Transcript: Brad Wilcox

My interview with the American sociologist and author

On the Lean Out podcast, we’ve talked a lot about plummeting birth rates in the West, about high rates of unhappiness among modern women, about the loneliness epidemic in our society, and about the crisis unfolding among men, with large numbers of suicides and overdoses.

My guest on the program this week says there’s a factor we should consider with each of these issues — and that is low marriage rates. And he thinks it’s time to have a conversation about the state of our unions.  

Brad Wilcox is a professor of sociology and director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. He’s also the author of Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization.

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

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TH: I found this book fascinating, and it resonated with me in a number of personal ways that we will get to. But to start today, half of Americans are now unmarried. That is a truly unprecedented state of affairs for society. We should note that Canada is similar. We're also experiencing a long-term decline in marriage rates. To set the stage for our conversation today, looking at the data in general terms, what impact is that trend having on individuals and on society?

BW: I think sometimes people think about love and marriage as simply individual, or maybe even familial, concerns. “It affects me, maybe my spouse, my kids.” But we've seen the data that strong families lead to good societies and good communities. Everything from mass incarceration, to the character of what we call the ‘American Dream’ down south of the border here, to national trends in happiness. All trace back very clearly to the health of marriage. Or, to put it in different terms, the state of our union depends to an important extent on the state of our unions — in the U.S. and this would be true for Canada as well.

TH: Your book points to some exceptions to the rule [of declining marriages]: Four groups of Americans who are, as you put it, especially likely to get married, steer clear of divorce court, and forge reasonably happy unions. Walk us through who these groups are.

BW: What I imagined, as I began this project, is that I would find that religious Americans, Asian Americans, and college-educated Americans — groups that I call “the strivers” in the book, folks who have a strong focus on education and the long term — that these three groups would be the ones who were the masters of marriage. But as I was crunching the numbers, I also found, really to my surprise, that conservatives also are uniquely successful at getting married and being happily married. 

So, what that means concretely is when I'm running regression models and I throw in religion, education, and race and ethnicity into the models, and then I throw ideology into the statistical models, I'm still finding there is a net effect of being conservative on your odds of being married and your odds of being happily married in the United States. That surprised me. I thought that was more of a religion thing. Conservatives obviously are not all religious, but are often more religious. I thought once you controlled for religion, that conservative story would disappear. It did not. So that is why they are the fourth group in the book.

One more thing to mention about those four groups is that a majority of them are married in an 18 to 55 demographic, whereas their comparison groups are not. So, a majority of conservatives are married, not a majority of liberal and moderates. A majority of religious Americans are married, not a majority of secular Americans. A majority of college-educated Americans are married, not less educated. Then, a majority of Asian Americans and whites are married, and not the majority of Black and Hispanics. So, along these four axes you see differences in who is getting married, who is staying married, and who is happily married.

TH: One of the things about these groups is that they are able to resist some of the messaging that we have in our culture right now that’s anti-marriage. The subtitle of your book is: “Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization.” In the book, you go through the messaging from elites — I'm assuming you mean economic elites — that devalues marriage, from both the right and the left. Walk us through the messaging coming from the radical left and the far right.

BW: When I began this project, to be frank, I was thinking primarily about more left-leaning journalists, professors, and culture shapers who are often delivering a negative message about marriage, or denying its value, or minimizing its value. As I was finishing up the book project, I came across an article in Bloomberg that said women who stay single and don't have kids are getting richer. It was arguing that there was a way in which marriage, or family life, was a path to less economic success. 

And then, there's an article called The Case Against Marriage in The Atlantic that I deal with. There's an article in The New York Times that says divorce can be an act of radical self love. These messages from the more mainstream left are encouraging folks to steer clear of marriage or family life, or minimize the importance of marriage. Primarily for women. I think everyone is aware of that line of argument.

But what's new is we are now seeing what I call the Red Pill Right. Online right figures like Pearl Davis and Andrew Tate, who have big platforms online. They are saying that marriage is basically a bad deal, especially for men, because of high divorce rates.

Oftentimes progressives on the left are telling women — and now this online right crowd is telling men — to steer clear of marriage, and instead focus on money, career freedom, and not settling down. In a sense probably using, but not really engaging the opposite sex in a relationship. So, these two different forces are now both ending up being anti-marriage voices in our culture today.

TH: You tweeted recently about a New York Times piece on a new memoir about polyamory, about open marriage. I thought this was a really good example to tease out. I actually went and read that memoir and it's a profoundly depressing book. The coverage of it is framed around this buzz, this hip new lifestyle, and liberation, and emotional evolution. But the actual story is her having a lot of very degrading sex, and it creating a lot of heartache and anxiety and stress in her marriage. This is a trend for these kinds of books by Gen X and Millennial women, who seem to be seeking liberation through sex — outside of committed relationships. I guess my question, though, is: Why is it any of our business what their choices are? Should we not just take an approach of “live and let live” here?