The marriage die is already cast, buckle up for the rough ride

There's no going back!

At the Cut, Elizabeth Traister warns of “the Marriage Plot,” what she describes as “the building wave of solemn advice from social scientists, pundits, and politicians that the answer to the assorted ills of single American men and women (but especially women) is marriage.” As it stands, I too think a much more robust and healthy marriage culture in the U.S. could solve a considerable amount of modern problems, chief among them the feelings of existential loneliness, rootlessness and despair griping an ever-expanding share of the younger generations. (Traister says the solution to these crises actually lays within “expanding social safety nets, strengthening labor laws, changing our tax code, overhauling housing policies, making education affordable, passing paid leave and child care, reimagining the criminal-justice system, restoring reproductive autonomy.” It’s just a progressive wish-list and nothing more. They’ve done all this stuff in Europe, of course, and it hasn’t worked there either, but we are Americans and historically we are nothing if not optimists.)

Actually though I’m sympathetic to criticism of this so-called “marriage plot,” though not in the same ways as the feminists are. My feeling is that, on marriage, the die has well been cast and there is simply nothing we can do about it at this point. Yes, Brad Wilcox and Ross Douthat are absolutely right about marriage, about families, about the need for people to get married young and start building families and creating the sorts of supportive communities and socio-emotional networks that will happily sustain them well into old age. All of that is true. But it doesn’t matter! The book has been closed on this one. The current marriage crisis has been five or six decades in the making and a handful of columns and books from right-leaning writers and commentators isn’t going to change that.

I mean, look: We have had several generations at this point of mothers and fathers, cultural leaders, institutions, politicians, celebrities and educators all proactively and aggressively encouraging young people not to get married. Mothers and fathers encourage their daughters to seek out mid-level careers and their sons to “travel” and “take their time, there’s no rush.” We now regularly assume that a huge portion of the population won’t even begin pursuing meaningful long-term employment until their early 20s at the earliest, and that’s only after they rack up five or six figures of debt for liberal arts degrees. We used to harangue our children to do the right thing, you know? We used to just mercilessly lash them if they were drifting around aimlessly without goals and aspirations but above all without a spouse. “What’re you doing, get married!” we said. “Find a woman and put a ring on it!” “Find a man and tie him down!” “Give us some grandkids, why don’t you!” No more. The major cultural and institutional incentives for marriage have all vanished and have really been gone for decades. This stuff is firmly set in stone—do we really think a book from Regnery and some New York Times columns are going to solve this?

So it’s not going to get better and in fact it’s going to get worse, much worse. Nearly 70 percent of American adults between the ages of 18-34—in other words, the prime childbearing years—are now unmarried. One could easily see that getting to 90 percent at some point and for those high numbers to extend well beyond the mid-thirties. That’s just the culture now and I have little doubt it’s just too firmly embedded and intractable to reverse as this point.

And spoiler alert: When the bill finally comes due, it’s going to be brutal. Yes, we’re going to have major labor crises in the coming decades as huge numbers of workers retire and there are simply no young ones to take their places. That is going to be its own sort of horrific headache. But beyond that, the epidemics of loneliness, of unhappiness, of dissolute existential emptiness, the resulting tidal waves of substance abuse, addiction, overdoses, suicides, the crumbling communities, the emptying cities, the migrant crises—those are going to be legion and they are going to be very, very hard to deal with. All of that is coming; at this point it is essentially inevitable.

Buckle up. It’s going to be deeply unpleasant. The upshot, of course, is this: The inheritors of this world are going to be the people having the most babies these days, and in the U.S. at present that demographic is overwhelmingly—ahem—conservative Christians, particularly conservative Catholics (ahem again). As Dr. Regis Martin has noted: “The future belongs to the fertile. It belongs to those who show up.” That’s us right now! So if nothing else, the decades on the other side of this unpleasant disaster will likely look a lot more conservative and, more importantly and God willing, a lot more Catholic. It’s going to be very difficult to get there. But you could envision worser futures than that one, for sure.