There are two unusual things about this book: It’s coming out for Valentine’s Day. And the title is a simple, strong imperative. 
The release of Get Married was deliberately planned to coincide with the end of National Marriage Week, an annual focus on the importance of marriage that ends on Valentine’s Day, February 14. And the book’s title commands us to do something for which that earlier generations did not seem to need an order.
Brad Wilcox is a recognized authority on the state of American marriage. Director of the National Marriage Project and professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, he’s been charting what’s going on with marriage in the United States for decades. The annual “State of Our Unions” report is compelling (if often disturbing) reading about what Americans are thinking about and doing in terms of marriage.
One of the things they’re not doing is getting married.
Marriage itself has ceased being socially accepted and expected as the defining relationship among adults. It’s not even first among equals. It competes with various forms and durations of concubinage, ranging from the overnight “one-night stand” to varying periods of “shacking up” to non-institutionalized, quasi-permanent “living together” whose endurance once upon a time was called “common law marriage.” The demise of that last term, first from our law and later from our social vocabulary is telling: to the degree a non-marital commitment aped the permanence of marriage, it even acquired a name that pointed to what it somehow mirrored. That just proves that marriage was the gold standard for the normal (statistically and axiologically) adult relationship.
Today, even when people finally decide on marriage from among the à la carte choices available, the news is rather discouraging. American men and women now marry at later ages than ever before. That, of course, bears implications for parenthood: reproductive interventions notwithstanding, biological clocks are still ticking and delayed marriage narrows the window of the childbearing years. That the American fertility rate is plummeting below replacement levels (and would be even worse absent current immigrants pulling the curve upwards) is a correlate of deferred marriage.
Perhaps even more important about these trends are the mentalities that fuel them. One reason for delayed marriage is what Wilcox has called the “cornerstone versus capstone” debate: is marriage the foundation for venturing into adult life or is it the crowning achievement of that journey? In other words, does one sail jointly into adulthood, building together because “it is not good for the man [or the woman] to be alone” (Gen 2:18)? Or is marriage the cherry on the adulthood cake, the crowning achievement on the resume of life achievements? Has focus on “security” and “career” shifted young adult priorities so markedly that marriage, instead of being a building block, is now a “capstone?”
Wilcox captures this paradigm shift in the opening paragraph of chapter one:
My students at the University of Virginia … [are] curious, hardworking to a fault, and friendly, and many of them have big hearts for good causes here in Charlottesville …. But they do suffer from one big blind spot. They are overwhelmingly preoccupied with their education and future careers to the exclusion of love and marriage. “Résumé virtues” are much more salient to them than “eulogy virtues.” Talking and thinking about marriage—or dating someone seriously—is a rarity among students at UVA.
Another reason for delayed marriage is the focus on individual “freedom” that is the ethos of secular American culture. Men, in particular, have always evinced a certain “commitment phobia,” blending well with that strand of American culture allergic to ties that bind: Glen Campbell captured it when he sang that not being “shackled by forgotten words and bonds//and the ink stains that are dried upon some line” is what made his girl “gentle on my mind.”
To that mindset—a mindset shared by many wedding-age Americans—marriage is a constraint upon, if not end to “freedom.” Again, Wilcox captures that mentality:
What we are seeing emerge, often articulated by men and women from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, is what I call the flying solo myth. This first great myth that I address in this book holds that marriage is of little or no importance today. … “Freedom” is found and maintained by avoiding marriage—or at least putting it off as long as possible.
“Freedom” as indeterminacy is, of course, illusory. If you’re stuck in a wood, you have little chance of moving anywhere purposefully (much less getting out of that forest) if you have no fixed reference point. “Freedom” is not going to be as helpful in figuring out how not “freely” to be stuck-in-place as northside tree moss during the day or the North Star at night.
In eleven chapters, Wilcox consummately leads readers through many of the ideas, assumptions, and trends that sustain the contemporary American status quo about marriage, often exploding them.
Is it better to “fly solo?” Both human experience and sociological data suggest that, in the long run, the answer is no. There is a Wisdom greater than modernity’s recognizing—in the midst of a lot of “it was good’s”—that it is “not good” for people to be alone. From the current surge in suicide among teens and young adults to growing universal complaints about loneliness to the phenomenon of “kodokushi” (elderly and isolated Japanese of whose demise the first sign is the telltale aroma of decomposition coming from their apartments), deliberately flying solo often seems a kamikaze mission.
Other myths dismantled by Wilcox include the “soulmate” myth, a romanticized vision of a marriage or relationship partner that expects a Prince or Princess Charming completely, comprehensively, and exhaustively to fulfill all of one’s needs and wants. Wilcox rightly recognizes that no human person is going to meet those expectations and that clinging to them is only likely to set one up for failure. I’d observe that the description of a soulmate might be one be more apt of God. But lots of today’s marriageable generation are also religiously “Nones,” unlikely to find the thick and satisfying fare to satisfy that appetite amidst the thin gruel served up by traffickers in the “spiritual” and “values.”
A unifying myth that, in many ways bears responsibility for the current travails of matrimony, is dispatched in Wilcox’s chapter, “We Before Me: Looking Out for Number One Is a Recipe for Marital Disaster.” American culture is mesmerized by individualism, an obsession inherently inimical to social relationships and institutions. This idée-fixe is the singular fetish of pro-abortionists who, under Roe, used it to pretend a father has no compelling interest in the fate of his unborn child or parents in the “abortion decision” of their minor daughter. But its reach extends far beyond pregnancy—which I mention to illustrate the inherent contradiction of individualism inserted into inalienably social relationships—conditioning expectations of marriage that, frankly, are more conducive to marital breakup. There is an unbridgeable chasm between “we” and the best coordinated egoïsme-à-deux.
Is parenthood a “trap?” If marriage itself is inimical to freedom, parenthood must take that enslavement to the next level. Wilcox, on the other hand, challenges the myth that “kids make life and marriage miserable.”
One aspect of that discussion is how various myths interlock. If marriage is conceptualized primarily as the quest for a “soulmate” then, yes, a baby is going to subject those expectations to a severe stress test. Given their intimate involvement with baby, mothers generally more easily take it for granted that attention will shift to the child. But a man with soulmate expectations now finds that baby is a competitor to the complete, comprehensive, and exhaustive fulfillment of his needs, while the woman may very well decide that not only are her needs unmet but he is not engaged in equitable burden-sharing when it comes to parental responsibilities. Again, an earlier Wisdom that recognized the “two will become one flesh” (Gen 2:24, Eph 5:32) most completely in that third person, which then also reveals the lie of “me before we.”
For anybody seeking to understand where America is on marriage and how we have gotten here, this book is essential reading. While I stress the problems, let me make clear that Wilcox is a very balanced author. He notes the bad but also points out the good. His writing is optimistic: as a college professor, he believes in his students. In that sense, he reminds me of another college professor, some 60 years ago, who used to take his students—men and women—camping and swimming and hiking around Poland, using the opportunity to talk to and hear from them about love and responsibility.
That professor, of course, was a philosopher and theologian, while Brad Wilcox is a sociologist. He brings big data to bear on what he’s saying and, in the United States. that’s probably better: nothing convinces Americans that something matters more than its quantification. And Wilcox certainly crunches numbers from decades of research on these topics persuasively to argue his point.
But while this book is thoroughly documented, it is equally accessible. It is not an abstruse treatise but the work of a public intellectual who marshals his arguments for a broad public debate among Americans as to where we are on marriage. Wilcox’s style is upbeat and highly readable. He blends his data with stories and anecdotes from his students that illustrate how all this is playing out in real people’s lives. In that way, he puts a human face on the argument. And, when you read closely, you discover just what a great teacher and author Wilcox must be, because he dexterously repeats and reinforces major points in diverse ways, often with memorable turns-of-phrase that makes the reader say, “Yep, I agree.”
As a theologian, I’ve relied on Wilcox for years. He’s a sociologist who lets his data back up his conclusions. But I’ve found those conclusions solidly consistent with a Catholic vision of marriage and family as the basic cells of society. I’ve also found his data consistent with Vatican II’s recommendation that theologians look to the “signs (and anti-signs) of the times” to bring religious insight to bear on the needs and challenges of a particular age. In that sense, Wilcox’s work will prove enlightening to Catholics, even as they look to the current cultural moment from a faith perspective.
Wilcox thoroughly surveys the landscape surrounding American marriage today, expertly pointing out where the landmines lie. He criticizes the
elites [who] will push nearly any other solution besides marriage and family life. … The default assumption underlying [their ‘solutions’] … is that people are autonomous, isolated individuals. So, the state and the market should step in to reinforce our independence and reduce the value and power of family ties. In reality, the counterintuitive truth is that flourishing families—bound together by healthy, mutual dependence—are essential for our civilization.
And it is precisely because of those nostrums which, in law, policy, and culture, are killing marriages, families, and human flourishing in the United States that Wilcox summons young people to do the revolutionary imperative contained in his title: “Get married!” Not a bad message for Valentine’s Day.
Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization
By Brad Wilcox
Broadside Books/Harper Collins, 2024
Hardcover, 293 pages
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“In reality, the counterintuitive truth is . . .”
Repeat, please.
Again.
With the divorce rate so high in the U.S., it’s no wonder that children grow up suspicious of a marriage commitment. Also, so many of us, including our children, are “star-gazers”–obsessed with entertainers, athletes, and other celebrities, many of whom seem to have a pretty poor track record when it comes to marriage. It’s likely that young people conclude that if being thin and beautiful, talented at entertainment or sports, idolized by the public, and fabulously wealthy–is not enough to make a marriage last, then what chance do they have for a lasting marriage as a person with average looks and some extra fat around the middle or on the thighs, not a lot of talent, and living on an income that covers basic expenses earned from a non-exciting ol’ job?! Maybe our church youth groups should start “Marriage Talk” socials, where parish couples who have been married for decades describe how they met and fell in love and how they have stayed in love and together for so many years.
Our culture needs to be more welcoming to young families with children. Better medical care, better family leave, etc. our current culture appears to value CEO bonuses more than the welfare of young families.
Stop already. Just.stop.
.
The European countries have generous family leave policies and tax credits, some include baby bonuses. Guess what, their birthrates are not any better than ours.
Stop what? I am entitled to my opinion.
Yes, you are entitled to your opinion. It is just that what you promote will not help.
Will not help what? So, bigger CEO bonuses help us all? So, improved medical care for young families hurts us? Nonsense. Why are you opposed to young families with children getting help? Read the Gospels, especially Matthew 25.
The solutions you are suggesting will not help the fertility rates, which is our discussion here. If you want to attack CEO bonuses, perhaps there is a good argument for that, but raising fertility rates isn’t one of them.
Mrs Hess is right up to a point. But only up to a point.
Giving financial incentives to marry and have children is like pushing on a piece of string. If men and women don’t want to marry and don’t want to have children, financial incentives aren’t going to change their minds.
What nations need to do is to concentrate on men and women who do want to marry, including those who have children, but not as many as they would like. Many of these are dissuaded from marriage and family building only by financial constraints.
So, taking from the rich (who don’t need all the wealth they possess in order to live well) and giving their wealth to men so that they are attractive for marriage to women of good judgement, is a sound policy.
In all cases, a society must distinguish men who are suitable for marriage from those – and they are many – who don’t have what it takes to be husbands and fathers.
In the present condition of society, any man contemplating marriage must consider that he is thinking about entering an arrangement which his wife can terminate at will, taking the children – harming them emotionally – the house, the car and everything he owns but a bedsit and a budgerigar.
Mr. Petek
“So, taking from the rich (who don’t need all the wealth they possess in order to live well) and giving their wealth to men so that they are attractive for marriage to women of good judgement, is a sound policy.
In all cases, a society must distinguish men who are suitable for marriage from those – and they are many – who don’t have what it takes to be husbands and fathers.
.
Personally, that sounds a lot like stealing. But even if not (okay, one can call it taxes, but that does not make it moral), who, exactly is going to decide 1) Who is Rich 2) Who is Poor and 3) Who is worthy?
.
Do you honestly trust the the currents Powers That Be to make those choices?
In reply to Mrs Hess: [Taking from the rich] “sounds a lot like stealing.”
To me, it sounds a lot like taxation. Consider that the super-wealthy elite use their wealth to buy governments, to subvert the Christian social order and the family, and to put us in 15-minute cities where we will eat bugs, own nothing and be happy.
Please stop with the “CEO bonuses” and “improved health care” red herrings. Neither has anything to do with marriage in the U.S. or anywhere else.
You are certainly entitled to your opinion and free speech is our right but Mrs. Hess is correct. European nations offering every sort of social welfare benefits to families have not raised their fertility rates to replacement levels.
Its fair enough to support social welfare programs for other reasons but they don’t seem to improve demographics.
It’s not the welfare state that’s the problem. It’s there to ensure that people who cannot afford to marry (and therefore ought not to marry) can at least afford to live.
The problem is that people who are unmarried are having children when they ought not to be sexually active.
“It’s not the welfare state that’s the problem. It’s there to ensure that people who cannot afford to marry (and therefore ought not to marry) can at least afford to live.”
Actually, the first part of your statement is demonstrably false. The structure of many transfer payment and other programs in the U.S. (such as TANF, SNAP, LIHEAP, housing subsidies and others) results in what are called “cliff effects”, where small increases in income can disqualify individuals and families from receiving many thousands of dollars in benefits.
For exactly this reason, single adults receiving such benefits often have a disincentive to marry if doing so would increase household income. It also creates a disincentive to pursue career advancement for the same reason. The structure of welfare state policies discourages efforts by those less fortunate to emerge from poverty.
Therefore, to the extent poverty discourages marriage, we need to change how transfer payment and other income subsidy programs are structured so that they allow people to increase their economic mobility without incurring disruptive benefit cutoffs. If increased economic mobility is positively correlated with increases in marriage, changes to the structure of benefit programs might have a significant impact on marriage rates.
The biggest problem for a faithful Catholic is finding another faithful Catholic to marry. One can’t just go to church on Sunday and expect the attractive person in the next pew to have anything at all in common with a faithful Catholic. Almost all of the institutions that used to promote marriage have been dismantled– even something as simple as the Saturday evening dances at the Roseland dance hall or the village yenta who tried to match people. I wonder if the book addresses this practical problem. Saying that people should marry is easy; the nuts and bolts of actually making it happen are where push comes to shove.
Have you been to a Latin Mass, Andrew?
It’s a different situation there. And that may apply as well to Eastern Rite parishes.
Sadly, the culture at many US Catholic parishes can resemble the culture at large. Which explains how Catholics continue to mostly contracept , sterilize themselves, vote for politicians who support feticide, etc. ,etc. If we model the prevailing culture we’ll get the same results.
This IS a real need. We need to facilitate Catholics meeting each other.
Catholics only? Prejudicial? Because of my marriages, I may never retrieve my soul. But, I will keep trying to reach my savior.
Dependence breeds neediness which is an entirely unattractive quality for any mate to possess. If you’re not comfortable being on your own and meeting your own needs you have absolutely no right to drag another person into the mess that is your life.
Obviously, some degree of independence is desirable, e.g., financial solvency. But the idea that people can be totally independent or that neediness is not a natural human state. Neediness in itself is not a “mess” in one’s life anymore than the illusion that “I’ve got it all together” is either attainable and/or desirable.
Finances are one statistic somewhat of interest. But, yours truly hoped to document here that the statistics for total divorces are distorted by the share that are multiple divorces for the same persons. Maybe the overall 50% divorce rate is overstated…
My thesis is partly true, but less so than I thought. I did run across more data than anyone wants to know: https://www.wf-lawyers.com/divorce-statistics-and-facts/
About helping singles to find each other, two paths that, within my very extended family, have led to good marriages are, for college students the Newman Center or access to a reliable parish with a functional youth group, and the Catholic matchmaking websites. The latter only sounds tacky; the truth is that these websites offer an electronic neighborhood that can substitute for our decimated geographic neighborhoods where people used to get acquainted.
The key missing ingredient in too many of today’s marriages is the commitment. By saying “I do” the marriage partners are creating a new and sacramental reality, irreversible and secure. When estrangement might begin to set in later, both parties can return to the deeper fact and reality that they already burned that deceptive bridge, together.
Neediness is very much so an unattractive quality in any man or woman. You obviously suffer for issues of codependency that you don’t see it that way. Neediness and codependency are not a natural human state,what they are is a gateway to abusive relationships. That you would try to make a case that needing/depending on another person is attractive proves you are either completely hen-pecked or you abuse your wife. Which one is it, John?
Leonard, it’s not that John could be hen-pecked, it’s that you’re bird-dogging the issues and trying to tease conclusions.
There CAN be a case such as you describe, but it is not so for all cases. And your outline can not be set up as a universal.
Moreover, your outline has intrinsic flaw, eg., EITHER “needy” OR “hen-pecked” yet necessarily “from abuse” or “as victim”. I think this is an original defect that has its root in the beginning of psychoanalysis, where a world is made up upon inter-locking, inter-linking and mutually affirming tautologies and self-contained preconceptions. The practitioner goes looking for “the proof” and the “counselling” is framed to the eventual “result”.
Leonard if we apply your outline to homosexualism, it could be said that an orientation towards them recommended and promoted at this time, even insisted upon too, indulges their neediness, nurtures their co-dependency and reinforces them obliging us to hen-peck them and dote on them where and when they say.
You want to use your technique to find fault in families and among normal people but elevate homosexualism?
If we all were self sufficient Leonard, one of the persons in a marriage would be redundant.
Methinks Leonard may suffer the same problem that Adam did. After his creation, HE seems to be perfectly content with his solitary situation. It’s not Adam who speaks of his needing a “helpmate” but rather God who pronounces “it is not good that the man be alone” and remedies what apparently hadn’t struck the man. I repeat: “neediness” is one thing, but need–because you are neither exhaustively self-sufficient nor complete–is human. Its denial is what fuels the mania for “autonomy” which currently fuels some of the darkest impulses of the culture of death.
God walked with Adam before He gave Eve to him; Adam was not “solitary” and it would be God who opened his eyes to what was brought to him -Adam- next. It wasn’t “remedy”; it was God moving along the original plan of perfection.
Redemption mirrors this, it is like a parallel -“but strangely preceding”. God has to open our eyes to our needs and neediness and God has to bring about the sanctification from there and through the means He provides.
Does not the author mean Saint Valentine’s Day?
A great many of us could probably name people we know who are blissfully single and others who are miserably married. Doesn’t one’s fulfillment, whether married or single, depend on God’s will for the person? I doubt the author of either the book or the above article is implying it, but a one-size-fits-all approach seems counterproductive. True, until recently the vast majority of people married, and those single often felt like failures or second-class citizens. If a person remains single because he or she honestly feels it’s God’s will, the person should be honored for that decision. Assuming that the person is selfish or afraid of commitment could do more damage than good. Even marrying late is not necessarily a bad or wrong course of action. Better to marry the right person at 40 than the wrong person at 20 and live to regret it.
Nobody’s implying that “one size fits all” and, while there is an appreciation for being single, human experience has long corroborated the Biblical insight “it is not good for the man (or woman) to be alone.” It baffles me how people think consecrated virginity or celibacy is some intolerable burden but random singleness a vocation.
“one size fits all”? Isn’t that being Catholic? Only the blessed.
It gets harder to be blissfully single in your 50’s, 60’s & beyond minus spouse, children, or grandchildren.
Absolutely. We have married for almost 62. The were time when we almost split, both understood we mad promise to. Our family is a living Joy–4 Children, 16 Grandchildren, 15 Great Grand Children. Over the years we went total bankrupt, lost our, they abolished my department at Hofstra: Social Science and Religion. God had other plans for us. He moved me in to Real Appraising. I never wanted to make a lot of money, but it happened. My Children and Grand Children were aways there for. God works in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform.
Dr. Chuck Chalberg has an interesting review of this book. The two parts that struck me (and the first may be overly simplistic) is that at the same time we need stronger marriages, they are becoming more difficult to make because men are moving right while women are moving right. Second, the “ruling elites” are not preaching what they practice about marriage and family; the owners of technology companies who won’t let their own children have smartphones come to mind.
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2024/04/get-married-american-families-civilization-brad-wilcox-chuck-chalberg.html
Marriage for me, but not for thee.
🙂