February 11, 2024 • 37 mins
University of Virginia sociologist and director of the National Marriage Project, Dr. Brad Wilcox discusses his new book, Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization. Wilcox argues that marriage is a key predictor of happiness and that society flourishes when marriages are strong. He also highlights the negative impacts of the decline in marriage rates, such as increased loneliness. Wilcox suggests that cultural, policy, and religious changes are needed to support marriage and family life. He also emphasizes the importance of character and shared values in choosing a spouse. Despite current trends, Wilcox remains hopeful that individuals can forge strong and stable marriages.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
On this episode of Newts World, What is the recipe
for happiness? If you listen to liberal elites or red
pill influencers, you say it's making money, living for yourself
and staying single without kids, and you'd be wrong. Nothing
predicts happiness better than a good marriage. According to new
research by the University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox, our
(00:28):
kids in communities not to mention, our civilization as a whole,
are much more likely to flourish when the state of
our unions are strong. Despite this, record number of Americans
are not succeeding at getting or staying married. In his
new book, Get Married, While Americans must defy the elites,
(00:48):
forge strong families, and save civilization, Brad Wilcox reveals the
anti family messages and policies coming out of Hollywood, Washington,
the media, at Kademia, and corporate America that have weakened marriage,
and he explains why America's most fundamental institution matters for
our civilization more than ever. I am really pleased to
(01:13):
welcome my guest, Brad Wilcox. He is a professor of
sociology the director of the National Marriage Project at the
University of Virginia, the Future of Freedom fellow at the
Institute for Family Studies and a non resident Senior Fellow
at the American Enterprise Institute. Brad, Welcome and thank you
(01:45):
for joining me on Newsworld. You know, Brad, I'm fascinated
with your National Marriage Project and the decision you made
to write what I think is a very important book.
How did this all start?
Speaker 2 (01:56):
So this really began actually here at the University of Virginia.
I was raised by a single mom nude and was
thinking as a college student here at UVA kind of
how much dads mattered, and then began to realize that
marriage was the institution that connects men to their kids
on average, and that led me to pursue a PhD
in sociology at Princeton and then come back here to
teach at UVA and bring the National Marriage Project from
(02:18):
Rutgers where it was to the University of Virginia. And
since two thousand and nine we've been kind of producing
reports and other research, including this new book, Get Married,
on a regular basis. The reports have been called the
State of our Unions, and they've been kind of chronicling
the fortunes of marriage in America, and I started doing
this with an eye towards how marriage matters for children.
As I've been talking to students here at UVA, particularly
(02:41):
young women at the university, there's just kind of more
and more concern but I'm hearing from them about kind
of their dating options. They tend to outnumber men here
at UV Obviously, they also kind of would say that
a lot of the guys are not really interested in
commitment or don't seem to be kind of focused on
a long term relationship. So now I've been writing and
thinking a lot more about the importance of marriage for adults,
(03:02):
and this book is designed in part to kind of
give people a roadmap for kind of getting married and
also kind of a rationale for focusing a lot more
in their twenties and thirties on not only getting married,
but I'm forging a strong and stable marriage as well.
So that's sort of where I've gone with the National
Marriage Project here at the University of Virginia.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
It's interesting because young adults, those under the age of thirty,
feel higher rates of loneliness compared to any other generation.
February twenty twenty three, Gallipol found the seventeen percent of
Americans said they felt loneliness throughout most of the day.
For young Americans under the age of thirty, that was
twenty four percent, and those in lower income households earning
(03:47):
less than twenty four thousand dollars a year twenty seven
percent suffer higher levels of daily loneliness than older and
higher income counterparts. I'm very interested in the study that
was done by Signa or nearly half of all Americans
report feeling lonely sometimes are always, and that Gen Z
ages eighteen to twenty two is the loneliest generation with
(04:09):
seventy nine percent. Think about that, seventy nine percent, eight
out of every ten feeling lonely at some point.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
What I'm projecting in the book is that at least
one in three young adults today, you know, folks in
their twenties like you were just talking about, will never marry.
So we're sort of seeing what I call the closing
of the American heart unfolding before us, where we're going
to see record levels of sort of permanent bachelors and
permanent bachelorettes. And then also I think record levels of
(04:38):
childlessness among the twenty something cohort today. So I'm trying
to do my part to kind of push back against
this closing of the American heart and kind of give
people some reasons to be more intentional about dating and
getting married, and then some advice about how to forge
strong and stable marriages for this twenty first century.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Well, what leads you to assume that there's a direct
correlation between loneliness and marriage.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
So we do know, for instance, from work done by
Dan Cox, my colleague at AI, that single millennium women
are twice as like I said, they're often lonely compared
to their married peers. He's done other work too, just
kind of drawing an empirical connection between loneliness and marriage.
We know, too, for some new work done by the
Rise of Chicago economists that happiness in America has been
(05:33):
dropping since the early two thousands. And the number one
factor that this new study from Chicago attributes this to
is this closing of the American heart, this drop in marriage,
that's the biggest contributor to declines and happiness in America.
So obviously I kind of live and work in the
shadow of Thomas Jefferson. I mean literally, I kind of
live just sort of below his Monticello and he was
(05:57):
obviously famous for penning. And my other thing is the
Declaration of Independence talked about the pursuit of happiness, that
kind of classic American pursuit, and more and more Americans
need are having difficulty realizing that pursuit. In a large part,
I think because they're not able to get married in
the first place and then stay married in the second place.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
This may be too pragmatic and therefore not necessarily accurate,
but it strikes me that there's a whole logical pattern.
If you're living alone and you go home to an
empty apartment or an empty house rather than being with somebody,
you almost inherently, I would think, would be more lonely.
(06:36):
What am I missing?
Speaker 2 (06:37):
No, you're I think, kind of hitting manel right on
the head. And in the book, one of the things
that I talk about are the stories of young adults
in their mid thirties who are lonely. I talk about
a young man living the outer suburbs of Washington, d C.
A guy that I'll call Scott, both for the book
and for now. And here's a guy who's reasonably successful,
(06:59):
earning six figures, owns a home, he's a defense consultant,
college degree, all that kind of stuff, and so by
kind of the sterends of the culture, which kind of
thinks today that it's all about kind of the job
and the money and the degree. He should be doing fine,
but he's not. He says, you know, I've got degrees
on my wile, I've got accomplishments and certificates, but it
doesn't mean anything in the end. He told me, he says,
(07:20):
I have to get up every day and look in
the mirror and realize I'm alone. I have nobody. A
young man who's in his mid thirties and keenly feeling
the lack of a wife and kids. Or take Taylor,
who lives in the Rocky Mountain West, and she talks
about kind of prioritizing her career over dating, really with
a night towards marriage in her twenties, and now she's
(07:42):
in her mid thirties as well, and a career in
digital marketing hasn't kind of delivered as much meaning and
value to her as getting married and having kids. She
does babysit for her nieces and nephews, and she likes that,
but she told me, she says, the older I get,
I'm like you know, is there a chain ants that
I could have a family of my own right now,
(08:03):
do fun things with them, fingerpaint whatever. I don't know
what kids do. So these kind of story is going
to give you a sense of how obviously there are
some folks who are flourishing as singles, but we are
seeing that on a lot of these emotional indicators, from
loneliness to happiness to life satisfaction, newt that single Americans
today are more likely to be floundering, and even more
so today relative to say, fifteen years ago.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
Is being lonely lead them to focus on trying to
find somebody or does it lead them to assume this
is an unavoidable fate.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
I think in some cases it makes them more intentional
about dating or putting themselves into social situations, whether it's
you know, the office Christmas party or the local church
or volunteering at the local food bank if you want
to get married, those are the kinds of things that
I think would be helpful to do. But in other cases,
and I think Scott's story is kind of an example
(08:56):
of this. There seems to me there's kind of a
vicious cycle or once you kind of feel like marriage
is beyond your grasp, then you are more likely to
kind of potentially retreat from social life. In Scott's case,
actually religious life. He became less religious than he was
as a twenty something guy. So that's obviously the more
negative response to a situation like that.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
I like your term, the closing of the American heart
is that yours.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
It is Yep. It's one of the sort of phrases
that I talk about in the book.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
I think in a sense you're suggesting that for a
lot of people who are lonely, they really find it
hard to open their heart to somebody else.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
Yeah, that's correct. But I also think, and you know,
I know you've been talking a lot about sort of
technology and social media, and what I also think to
it's just the nature of the beast since twenty ten,
that screen time is competing with social time and dating
time and opportunity. So that's also part of challenge that's
facing us too.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
It raises an interesting question. I think a generation ago,
I would have said that it was the pressure of
employment and focusing on your job and deciding that you
couldn't do both. The sort of the whole liberation of
women and Betty Free Dan and that kind of thing.
But I run into young people who are so immersed
(10:17):
in their phone that they literally don't have very good
ability to talk to people. Correct. Yes, they'll text you
even if you're in the same room.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
Yeah. No. I was at a July fourth party or
in Charlottesville, Virginia, not too long ago, and there were
a bunch of teenagers sitting on the front lawn preparing
to watch the fireworks go off. And they were sitting
on the lawn. Some of them are talking, but many
of them are just texting. And as you were saying,
they were texting one another, which was just so shocking.
So I talked about this in terms of kind of
in the book as sort of our electronic opiates today,
(10:49):
and it's both you know, our phones, but also think
looking for teenage boys and young men and even middle
aged guys too. Nowadays it's the Xbox, it's gaming as
things that are drawing us away from in person connections.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
You have loneliness, you have people who are not getting married.
But then you go a step further and you say
that marriage is the key to saving civilization. I mean
that's a pretty big claim. Why do you believe that, Well, I.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
Think, as you probably know well and maybe more than others.
And there's obviously a lot of folks who think that
who is the next occupant of the White House is
the most important kind of issue facing our country. And
why I don't want to minimize the importance of the election.
I want to sort of stress that kind of who's
in our house, you know, who's in my kid's house,
you know, is often more important than who's in the
White House. Right. So the point there is that, you know,
(11:55):
as Jefferson said, he talked about life, liberty and as
I mentioned, the pursuit of happiness, and when it comes
to life, we're seeing We've got a new study coming
out these family studies from the Brooking scholar Jonathan Rothwell,
is that the number one predictor of deaths of despair
across America is marriage rates. So, especially when working class
men are not getting married, not staying married, much more
(12:18):
likely to succumb to alcoholism, drug abuse, or direct suicide.
When it comes to liberty, I think you can appreciate
that one of the biggest drivers of the growth in
the federal bureaucracy is the falling fortunes of marriage and
the stable two parent family. But then also kind we
know that the strongest predictor of the health of the
American dream is to share of two parent families in
(12:40):
a community. This is from work by Rosh Chatty at Harvard,
So kind of think about that is one expression of
positive liberty America. Can you make it in America? And
if you come from a neighborhood, a community where there
are lots of two parent families and you're a poor kid,
your odds of realizing that dream are much much higher.
But if you come from a neighborhood where's lots of
single parent families, they're much much lower. And then, as
(13:03):
I said before, the macro level, the biggest happiness factor
is marriage trends. And then for individuals, what my book
shows is the top predictor of happiness for both men
and women is not money, it's not their job, it's
not sexual frequency, it's the quality of their marriage. And
so happily married folks are just doing way better than
(13:24):
their fellow Americans who are not happily married and their
fellow Americans who are single.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
How do you reverse this? Let me back up a
second and to say, I think this also fits into
the explosion of drug addiction, the explosion of homelessness, the
explosion of violence caused by people who are mentally ill,
because in fact, the system can't accommodate and help people
come to grips with life. And so you have a
(13:49):
substantial number of people who are basically damaged by the
act of living in isolation and the act of having
no support mechanisms. So how do you turn that around?
Speaker 2 (14:01):
So I think obviously part of the subtitle is defy
the Elites. And when I first kind of released the
notice of the book, there are lots of smart journalists,
elite journalists who are pushing back and they're single. Elites
are doing great, Brad, what are you talking about the
by elites? And my point is that too many of
our elites talk left and walk right when it comes
to marriage and family. I have a piece in The
Atlantic coming on in this next week, and the idea
(14:24):
there is that they themselves are kind of living marriage
focused lives, family focused lives oftentimes, but they're presiding over
Hollywood enterprises, or legislation in Congress, or journalistic articles hearing
in mainstream outlets that are basically denigrating or devaluing marriage
(14:45):
or kind of minimizing its importance. In the book, I
talk about a piece that came out when I was
finishing up the book, was trending on Twitter from Bloomberg
that said that women who stay single and don't have
kids are getting richer, and it kind of basic presented
a story that suggested that marriage and motherhood were pathways
to emiseration and misrious. It's all the women who were
(15:06):
kind of profiled, who were single and childless. We're doing wonderfully,
and we're now actually kind of getting this message too
from the online right people like entertain as well. So
I think part of the challenge is to kind of
encourage our elites broadly to find, whether it's in the
c suite or up on Capitol Hill, to do a
better job of passing legislation, running stories, having scripts and
(15:31):
movies that paint not a kind of rose colored view
of marriage and family new, but one that's actually truthful.
I think that would be helpful in terms of just
changing the culture. On the policy front, I think tackling
the marriage penalty embedded in a lot of our means
tested programs and policies would help working class families who
often face pretty big penalties and things like medicaid from
getting married. When it comes to our churches, having more ministries,
(15:54):
like there's a mystry called Comunio which is serving Catholic
and Protestant churches across the US. Upping their game on
the marriage front, I think would be a helpful thing.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
And then I think.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
Frankly trying to figure out ways to help families, both
with legislation on Capitol Hill, but also with kind of
just advice about ways to kind of tame the technological
beast and to kind of help families have both parents
and teens kind of put their phones in the kitchen corner,
you know, when they come home, and leave them there
(16:25):
for the duration of most of their evening or weekend.
There's more that I say in the book. We just
have to be I think more intentional on number of friends,
the cultural front, the policy front, the religious front, and
then to what we're doing in our homes to kind
of build a culture that's more family friendly.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
And you make a point that actually ethnicity is the
largest single predictor of marriage rates. Can you expand on that?
Speaker 2 (16:51):
Yeah, So one of the things that I did was
kind of talk about there's a lot of bad news
to discuss when it comes to marriage and family America today,
but there's good news as well. And one piece of
the good news in the book is there are four
groups of Americans who are flourishing relatively speaking when it
comes to marriage. One is Asian Americans, as you just mentioned,
One is religious Americans, another is what I call strivers
(17:13):
Americans who are college educative, kind of more long term orientation,
professional orientation that's financially bet avential for families. And then
conservative Americans are the fourth group that are more likely
to be doing well on the marriage front. And when
it comes to that first group, Asian Americans, we see
that they're more likely to be getting married in the
first place and staying married in the second place. In fact,
(17:33):
there's no group of Americans new who are more likely
to be both married and stably married than Indian Americans,
especially immigrants directly from India. So it kind of just
gives you some sense that what we're talking about is
not just about money and class. It's also about culture.
And I think we can all appreciate the ways in
which the Indian culture has been for a very long
(17:54):
time pretty marriage minded.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
Do you see any of that spreading. I mean, is
it literally limited to those ethnic pockets.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
Well, I think we have seen just in the elite
circles that I track. There was a book published this
fall called The Two Parent Privilege by Melissa Kearney, an
economist at Brookings of all places, and very positive kind
of take on marriage and kids. Got a lot of
good attention, So I think that's a helpful sign. My
book obviously advances the conversation too in the media and
(18:25):
other venues, but beyond Asian Americans, Yeah, I do think
we see certainly in the religious world there are new
ministries like the one I've just mentioned, Comenial that's serving
a lot of churches across the US, and my own
parish here in Charlottesville, Virginia. There's been an uptick in
young marriages from Catholic Who's that's the Catholic student group
at the University of Virginia. And I've never seen a
(18:47):
group of Catholic students at EVA, and I've been in
touch with them for the last twenty years who've been
so kind of focused on dating and marriage, you know,
recognizing that the broader culture is having a lot of difficulty.
So there are some I think what we might call
points of light on the horizon. But I also want
to be honest with you, nid, I think that sort
of for the broader society, the trends are not going
(19:10):
to be good, at least for the short term, and
so we've got to be more intentional about giving people
kind of a roadmap that will kind of bring them
to higher ground and avoid what I would sorter of
view as a kind of demographic tsunami that's coming our
way since across from East Asia, across the Pacific and
going to be hitting our shores in the coming years.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
I'll mentioned a while ago that there are legal consequences
to getting married that are negative that frankly I thought
we had taken out of the system. Do you know,
has anybody put together if a new administration came in
and they wanted to be strongly pro marriage, has anybody
put together a list of the things that should be
(19:49):
repealed or the things that should be changed.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
So I have a chapter with an AI volume that's
going to do some of that. But yeah, I've got
some ideas about how, for instance, to tackle the marriage
panel in our means tested programs, Things like Medicaid would
be one example. They're income tax, but it would be
a different example. The food stamps would be a third example.
I also think it'd be helpful too, both at the
federal and the state and local levels, to talk about
(20:14):
what's called the success sequence, which means is I think
you probably know encouraging young adults to get at least
a high school degree, work full time in their twenties,
and get married before having children. If you kind of
follow those three steps, your odds are being poor just
three percent, and your odds of being in the middle
class or higher eighty six percent as you head into
your late twenties and thirties. I think too many of
(20:35):
you young adults don't appreciate how much not just actually marriage,
but even full time work we're seeing. I think troublingly,
a large number of young men, you know, especially young
men who are not that kind of striver or that
college track, are not working full time. They're kind of
moving in and out of different gigs, whether it's driving
uber or working at a fast food restaurant. Also saying
(20:58):
visa via the whole Mayor and Love issue, that a
lot of working class couples are couples now where she
works more hours than he does, makes more money than
he does, and she also does more of the housework
and if they've got kids, childcare, and that's obviously a
recipe for relationship disaster. So we've got to be thinking
about that issue as well, encouraging young adults to appreciate
(21:21):
the value of marriage and work, especially for young men.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
You also talk a little bit about the concept which
I frankly had not heard of, about the rise of
the I mean, I may say this wrong, but the
trad wife social media. What is that all about. That's
totally new to me until I saw your book.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
So there is kind of, like, as we can I appreciate,
there's a way in which social media kind of balkanizes.
It creates all these different subcultures across the spectrum, and
one of them is kind of the tradwife subculture. It's
kind of, you know, basically urging women to embrace marriage,
motherhood and traditional roles and kind of celebrating domesticity, femininity,
(22:01):
beautiful dresses, beautiful kitchens and homes and meals and all that,
caring for kids. And we've seen some of that, particularly
in the Mormon community, in the last decade, but and
it's now kind of spread to many other parts of
the internet as well, So that's certainly part of what
we're seeing now. But when it comes to kind of
how does this sort of play out for ordinary couples,
I've got a kind of somewhat of a complicated message
(22:22):
in the book in terms of gender. So what I
see is that for women, for instance, having a husband
who had embody some classic masculine traits like protectiveness and
being a good provider and being even physically strong, these
are all things that women across the spectrum tend to
appreciate in men. But when it comes to kind of
(22:43):
how you divide work in family, not seeing a huge
connection for kind of the average woman to her happiness.
So I kind of bundless together and knew as a
kind of a neo traditional model is sort of on
average often attractive for today's married women, especially mary moms,
and that traditional pieces are still looking for guys who
(23:03):
are reliable providers and are protective of them in a
variety of contexts socially, physically, et cetera. But they're also
looking for guys who are engaged with the kids across
the ideological spectrum. Engaged dads are definitely appreciated by women,
but how you kind of divide up housework and paid
work is pretty flexible today in terms of how that
(23:25):
connects up to merrital happiness. For today's women, there are.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
A variety of ways to be positive in a long
term relationship. Is that part of your message when.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
It comes to the division of housework and paid work.
What I'm basically saying here is that there's no one
model today that correlates consistently with a better outcome, and
that would be I think kind of maybe good news
for folks in the center of these sort of gender wars.
I think where my conclusions would be more traditional is
(23:55):
just sort of saying I think there are important ways
in which women are still looking women on the left
implicitly for them, oftentimes for guys who are protective, ambitious, hardworking,
and are employed on a full time basis. So those
kinds of traits and characteristics are still very much appealing
to women, even on the left to think of themselves
as either a galitarian or even say things like gender
(24:17):
is fluid. But when you kind of push beneath to
like what makes you happy, you know then they'll talk
about the way in which you know their husband is
hardworking or protective or ambitious, even if they're kind of
ideologically on the left.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
There's this conflict. Though I listened to some of the
day really surprised me who I've always thought it has
been pretty liberal, who said, we've had a generation of
telling young males that their inferior, that they are the problem,
et cetera. And he said, you know, you do that
long enough, and you really do have an extraordinary withdrawal
(24:53):
and an unwillingness to compete. And this goes back to
books that were written twenty years ago about undermine the
whole concept of masculinity. So you didn't just have a
pro feminism, but you had an anti male kind of
part to that. To what extent is that also combined,
I think with the ability to amuse yourself with computerized
(25:15):
games so that you literally on a relatively low income,
can occupy yourself and feel like you're busy having fun.
You don't need to go out and do all these things.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
I talk about a male malaise, you know, for younger
men and teenage boys, and I think it's probably about
these electronic opiates that give, you know, teenage boys in
the similar crop right of being that white knight riding
on your horse, but just doing it all on the xbox.
So that's part of the problem. And I think the
other part of the problem is that we're not giving
(25:46):
young men a constructive model of masculinity, and so they
gravitate to people like Andrew Tate who kind of give
them a more misogynistic model of masculinity. And if we
where as a culture giving young men a distinctive model
of masculinity that they could buy into and identify with
and guide their transition into adulthood, we'd be doing a
(26:07):
lot better by them, but also by dating and marriage
as well.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
You describe the degree to which very often the next
generation can't sustain the economic success, particularly if they come
out of broken homes or situations where they don't end
up getting married. And I was struck because I just
saw a study a couple days ago that the five
wealthiest families in Florence in fourteen seventy one are the
(26:52):
five wealthiest families in Florence because they have very strong
family ties, They have a very strong sense of generational obligation.
Thomas Mann wrote about the Budenbrook cycle where you go
from shurt sleeves to wealth to shirt sleeves in three generations. Well,
apparently the medici and others have figured out they don't
want to do that, and they somehow instill in their
(27:15):
children the obligation that you are going to manage this,
you are going to maintain this. And it's worked now
for five hundred years.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
Yeah, there have been a number of studies in recent years,
both in England and in Italy kind of in this spirit,
and it does, I think, remind us that there is
an intergenerational feature to family life that Americans can lose
sight of. Kind of tending the fires, you know, on
the home front can be good for not just you
and your kids, but even your sense your grandkids. And
(27:45):
by contrast, if things are not going well in one generation,
their offer and not going to go well in not
just the next generation, but the third generation and beyond.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
You make that point from a different angle when you
point out that males who come from non intact families
are dramatically more likely to end up in prison. Can
you comment on the degree to which growing up in
a sort of chaotic environment contributes to being unable to
function within a normal framework.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
Yeah, one of the most striking findings in the book
from my perspective as a scholar and as a social scientist,
it's just the finding from the NLS Y ninety seven,
is big federally funded survey that tracks people over time,
is that boys today who were raised in any kind
of non intac family basically about twice as likely to
land in prison or in jail than their male peers
(28:37):
who are from intact, married families. And more particularly, that
young men are being raised in non intac families are
more likely to spend some time in prison or in
jail than they are to be graduating from college. So
they're going to get you to give you two sets
of stats here on this. So young men from intact
families with mom and dad in the household, thirty eight
(28:57):
percent of them graduate from college. Only nine percent of
them would spend some time in Jailberson. You know, it
could be a night in the cling for a fight
at the bar, right, but some prisoner jail. By contrast,
boys being raised by single moms nineteen percent of them
will spend some time in prison or jail by the
time they turn thirty. Only fifteen percent of them will
graduate from college today, So there's just no question when
(29:19):
it comes to school and problems with the law. Young
men are more likely to have a pretty negative outcome
when they don't have their married parents. Now, for girls,
the story there is more about kind of the emotional piece.
We see a lot higher lovels of depression sadness for
girls and non attack families, and that's kind of where
their kind of family chaos is expressed. And there's a
(29:40):
new book coming a week after my book by Rob
Henderson that kind of chronicles he was raised kind of
a single mom and then foster care and then adoption
and his adoptive parents got divorced, and his book coming
out a week after Mind kind of gives you more
of a personal story about how his fortunes in school
and life and flowed with the stability of his family background.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
But as you look at all this, are you optimistic
or pessimistic that we can turn this around?
Speaker 2 (30:10):
I think short term I'm pretty pessimistic. I think that
the trends are pretty strong right now towards less marriage,
less stating fewer kids. I think we're going to see
a record number of young adults today who are going
to end up kindless, what they call bare branches in China,
without the benefit of a spouse and children to sustain them,
especially in midlife and later life, financially, health wise, and
(30:31):
emotionally too. But I do obviously also show groups that
are managing to make it marriage wise new and I
do see efforts in civil society and in my own
world where people are forging strong families. And I give
people some advice about how you can yourself kind of
beat these larger trends. So I think that's sort of
(30:52):
the helpful note in my book is kind of giving
people a roadmap for how they themselves can forge a
strong and stable marriage today.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
I'm really curious how do young people today get marriage advice,
particularly if they come out of a non traditional background
and don't have immediate access to in their own family.
Speaker 2 (31:11):
Yeah, and I think a lot of what we're seeing
is that people are turning to popular shows like Bachelor
and Bachelorett, and they're turning obviously the Instagram and TikTok too,
and kind of taking cues from influencers of one stripe
or another. And I think the challenge with that kind
of messaging oftentimes is it's more superficial in terms of
the kind of things that are being stressed, in terms
of maybe it's looks or humor or charm or money
(31:35):
as sort of the markers of a good dating partner
and even a good spouse down the road. I think
also you can see two in the pop culture and
over the romanticized understanding of love and marriage. And I've
got a piece in the Wall State draw coming out
on what I call the soulmate myth and begin with
Taylor Swift's song Lover, which again kind of gives us
a very romantic view about marriage. And I think what
(31:58):
the challenge we face is kind of letting our young
adults know that, yes, romance is important. Yes looks and
money are things worth kind of keeping in mind, but
when it comes to forging a strong and stable marriage,
you really need to look for qualities of character, things
like loyalty, fortitude, fidelity. These are the kinds of virtues.
It would be part and parcel of a good long
(32:19):
term relationship, a good marriage, and would be the foundation
for a strong family life as well. I think that's
the challenge. And to your point earlier, I think having
people who are online kind of giving this message in
accessible and engaging ways is part of what's needed to
to kind of counter what people might otherwise encounter on
their screens.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
So, given everything we've learned about young people today and
the dysfunctionalities and the lack of accurate information, what advice
would you have for somebody who's looking for a spouse.
Speaker 2 (32:49):
So one of the things that my calling, doctor Wenny Wang,
has found in her research is that couples who meet
in some kind of religious event or activity, or meet
in college in person are more likely to be flourishing,
and the couples who meet online or in bars and
taverns are the least likely to be flourishing in their marriages. Now,
it's just a correlation, but it's worth kind of thinking about.
I think the point I'm getting at is it's important
(33:11):
trying to sort of maximize your time as a young
adult doing things in person, whether it's socially and after
work if you're religious, you know, in some kind of
church or synagogue, college, and not listening to parents and
peers and professors who would tell you too to kind
of push all that off unto your late twenties or
early thirties, because what we see is the couples who
(33:32):
get married kind of in their twenties roughly defined mid
twenties are more likely to be happily married, and I
think today more likely to avoid ending up kinless. So
I would just be intentional in part about using opportunities
in your early twenties and mid twenties, whether it's in
college or in the workplace, to meet people in person
and not just to rely upon their smartphone and dating
(33:52):
apps as well. I would also encourage men to be
more intentional and more courageous in terms of asking when
in their circles out and then encourage women to be
more kind of flexible and kind of giving the guys
a chance, you know, maybe a second date, even if
you're necessarily convinced in the first date. I know plenty
of people, including myself, who kind of had to really
(34:14):
woo someone over a period of time to kind of
seal the deal. My wife and I dated for on
and off for about three years before we got married
at age twenty four, and we've been married now twenty
eight years. So that's also a piece of advice that
I would give them. And finally, again I would address
the importance of looking for character and shared values as
really crucial foundations for a strong marriage, more than whether
they kind of meet all of your criteria for the
(34:36):
perfect soulmate. I think character is king, and you've got
to look for things that would make your spouse down
the road a good wife and mother and a good
husband and father.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
I really appreciate the creativity and the determination that you've
shown in the work you're doing, and I want to
encourage you to continue. Your point's not true. This is,
in fact, at the heart of civilization. I had a
great deal of our current collapse in terms of our
cities and in terms of crime and drug addiction and
(35:10):
suicide relates back directly to the challenge of loneliness and
the challenge of a society which has broken down what
had been historically for virtually all civilizations, the central building
block on which the civilization resides. So I think the
work you're doing is really really important.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
Well, thank you. I think we know that the state
of our union depends in important ways on the states
of our unions plural, so I think that's certainly a
key message this book is offering to the general public.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
Well, I want to thank you for joining me. Your
new book is Get Married, Why Americans Must Defy the Elites,
Forge strong Families, and Save Civilization. I want to encourage
our listeners to get a copy. It's available to Amazon
and at bookstores everywhere, and the work you're doing at
the University of Virginia on the National Marriage Project can
(36:02):
be found at National Marriageproject dot org. Brad, thank you
very much for joining me.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
Thank you, mister speaker.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
Thank you to my guest, Brad Wilcox. You can get
a link to buy his new book, Get Married, Why
Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save
Civilization on our show page at newtsworld dot com. Newtsworld
is produced by Gingers three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive
producer is Guernsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The
(36:36):
artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special
thanks to the team at Ginger three sixty. If you've
been enjoying Nutsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast
and both rate us with five stars and give us
a review so others can learn what it's all about.
Right now, listeners of Newtsworld can sign up for my
(36:56):
three free weekly columns at gingerstreect dot com slash newsletter.
I'm Nick Gingrich. This is newswork.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
M M m
On this episode of Newts World, What is the recipe
for happiness? If you listen to liberal elites or red
pill influencers, you say it's making money, living for yourself
and staying single without kids, and you'd be wrong. Nothing
predicts happiness better than a good marriage. According to new
research by the University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox, our
(00:28):
kids in communities not to mention, our civilization as a whole,
are much more likely to flourish when the state of
our unions are strong. Despite this, record number of Americans
are not succeeding at getting or staying married. In his
new book, Get Married, While Americans must defy the elites,
(00:48):
forge strong families, and save civilization, Brad Wilcox reveals the
anti family messages and policies coming out of Hollywood, Washington,
the media, at Kademia, and corporate America that have weakened marriage,
and he explains why America's most fundamental institution matters for
our civilization more than ever. I am really pleased to
(01:13):
welcome my guest, Brad Wilcox. He is a professor of
sociology the director of the National Marriage Project at the
University of Virginia, the Future of Freedom fellow at the
Institute for Family Studies and a non resident Senior Fellow
at the American Enterprise Institute. Brad, Welcome and thank you
(01:45):
for joining me on Newsworld. You know, Brad, I'm fascinated
with your National Marriage Project and the decision you made
to write what I think is a very important book.
How did this all start?
Speaker 2 (01:56):
So this really began actually here at the University of Virginia.
I was raised by a single mom nude and was
thinking as a college student here at UVA kind of
how much dads mattered, and then began to realize that
marriage was the institution that connects men to their kids
on average, and that led me to pursue a PhD
in sociology at Princeton and then come back here to
teach at UVA and bring the National Marriage Project from
(02:18):
Rutgers where it was to the University of Virginia. And
since two thousand and nine we've been kind of producing
reports and other research, including this new book, Get Married,
on a regular basis. The reports have been called the
State of our Unions, and they've been kind of chronicling
the fortunes of marriage in America, and I started doing
this with an eye towards how marriage matters for children.
As I've been talking to students here at UVA, particularly
(02:41):
young women at the university, there's just kind of more
and more concern but I'm hearing from them about kind
of their dating options. They tend to outnumber men here
at UV Obviously, they also kind of would say that
a lot of the guys are not really interested in
commitment or don't seem to be kind of focused on
a long term relationship. So now I've been writing and
thinking a lot more about the importance of marriage for adults,
(03:02):
and this book is designed in part to kind of
give people a roadmap for kind of getting married and
also kind of a rationale for focusing a lot more
in their twenties and thirties on not only getting married,
but I'm forging a strong and stable marriage as well.
So that's sort of where I've gone with the National
Marriage Project here at the University of Virginia.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
It's interesting because young adults, those under the age of thirty,
feel higher rates of loneliness compared to any other generation.
February twenty twenty three, Gallipol found the seventeen percent of
Americans said they felt loneliness throughout most of the day.
For young Americans under the age of thirty, that was
twenty four percent, and those in lower income households earning
(03:47):
less than twenty four thousand dollars a year twenty seven
percent suffer higher levels of daily loneliness than older and
higher income counterparts. I'm very interested in the study that
was done by Signa or nearly half of all Americans
report feeling lonely sometimes are always, and that Gen Z
ages eighteen to twenty two is the loneliest generation with
(04:09):
seventy nine percent. Think about that, seventy nine percent, eight
out of every ten feeling lonely at some point.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
What I'm projecting in the book is that at least
one in three young adults today, you know, folks in
their twenties like you were just talking about, will never marry.
So we're sort of seeing what I call the closing
of the American heart unfolding before us, where we're going
to see record levels of sort of permanent bachelors and
permanent bachelorettes. And then also I think record levels of
(04:38):
childlessness among the twenty something cohort today. So I'm trying
to do my part to kind of push back against
this closing of the American heart and kind of give
people some reasons to be more intentional about dating and
getting married, and then some advice about how to forge
strong and stable marriages for this twenty first century.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Well, what leads you to assume that there's a direct
correlation between loneliness and marriage.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
So we do know, for instance, from work done by
Dan Cox, my colleague at AI, that single millennium women
are twice as like I said, they're often lonely compared
to their married peers. He's done other work too, just
kind of drawing an empirical connection between loneliness and marriage.
We know, too, for some new work done by the
Rise of Chicago economists that happiness in America has been
(05:33):
dropping since the early two thousands. And the number one
factor that this new study from Chicago attributes this to
is this closing of the American heart, this drop in marriage,
that's the biggest contributor to declines and happiness in America.
So obviously I kind of live and work in the
shadow of Thomas Jefferson. I mean literally, I kind of
live just sort of below his Monticello and he was
(05:57):
obviously famous for penning. And my other thing is the
Declaration of Independence talked about the pursuit of happiness, that
kind of classic American pursuit, and more and more Americans
need are having difficulty realizing that pursuit. In a large part,
I think because they're not able to get married in
the first place and then stay married in the second place.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
This may be too pragmatic and therefore not necessarily accurate,
but it strikes me that there's a whole logical pattern.
If you're living alone and you go home to an
empty apartment or an empty house rather than being with somebody,
you almost inherently, I would think, would be more lonely.
(06:36):
What am I missing?
Speaker 2 (06:37):
No, you're I think, kind of hitting manel right on
the head. And in the book, one of the things
that I talk about are the stories of young adults
in their mid thirties who are lonely. I talk about
a young man living the outer suburbs of Washington, d C.
A guy that I'll call Scott, both for the book
and for now. And here's a guy who's reasonably successful,
(06:59):
earning six figures, owns a home, he's a defense consultant,
college degree, all that kind of stuff, and so by
kind of the sterends of the culture, which kind of
thinks today that it's all about kind of the job
and the money and the degree. He should be doing fine,
but he's not. He says, you know, I've got degrees
on my wile, I've got accomplishments and certificates, but it
doesn't mean anything in the end. He told me, he says,
(07:20):
I have to get up every day and look in
the mirror and realize I'm alone. I have nobody. A
young man who's in his mid thirties and keenly feeling
the lack of a wife and kids. Or take Taylor,
who lives in the Rocky Mountain West, and she talks
about kind of prioritizing her career over dating, really with
a night towards marriage in her twenties, and now she's
(07:42):
in her mid thirties as well, and a career in
digital marketing hasn't kind of delivered as much meaning and
value to her as getting married and having kids. She
does babysit for her nieces and nephews, and she likes that,
but she told me, she says, the older I get,
I'm like you know, is there a chain ants that
I could have a family of my own right now,
(08:03):
do fun things with them, fingerpaint whatever. I don't know
what kids do. So these kind of story is going
to give you a sense of how obviously there are
some folks who are flourishing as singles, but we are
seeing that on a lot of these emotional indicators, from
loneliness to happiness to life satisfaction, newt that single Americans
today are more likely to be floundering, and even more
so today relative to say, fifteen years ago.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
Is being lonely lead them to focus on trying to
find somebody or does it lead them to assume this
is an unavoidable fate.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
I think in some cases it makes them more intentional
about dating or putting themselves into social situations, whether it's
you know, the office Christmas party or the local church
or volunteering at the local food bank if you want
to get married, those are the kinds of things that
I think would be helpful to do. But in other cases,
and I think Scott's story is kind of an example
(08:56):
of this. There seems to me there's kind of a
vicious cycle or once you kind of feel like marriage
is beyond your grasp, then you are more likely to
kind of potentially retreat from social life. In Scott's case,
actually religious life. He became less religious than he was
as a twenty something guy. So that's obviously the more
negative response to a situation like that.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
I like your term, the closing of the American heart
is that yours.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
It is Yep. It's one of the sort of phrases
that I talk about in the book.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
I think in a sense you're suggesting that for a
lot of people who are lonely, they really find it
hard to open their heart to somebody else.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
Yeah, that's correct. But I also think, and you know,
I know you've been talking a lot about sort of
technology and social media, and what I also think to
it's just the nature of the beast since twenty ten,
that screen time is competing with social time and dating
time and opportunity. So that's also part of challenge that's
facing us too.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
It raises an interesting question. I think a generation ago,
I would have said that it was the pressure of
employment and focusing on your job and deciding that you
couldn't do both. The sort of the whole liberation of
women and Betty Free Dan and that kind of thing.
But I run into young people who are so immersed
(10:17):
in their phone that they literally don't have very good
ability to talk to people. Correct. Yes, they'll text you
even if you're in the same room.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
Yeah. No. I was at a July fourth party or
in Charlottesville, Virginia, not too long ago, and there were
a bunch of teenagers sitting on the front lawn preparing
to watch the fireworks go off. And they were sitting
on the lawn. Some of them are talking, but many
of them are just texting. And as you were saying,
they were texting one another, which was just so shocking.
So I talked about this in terms of kind of
in the book as sort of our electronic opiates today,
(10:49):
and it's both you know, our phones, but also think
looking for teenage boys and young men and even middle
aged guys too. Nowadays it's the Xbox, it's gaming as
things that are drawing us away from in person connections.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
You have loneliness, you have people who are not getting married.
But then you go a step further and you say
that marriage is the key to saving civilization. I mean
that's a pretty big claim. Why do you believe that, Well, I.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
Think, as you probably know well and maybe more than others.
And there's obviously a lot of folks who think that
who is the next occupant of the White House is
the most important kind of issue facing our country. And
why I don't want to minimize the importance of the election.
I want to sort of stress that kind of who's
in our house, you know, who's in my kid's house,
you know, is often more important than who's in the
White House. Right. So the point there is that, you know,
(11:55):
as Jefferson said, he talked about life, liberty and as
I mentioned, the pursuit of happiness, and when it comes
to life, we're seeing We've got a new study coming
out these family studies from the Brooking scholar Jonathan Rothwell,
is that the number one predictor of deaths of despair
across America is marriage rates. So, especially when working class
men are not getting married, not staying married, much more
(12:18):
likely to succumb to alcoholism, drug abuse, or direct suicide.
When it comes to liberty, I think you can appreciate
that one of the biggest drivers of the growth in
the federal bureaucracy is the falling fortunes of marriage and
the stable two parent family. But then also kind we
know that the strongest predictor of the health of the
American dream is to share of two parent families in
(12:40):
a community. This is from work by Rosh Chatty at Harvard,
So kind of think about that is one expression of
positive liberty America. Can you make it in America? And
if you come from a neighborhood, a community where there
are lots of two parent families and you're a poor kid,
your odds of realizing that dream are much much higher.
But if you come from a neighborhood where's lots of
single parent families, they're much much lower. And then, as
(13:03):
I said before, the macro level, the biggest happiness factor
is marriage trends. And then for individuals, what my book
shows is the top predictor of happiness for both men
and women is not money, it's not their job, it's
not sexual frequency, it's the quality of their marriage. And
so happily married folks are just doing way better than
(13:24):
their fellow Americans who are not happily married and their
fellow Americans who are single.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
How do you reverse this? Let me back up a
second and to say, I think this also fits into
the explosion of drug addiction, the explosion of homelessness, the
explosion of violence caused by people who are mentally ill,
because in fact, the system can't accommodate and help people
come to grips with life. And so you have a
(13:49):
substantial number of people who are basically damaged by the
act of living in isolation and the act of having
no support mechanisms. So how do you turn that around?
Speaker 2 (14:01):
So I think obviously part of the subtitle is defy
the Elites. And when I first kind of released the
notice of the book, there are lots of smart journalists,
elite journalists who are pushing back and they're single. Elites
are doing great, Brad, what are you talking about the
by elites? And my point is that too many of
our elites talk left and walk right when it comes
to marriage and family. I have a piece in The
Atlantic coming on in this next week, and the idea
(14:24):
there is that they themselves are kind of living marriage
focused lives, family focused lives oftentimes, but they're presiding over
Hollywood enterprises, or legislation in Congress, or journalistic articles hearing
in mainstream outlets that are basically denigrating or devaluing marriage
(14:45):
or kind of minimizing its importance. In the book, I
talk about a piece that came out when I was
finishing up the book, was trending on Twitter from Bloomberg
that said that women who stay single and don't have
kids are getting richer, and it kind of basic presented
a story that suggested that marriage and motherhood were pathways
to emiseration and misrious. It's all the women who were
(15:06):
kind of profiled, who were single and childless. We're doing wonderfully,
and we're now actually kind of getting this message too
from the online right people like entertain as well. So
I think part of the challenge is to kind of
encourage our elites broadly to find, whether it's in the
c suite or up on Capitol Hill, to do a
better job of passing legislation, running stories, having scripts and
(15:31):
movies that paint not a kind of rose colored view
of marriage and family new, but one that's actually truthful.
I think that would be helpful in terms of just
changing the culture. On the policy front, I think tackling
the marriage penalty embedded in a lot of our means
tested programs and policies would help working class families who
often face pretty big penalties and things like medicaid from
getting married. When it comes to our churches, having more ministries,
(15:54):
like there's a mystry called Comunio which is serving Catholic
and Protestant churches across the US. Upping their game on
the marriage front, I think would be a helpful thing.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
And then I think.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
Frankly trying to figure out ways to help families, both
with legislation on Capitol Hill, but also with kind of
just advice about ways to kind of tame the technological
beast and to kind of help families have both parents
and teens kind of put their phones in the kitchen corner,
you know, when they come home, and leave them there
(16:25):
for the duration of most of their evening or weekend.
There's more that I say in the book. We just
have to be I think more intentional on number of friends,
the cultural front, the policy front, the religious front, and
then to what we're doing in our homes to kind
of build a culture that's more family friendly.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
And you make a point that actually ethnicity is the
largest single predictor of marriage rates. Can you expand on that?
Speaker 2 (16:51):
Yeah, So one of the things that I did was
kind of talk about there's a lot of bad news
to discuss when it comes to marriage and family America today,
but there's good news as well. And one piece of
the good news in the book is there are four
groups of Americans who are flourishing relatively speaking when it
comes to marriage. One is Asian Americans, as you just mentioned,
One is religious Americans, another is what I call strivers
(17:13):
Americans who are college educative, kind of more long term orientation,
professional orientation that's financially bet avential for families. And then
conservative Americans are the fourth group that are more likely
to be doing well on the marriage front. And when
it comes to that first group, Asian Americans, we see
that they're more likely to be getting married in the
first place and staying married in the second place. In fact,
(17:33):
there's no group of Americans new who are more likely
to be both married and stably married than Indian Americans,
especially immigrants directly from India. So it kind of just
gives you some sense that what we're talking about is
not just about money and class. It's also about culture.
And I think we can all appreciate the ways in
which the Indian culture has been for a very long
(17:54):
time pretty marriage minded.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
Do you see any of that spreading. I mean, is
it literally limited to those ethnic pockets.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
Well, I think we have seen just in the elite
circles that I track. There was a book published this
fall called The Two Parent Privilege by Melissa Kearney, an
economist at Brookings of all places, and very positive kind
of take on marriage and kids. Got a lot of
good attention, So I think that's a helpful sign. My
book obviously advances the conversation too in the media and
(18:25):
other venues, but beyond Asian Americans, Yeah, I do think
we see certainly in the religious world there are new
ministries like the one I've just mentioned, Comenial that's serving
a lot of churches across the US, and my own
parish here in Charlottesville, Virginia. There's been an uptick in
young marriages from Catholic Who's that's the Catholic student group
at the University of Virginia. And I've never seen a
(18:47):
group of Catholic students at EVA, and I've been in
touch with them for the last twenty years who've been
so kind of focused on dating and marriage, you know,
recognizing that the broader culture is having a lot of difficulty.
So there are some I think what we might call
points of light on the horizon. But I also want
to be honest with you, nid, I think that sort
of for the broader society, the trends are not going
(19:10):
to be good, at least for the short term, and
so we've got to be more intentional about giving people
kind of a roadmap that will kind of bring them
to higher ground and avoid what I would sorter of
view as a kind of demographic tsunami that's coming our
way since across from East Asia, across the Pacific and
going to be hitting our shores in the coming years.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
I'll mentioned a while ago that there are legal consequences
to getting married that are negative that frankly I thought
we had taken out of the system. Do you know,
has anybody put together if a new administration came in
and they wanted to be strongly pro marriage, has anybody
put together a list of the things that should be
(19:49):
repealed or the things that should be changed.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
So I have a chapter with an AI volume that's
going to do some of that. But yeah, I've got
some ideas about how, for instance, to tackle the marriage
panel in our means tested programs, Things like Medicaid would
be one example. They're income tax, but it would be
a different example. The food stamps would be a third example.
I also think it'd be helpful too, both at the
federal and the state and local levels, to talk about
(20:14):
what's called the success sequence, which means is I think
you probably know encouraging young adults to get at least
a high school degree, work full time in their twenties,
and get married before having children. If you kind of
follow those three steps, your odds are being poor just
three percent, and your odds of being in the middle
class or higher eighty six percent as you head into
your late twenties and thirties. I think too many of
(20:35):
you young adults don't appreciate how much not just actually marriage,
but even full time work we're seeing. I think troublingly,
a large number of young men, you know, especially young
men who are not that kind of striver or that
college track, are not working full time. They're kind of
moving in and out of different gigs, whether it's driving
uber or working at a fast food restaurant. Also saying
(20:58):
visa via the whole Mayor and Love issue, that a
lot of working class couples are couples now where she
works more hours than he does, makes more money than
he does, and she also does more of the housework
and if they've got kids, childcare, and that's obviously a
recipe for relationship disaster. So we've got to be thinking
about that issue as well, encouraging young adults to appreciate
(21:21):
the value of marriage and work, especially for young men.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
You also talk a little bit about the concept which
I frankly had not heard of, about the rise of
the I mean, I may say this wrong, but the
trad wife social media. What is that all about. That's
totally new to me until I saw your book.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
So there is kind of, like, as we can I appreciate,
there's a way in which social media kind of balkanizes.
It creates all these different subcultures across the spectrum, and
one of them is kind of the tradwife subculture. It's
kind of, you know, basically urging women to embrace marriage,
motherhood and traditional roles and kind of celebrating domesticity, femininity,
(22:01):
beautiful dresses, beautiful kitchens and homes and meals and all that,
caring for kids. And we've seen some of that, particularly
in the Mormon community, in the last decade, but and
it's now kind of spread to many other parts of
the internet as well, So that's certainly part of what
we're seeing now. But when it comes to kind of
how does this sort of play out for ordinary couples,
I've got a kind of somewhat of a complicated message
(22:22):
in the book in terms of gender. So what I
see is that for women, for instance, having a husband
who had embody some classic masculine traits like protectiveness and
being a good provider and being even physically strong, these
are all things that women across the spectrum tend to
appreciate in men. But when it comes to kind of
(22:43):
how you divide work in family, not seeing a huge
connection for kind of the average woman to her happiness.
So I kind of bundless together and knew as a
kind of a neo traditional model is sort of on
average often attractive for today's married women, especially mary moms,
and that traditional pieces are still looking for guys who
(23:03):
are reliable providers and are protective of them in a
variety of contexts socially, physically, et cetera. But they're also
looking for guys who are engaged with the kids across
the ideological spectrum. Engaged dads are definitely appreciated by women,
but how you kind of divide up housework and paid
work is pretty flexible today in terms of how that
(23:25):
connects up to merrital happiness. For today's women, there are.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
A variety of ways to be positive in a long
term relationship. Is that part of your message when.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
It comes to the division of housework and paid work.
What I'm basically saying here is that there's no one
model today that correlates consistently with a better outcome, and
that would be I think kind of maybe good news
for folks in the center of these sort of gender wars.
I think where my conclusions would be more traditional is
(23:55):
just sort of saying I think there are important ways
in which women are still looking women on the left
implicitly for them, oftentimes for guys who are protective, ambitious, hardworking,
and are employed on a full time basis. So those
kinds of traits and characteristics are still very much appealing
to women, even on the left to think of themselves
as either a galitarian or even say things like gender
(24:17):
is fluid. But when you kind of push beneath to
like what makes you happy, you know then they'll talk
about the way in which you know their husband is
hardworking or protective or ambitious, even if they're kind of
ideologically on the left.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
There's this conflict. Though I listened to some of the
day really surprised me who I've always thought it has
been pretty liberal, who said, we've had a generation of
telling young males that their inferior, that they are the problem,
et cetera. And he said, you know, you do that
long enough, and you really do have an extraordinary withdrawal
(24:53):
and an unwillingness to compete. And this goes back to
books that were written twenty years ago about undermine the
whole concept of masculinity. So you didn't just have a
pro feminism, but you had an anti male kind of
part to that. To what extent is that also combined,
I think with the ability to amuse yourself with computerized
(25:15):
games so that you literally on a relatively low income,
can occupy yourself and feel like you're busy having fun.
You don't need to go out and do all these things.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
I talk about a male malaise, you know, for younger
men and teenage boys, and I think it's probably about
these electronic opiates that give, you know, teenage boys in
the similar crop right of being that white knight riding
on your horse, but just doing it all on the xbox.
So that's part of the problem. And I think the
other part of the problem is that we're not giving
(25:46):
young men a constructive model of masculinity, and so they
gravitate to people like Andrew Tate who kind of give
them a more misogynistic model of masculinity. And if we
where as a culture giving young men a distinctive model
of masculinity that they could buy into and identify with
and guide their transition into adulthood, we'd be doing a
(26:07):
lot better by them, but also by dating and marriage
as well.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
You describe the degree to which very often the next
generation can't sustain the economic success, particularly if they come
out of broken homes or situations where they don't end
up getting married. And I was struck because I just
saw a study a couple days ago that the five
wealthiest families in Florence in fourteen seventy one are the
(26:52):
five wealthiest families in Florence because they have very strong
family ties, They have a very strong sense of generational obligation.
Thomas Mann wrote about the Budenbrook cycle where you go
from shurt sleeves to wealth to shirt sleeves in three generations. Well,
apparently the medici and others have figured out they don't
want to do that, and they somehow instill in their
(27:15):
children the obligation that you are going to manage this,
you are going to maintain this. And it's worked now
for five hundred years.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
Yeah, there have been a number of studies in recent years,
both in England and in Italy kind of in this spirit,
and it does, I think, remind us that there is
an intergenerational feature to family life that Americans can lose
sight of. Kind of tending the fires, you know, on
the home front can be good for not just you
and your kids, but even your sense your grandkids. And
(27:45):
by contrast, if things are not going well in one generation,
their offer and not going to go well in not
just the next generation, but the third generation and beyond.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
You make that point from a different angle when you
point out that males who come from non intact families
are dramatically more likely to end up in prison. Can
you comment on the degree to which growing up in
a sort of chaotic environment contributes to being unable to
function within a normal framework.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
Yeah, one of the most striking findings in the book
from my perspective as a scholar and as a social scientist,
it's just the finding from the NLS Y ninety seven,
is big federally funded survey that tracks people over time,
is that boys today who were raised in any kind
of non intac family basically about twice as likely to
land in prison or in jail than their male peers
(28:37):
who are from intact, married families. And more particularly, that
young men are being raised in non intac families are
more likely to spend some time in prison or in
jail than they are to be graduating from college. So
they're going to get you to give you two sets
of stats here on this. So young men from intact
families with mom and dad in the household, thirty eight
(28:57):
percent of them graduate from college. Only nine percent of
them would spend some time in Jailberson. You know, it
could be a night in the cling for a fight
at the bar, right, but some prisoner jail. By contrast,
boys being raised by single moms nineteen percent of them
will spend some time in prison or jail by the
time they turn thirty. Only fifteen percent of them will
graduate from college today, So there's just no question when
(29:19):
it comes to school and problems with the law. Young
men are more likely to have a pretty negative outcome
when they don't have their married parents. Now, for girls,
the story there is more about kind of the emotional piece.
We see a lot higher lovels of depression sadness for
girls and non attack families, and that's kind of where
their kind of family chaos is expressed. And there's a
(29:40):
new book coming a week after my book by Rob
Henderson that kind of chronicles he was raised kind of
a single mom and then foster care and then adoption
and his adoptive parents got divorced, and his book coming
out a week after Mind kind of gives you more
of a personal story about how his fortunes in school
and life and flowed with the stability of his family background.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
But as you look at all this, are you optimistic
or pessimistic that we can turn this around?
Speaker 2 (30:10):
I think short term I'm pretty pessimistic. I think that
the trends are pretty strong right now towards less marriage,
less stating fewer kids. I think we're going to see
a record number of young adults today who are going
to end up kindless, what they call bare branches in China,
without the benefit of a spouse and children to sustain them,
especially in midlife and later life, financially, health wise, and
(30:31):
emotionally too. But I do obviously also show groups that
are managing to make it marriage wise new and I
do see efforts in civil society and in my own
world where people are forging strong families. And I give
people some advice about how you can yourself kind of
beat these larger trends. So I think that's sort of
(30:52):
the helpful note in my book is kind of giving
people a roadmap for how they themselves can forge a
strong and stable marriage today.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
I'm really curious how do young people today get marriage advice,
particularly if they come out of a non traditional background
and don't have immediate access to in their own family.
Speaker 2 (31:11):
Yeah, and I think a lot of what we're seeing
is that people are turning to popular shows like Bachelor
and Bachelorett, and they're turning obviously the Instagram and TikTok too,
and kind of taking cues from influencers of one stripe
or another. And I think the challenge with that kind
of messaging oftentimes is it's more superficial in terms of
the kind of things that are being stressed, in terms
of maybe it's looks or humor or charm or money
(31:35):
as sort of the markers of a good dating partner
and even a good spouse down the road. I think
also you can see two in the pop culture and
over the romanticized understanding of love and marriage. And I've
got a piece in the Wall State draw coming out
on what I call the soulmate myth and begin with
Taylor Swift's song Lover, which again kind of gives us
a very romantic view about marriage. And I think what
(31:58):
the challenge we face is kind of letting our young
adults know that, yes, romance is important. Yes looks and
money are things worth kind of keeping in mind, but
when it comes to forging a strong and stable marriage,
you really need to look for qualities of character, things
like loyalty, fortitude, fidelity. These are the kinds of virtues.
It would be part and parcel of a good long
(32:19):
term relationship, a good marriage, and would be the foundation
for a strong family life as well. I think that's
the challenge. And to your point earlier, I think having
people who are online kind of giving this message in
accessible and engaging ways is part of what's needed to
to kind of counter what people might otherwise encounter on
their screens.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
So, given everything we've learned about young people today and
the dysfunctionalities and the lack of accurate information, what advice
would you have for somebody who's looking for a spouse.
Speaker 2 (32:49):
So one of the things that my calling, doctor Wenny Wang,
has found in her research is that couples who meet
in some kind of religious event or activity, or meet
in college in person are more likely to be flourishing,
and the couples who meet online or in bars and
taverns are the least likely to be flourishing in their marriages. Now,
it's just a correlation, but it's worth kind of thinking about.
I think the point I'm getting at is it's important
(33:11):
trying to sort of maximize your time as a young
adult doing things in person, whether it's socially and after
work if you're religious, you know, in some kind of
church or synagogue, college, and not listening to parents and
peers and professors who would tell you too to kind
of push all that off unto your late twenties or
early thirties, because what we see is the couples who
(33:32):
get married kind of in their twenties roughly defined mid
twenties are more likely to be happily married, and I
think today more likely to avoid ending up kinless. So
I would just be intentional in part about using opportunities
in your early twenties and mid twenties, whether it's in
college or in the workplace, to meet people in person
and not just to rely upon their smartphone and dating
(33:52):
apps as well. I would also encourage men to be
more intentional and more courageous in terms of asking when
in their circles out and then encourage women to be
more kind of flexible and kind of giving the guys
a chance, you know, maybe a second date, even if
you're necessarily convinced in the first date. I know plenty
of people, including myself, who kind of had to really
(34:14):
woo someone over a period of time to kind of
seal the deal. My wife and I dated for on
and off for about three years before we got married
at age twenty four, and we've been married now twenty
eight years. So that's also a piece of advice that
I would give them. And finally, again I would address
the importance of looking for character and shared values as
really crucial foundations for a strong marriage, more than whether
they kind of meet all of your criteria for the
(34:36):
perfect soulmate. I think character is king, and you've got
to look for things that would make your spouse down
the road a good wife and mother and a good
husband and father.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
I really appreciate the creativity and the determination that you've
shown in the work you're doing, and I want to
encourage you to continue. Your point's not true. This is,
in fact, at the heart of civilization. I had a
great deal of our current collapse in terms of our
cities and in terms of crime and drug addiction and
(35:10):
suicide relates back directly to the challenge of loneliness and
the challenge of a society which has broken down what
had been historically for virtually all civilizations, the central building
block on which the civilization resides. So I think the
work you're doing is really really important.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
Well, thank you. I think we know that the state
of our union depends in important ways on the states
of our unions plural, so I think that's certainly a
key message this book is offering to the general public.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
Well, I want to thank you for joining me. Your
new book is Get Married, Why Americans Must Defy the Elites,
Forge strong Families, and Save Civilization. I want to encourage
our listeners to get a copy. It's available to Amazon
and at bookstores everywhere, and the work you're doing at
the University of Virginia on the National Marriage Project can
(36:02):
be found at National Marriageproject dot org. Brad, thank you
very much for joining me.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
Thank you, mister speaker.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
Thank you to my guest, Brad Wilcox. You can get
a link to buy his new book, Get Married, Why
Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save
Civilization on our show page at newtsworld dot com. Newtsworld
is produced by Gingers three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive
producer is Guernsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The
(36:36):
artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special
thanks to the team at Ginger three sixty. If you've
been enjoying Nutsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast
and both rate us with five stars and give us
a review so others can learn what it's all about.
Right now, listeners of Newtsworld can sign up for my
(36:56):
three free weekly columns at gingerstreect dot com slash newsletter.
I'm Nick Gingrich. This is newswork.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
M M m
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