Transcript: Andrea Mrozek

An interview with the author and Cardus Family fellow

One of the themes of the Lean Out podcast is the breakdown of trust between men and women. For a marker of this rupture, we need only look to declining marriage rates. My guest on this week’s program has penned a new book about the institution of marriage, making the case that we should reconsider its benefits — not just for individual health and happiness, but for overall societal good.

Andrea Mrozek is a senior fellow at Cardus Family. With Peter Jon Mitchell, she’s written a new book titled I…Do? Why Marriage Still Matters. Andrea Mrozek returns to the podcast.

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview for free here.

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TH: Last time you were on the podcast, we spoke about declining fertility rates in the Western world. This time around, we're going to talk about marriage. This is a subject we've covered a lot at Lean Out over the past year, trying to understand this emotional and political rift between men and women. With your colleague, Peter Jon Mitchell, you have published a book on why marriage still matters. To start today, tell us a little bit about what drew you to this subject.

AM: Mainly I was realizing working at a public policy think tank, looking at family issues, that I was learning a lot that was actually changing my perspective. I thought, along with Peter Jon, of course, that we could package this up and create something of a winsome, concise summary of the issues that marriage faces — and draw people along into the conversation. It's not a book that's intended to dive deep into every issue, but it is meant to present many of the different things that marriage is facing as it declines, essentially.

Over time, I've come to see that marriage and family are the premier institutions in our lives. We have low trust in media. We have low trust in government. We have low trust in religions and market and all these other institutions. Family and marriage are things that we can have a small amount of control over. I wanted to present other Canadians, North Americans, with an opportunity to reimagine what marriage can be in our lives, particularly now that our world is feeling very filled with instability. That was the genesis of the idea.

TH: Just on a personal note, if I can ask, what was your view of marriage growing up?

AM: I was born in the '70s. Anybody growing up in our world today, our culture today, does not have an institutional view of marriage. We do not think marriage is an institution. When you look up the trust statistics pertaining to other institutions, you don't find marriage listed there. I definitely didn't think of it as an institution. I thought of it as a romantic relationship and a way of showing love. It is also that, but it's more than that. The way it builds into our communities, the modern day miracle of having a marriage stay together and raising kids, people don't see that as a miracle.

I was just at a little community event at our community centre, a winter carnival this past weekend, and somehow this book came up. A mom asked, "What's the title?" I told her, and you could just see her thinking. It's not the way we think of marriage. Nobody thinks of marriage as an institution or as something that builds into our communities and our world. I didn't think about it that way either.

TH: Where are we at in Canada? What are the numbers? We know marriage is declining, but where is it at specifically — and how does it compare to the US?

AM: Closer to the time I was born in the '70s, it would have been like 90% of families were married parent families. It still is a majority, but the trajectory is down. We're at, I think, somewhere in the seventies now, like 70% in Canada. I'm forgetting the American statistics right now, but marriage in America remains more popular. I recently read a book, and it involved a man who was on his eighth marriage. I don't think that kind of thing happens in Canada. If you're getting into your fifth, sixth, seventh relationship, they're going to be common law in Canada. And in the States, apparently, you can get married that number of times.

Actually, there's a book called The Marriage Go-Round, and that one is an American author, an American researcher. Cherlin is his name. That speaks to that tendency to get married and married and married and the love of marriage that remains even when it's just serial monogamy.

TH: There are health and wellbeing benefits to marriage, as well as economic benefits, of course. This doesn't get talked about much in our current culture. Make your best case for us. What does the evidence have to say on that? Briefly, what is the marriage advantage for both men and for women?