect men who have, you know, a decent job and men who are not employed, you know, full time are, I think, you know, just having much greater difficulty even today and still, you know, navigating marriage successfully.

• 1:04:01Chris Williamson?

  Do you have, you said you have quite a few kids, some of them sons, are they all girls?

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  I have sons and daughters, yes.

• 1:04:08Chris Williamson?

  So I don't know how old they are, but at some point, your sons are going to begin dating, they're going to enter the dating market. Given the current world of men's advice and the current state of the dating environment, what are you going to tell your sons or what would you tell a struggling young guy who reads too much of the internet about how to be as eligible of a mate to the opposite sex as they can be?

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  Well, Chris, it's interesting. You know, one of the things that I would say both to my to my sons, but just to young men, and I do say to young men more generally, is that, you know, there are a lot of complaints that we're getting, you know. There was a critique of my kind of thesis in New York Times recently from, you know, a journalist, and she was saying, there just aren't any good men out there. And so, you know, my response to that kind of idea is I think there are some legitimate concerns. We have to understand the why, why aren't you finding enough good men out there? I think it's part because we're not kind of giving young men enough kind of concrete advice about what is appealing and attractive to women. And so, one of the things that I find also in my chapter on gender is that women are happier when, you know, they're rating the men in their lives to be physically stronger, right?

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  So, so what I would say to young men who are interested kind of in dating and getting married is that, you know, get in shape physically.

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

  I'm, you know, I'm not, I'm not, as you might guess, I'm not a big athlete, but I swim regularly. And so if you're not like an athlete, you know, you can find things, you know, to do, run, swim, bike, go to the gym, whatever, but get in decent physical shape. Like, that's one thing that I would say to them. Because women do value, you know, physical strength, and they value guys who are, who are, can take care of themselves physically. That's, that's one thing that I would say. I would say also kind of have a sense of mission in life, you know? I'm, want to do this job-wise. It doesn't matter what it is, really, I don't think, but just to have like a clear sense of like, I'm, I'm learning this thing to do this job. And that might change over time, that's fine, but to have a sense of like,

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  professionally, like you, you want to do something, and you have like a plan and a purpose, basically. That extends, of course, too, to the things that are of a more civic character. I think women also kind of have a tremendous respect for guys who are, you know, volunteering in their communities as well. And they want to, same thing applies to religion, you know, if, if, you know, if you're in that religious subset. So I think a sense of mission matters as well.

• 1:06:40Speaker 01

  And then I would also say to young men that when it comes to dating, to really take the initiative initially, I ask my women in my large family classes at UVA, kind of, what's your preference, you know, when it comes to that first date? Is it that you take the initiative to ask someone out on the date or that he takes the initiative? And about 80% of the women in my classes, I've got large classes at UVA, would say it's their preference that he takes the initiative. It's a sign of his interest in them and it's also a sign of like his willingness to engage and risk in healthy ways as well. So I would, you know, talk to young men about kind of the importance of taking initiative,

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  the importance of having a sense of mission, especially when it comes to something related to, you know, school or work, depending upon their stage of life, and the importance of kind of being in decent physical shape. Because these are all things that women appreciate and I think we're not telling men enough and adolescent males as well, that, you know, you've got to get off the Xbox, you've got to get off your phone, you've got to get out there and hit the gym or do something, get more serious about your studies or your skills, you know, your training, tech, whatever it might be, you know, get a job and make a mark. And if you do those kinds of things and develop competencies, obviously, in certain kinds

• 1:08:06Speaker 01

  of areas, then you will garner the respect and the interest of women in your milieu.

• 1:08:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I mean, it's the competence that women, I think largely, are looking for. You know, if you were to just ask someone, would you rather have a competent or an incompetent partner? Not clarifying in what domain, by how much, like, who wants to be with a useless partner that doesn't have any agency, that doesn't have any intentionality, that isn't able to enact change that they want? In any area of their life, or even in specific areas of their life, like if you're unable to get in shape, it identifies that in some regard, you aren't competent at being able to control your own body and your own physicality. If you aren't able to hold down a job, it shows that you aren't competent at being able to show up on time, or be reliable,

• 1:08:55Chris Williamson?

  or be disciplined, or be whatever the thing is. And Jordan Peterson was on the show a couple of months ago, and he said, women use wealth as a proxy for competence. It's not the wealth that they're after, it's just the most reliable, rough-hewn rubric signal that they can find to say, here is a rank order, starting with fucking Elon Musk, or whoever's at the top now, some Arab sheikh, and going all the way down. Here is a rank ordered list of 3.5 billion men, and you can work out a kind of a competent. It's the best video game ever made. It's the best video game ever made.

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think a key word you mentioned there is, Chris, agency. And I think there's so much passivity among young men today, and among teenage boys today. Way too much screen time, way too much video games. And, and at a certain point, you know, women notice that, and it's a, it's a big turn off, especially when it comes to marriage, because they want a guy who has a sense of agency, and who exemplifies that in his life in a variety of different domains.

• 1:09:59Chris Williamson?

  What do you think about most of the advice coming out of the manosphere? Obviously, there is this huge market for speaking to men. As you've identified, we're not necessarily telling men the right things. Is the manosphere getting anything right? Or what are the things that it gets most wrong? What do you wish that you could sort of sponish from it?

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I certainly think some of the things we've talked about just in the last few minutes are articulated in different ways by people like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate. I think what's problematic is that on parts of the manosphere, it's a very kind of self-centered, self-oriented approach to masculinity, particularly people like Andrew Tate, obviously. There's also kind of a, there's a way in which women are talked down, and, you know, are described in very, you know, degrading, or

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  Demeaning or or negative ways. So I think it can cultivate a certain sense of

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  of suspicion, needless suspicion, the part of men. Now, obviously, we all we all both women have to be discerning because there are people out there who are bad actors or who've got vices are going to make them bad spouses, or there's just not a good fit for a particular person and you. You have to kind of figure out, do you have the capacity for friendship with this person? Do they have some key virtues that will make them a good husband, a good father, a good wife, and a good mother? But I think parts of the manosphere are painting and obviously an overly negative view of women and marriage and are encouraging men to be selfish in ways that will make them, you know, bad romantic partners and reduce their odds of succeeding in marriage as well.

• 1:11:37Chris Williamson?

  Which ultimately results in them dying on average eight or nine years earlier.

• 1:11:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. Alcohol abuse. And this is, again, this is what Pearl Davis and Andrew Tate don't really acknowledge or appreciate is that, yes, marriage is a risk, no doubt. But the guys who are not married today, never married, and guys who are divorced are just much more likely to be, especially if they're not college educated, if they're not kind of doing well professionally, you know, at the top of some game, they are just much more likely to be floundering and to, you know, end up, yeah, sad, lonely, and vulnerable to these tests of despair.

• 1:12:14Chris Williamson?

  What about from a woman's side? It's not something that I often see coming from the right or from anybody sort of right or far left. Bits of dating advice for women, you know, women who want to get married, who want to find a partner, who want to be discerning with their mate choice, but who also know that in a post Me Too world, men are maybe more reticent about approaching them, they may be more concerned about, they maybe don't have quite the same like patriarchy fueled agency that perhaps our great grandfathers would have done. What do you say to women when it comes to attracting, selecting a male partner?

• 1:12:55Speaker 01

  So I think for both young men and young men, I would certainly say, you know, given the challenges that people are facing today is number one, if you have, you know, friends who are kind of wise and discerning and roughly your age or a little bit older, or even, you know, a lot older, kind of just let it be known that you're interested in getting married. And have them kind of, you know, do the sort of mating game, you know,

• 1:13:18Chris Williamson?

  Crowdsourced the potential man.

• 1:13:20Speaker 01

  Matchmaking, you know, is, you know, I regularly introduce students that I know are interested in getting married or young adults, you know, to one another, just so, and, you know, that's, that can be fruitful. Um, I think so, you know, letting it be known to people you trust, judgment you trust. Um, I think if you have a religious bone in your body, um, go to church, synagogue, mosque, temple, whatever. Um, the folks who are in those communities are much more marriage minded than the folks who are not. And that, that's worth kind of, you know, taking seriously if you have any kind of religious interest or background. Um, I would say also kind of for women in particular, kind of given the fact that a lot of guys are worried about the me too, you know, suspicion.

• 1:14:03Speaker 01

  Um, you know, signaling with this, with a smile, uh, with a compliment, with extra attention, you know,

• 1:14:10Chris Williamson?

  Cultivating receptivity is a hugely overlooked, uh, way of doing this. I was reminded of the, uh, I guess it would have been the, the aristocracy during the Renaissance would, uh, drop a handkerchief. Uh, you know, you need a non-verbal cue equivalent of dropping a handkerchief.

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, all that I think is valuable. And then, you know, some folks are just not going to have any, any success in person, right? And so, um, you know, I certainly know folks who are happily married today who met on, you know, on some dating service. But just be kind of discerning about the service you pick. So obviously Tinder is probably not the best option. Um, there are, you know, newer sites, um, that are kind of cultivating a more, you know, marriage oriented approach. Um, that are accessible, um, online, for instance, you know, that can, um, you know, uh, be helpful. So I think if you're going to seek out, um, a, a dating site, you know, pick one, um, that is oriented towards marriage, oriented towards serious relationships.

• 1:15:15Chris Williamson?

  Brad Wilcox, ladies and gentlemen. Brad, I've been a massive fan of your work for a long time. I'm really glad that you've dug into the deep and dark murky data that's sort of borne all of this stuff out. Where should people go? They want to learn more about your work in the book and keep up to date with what you do. Where should they go?

• 1:15:31Speaker 01

  They can type in get married and that'll, you know, go to Harper for the book. I'm on Twitter at Brad Wilcox IFS and then on the web oftentimes at familystudies.org as well. Those are three places to look me up.

• 1:15:46Chris Williamson?

  Brad, I really appreciate you. Thank you for today.

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  It's great to be with you, Chris. Thanks for having me on.