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In a widely shared 2022 video on “why modern men don’t want marriage,” Andrew Tate made the case that there is “zero statistical advantage” to getting married if you are a man in America today. He thinks that women are useless anchors—“They want you monogamous so that your testosterone level drops,” he wrote on X last fall—and that your marriage will probably fail anyhow. There aren’t any if you look at the benefits of marriage and use your head rather than your heart.
Among other things, the loudest voice in the manosphere is notorious for being accused of assault, rape, and human trafficking. (Tate has refuted these accusations.) However, he is also infamous for starting a new front in the marriage-related culture wars, which primarily targets young men and teenage boys.
According to Tate, men are at greater risk of divorce and no longer receive the respect they are due from women in marriage. He contends that men ought to concentrate on becoming powerful, earning a lot of money, and utilizing—but not investing in—the other sex. Tate’s obvious popularity—his videos have received hundreds of millions of views on YouTube and TikTok—seems to be another indication that our oldest social institution is having problems.
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Though from a different perspective and with less venom than Tate, left-leaning critics have been challenging the institution’s worth for a lot longer. Undoubtedly, the realities of marriage in the last few decades serve as fodder for a number of criticisms. Difficult marriages, and even dangerous ones for women, were not uncommon prior to the 1970s, when divorce became widely accepted. The demands of marriage stymied many women’s career aspirations, and some still do. Divorce has caused many men to be severely impacted financially and removed from their children’s lives. The inability of their parents to get along has destroyed the faith of countless divorced children in marriage (a pattern that may help explain Tate’s animosity toward the institution; his parents divorced when he was a child).
The great family revolution of the late 20th century, which saw a rise in divorce and single parenthood, is both a cause and an effect of some of these dynamics. According to census data, the percentage of prime-age adults (25–55) who were married decreased from 83 percent in 1960 to 57 percent in 2010, while the percentage of children born to unmarried parents increased from 5 to 41 percent.
Americans are pessimistic about marriage as a result of these trends. The percentage of married prime-age adults continued its long, slow decline until 2022. A majority of men and women were “pessimistic about the institution of marriage and the family,” per a 2023 Pew Research Center survey.
Can the government stop divorce? (from the October 1997 issue)
However, rumors that marriage is dying are overblown. The post-1960s family revolution seems to have come to an end, rather quietly. The percentage of children in two-parent households has increased, and divorce rates have decreased. Even among groups that strayed from marriage as a social institution during the 20th century, such as Black and working-class Americans, the institution is regaining its strength. Contrary to what some on the left and right have said, that is good news for America’s children as well as, generally speaking, though not always, for married men and women today.
The progressive family historian Stephanie Coontz stated in a 2013 speech to the National Council on Family Relations that “we have to recognize divorced families, single-parent families, and married-couple families are all here to stay if the ongoing revolution in family and gender arrangements is largely irreversible.”
Although it had somewhat decreased from its peak in 1981, the divorce rate was roughly twice as high as it had been in 1960 at the time of her talk. On the other hand, nonmarital childbearing had just reached a record high. However, two significant changes in family dynamics were occurring even as Coontz was speaking.
First, the divorce rate was rapidly declining. The divorce rate has now decreased by nearly 40% since the early 1980s, with the last 15 years accounting for roughly half of that decrease. (All figures in this article are based on my analysis of national data, unless otherwise indicated.) The notion that marriage will fail at least half of the time is outdated and deeply ingrained in the minds of many Americans. In recent years, the percentage of first marriages predicted to end in divorce has decreased to roughly 40%.
Second, after nearly 50 years of growth, nonmarital childbearing petered out in 2009 at 41 percent. A few years later, it decreased slightly to about 40 percent, where it has stayed. Less divorce and a slight decrease in unwed childbearing translate into greater stability for kids. According to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, the percentage of children living in married families fell for over 40 years, starting in the late 1960s, and then peaked in 2012 at 64 percent before increasing to 66 percent in 2024. Additionally, from a low of 52% in 2014 to 54% in 2024, the percentage of children who spend their entire childhood in an intact married family has increased.
Even though the third shift is far less established than the first two, it might already be underway. In the three years of data since 2020, the rate of new marriages among prime-age adults has increased after reaching a low point during the pandemic. It was higher than it has been since 2008 in 2023, the most recent year for which data is available. The percentage of married prime-age adults has also leveled off in recent years, indicating that the decades-long decline in the percentage of married Americans may have reached its lowest point. However, at least some of this increase is a post-pandemic bounce.
Listen: American marriage’s latest rift
A few of these changes are slight. Coontz was undoubtedly correct when he predicted that families and couples in the US would continue to live in a range of configurations. Regarding the number of new marriages, extra caution is necessary because there is a good chance that the longer trend of fewer marriages will reappear. However, marriage appears to be making a comeback as a likely success story for those who do get married and as a pillar of American family life. Once more, stable marriage is the norm, and most people raise the next generation in this manner.
Injustices abound in the institution’s history. Marriage has historically been associated with women’s oppression in a variety of contexts. (Since same-sex marriage was illegal until very recently, this article primarily discusses heterosexual marriages.) However, marriage’s recent tenacity in the United States shouldn’t come as a surprise considering its lengthy history. The causes of that resilience shouldn’t either. In the United States, marriage is continuing to evolve in response to shifting expectations and conditions. The institution that appeared so distressed in the late 1960s and early 1970s is not the same as it is today.
Family care is one prominent example. Regarding household duties, the majority of American marriages today are not relics from the 1950s; instead, husbands are more inclined to take on more responsibility. According to Pew and the American Time Use Survey, fathers in the United States spent nine hours a week on child care in 2024, up from 2.5 hours in 1965. Dads’ time spent on child care increased from 25 to 62 percent of moms’ time during this same time period.
In fact, one reason why the birth rate in the United States might be higher than in East Asian nations like South Korea and Japan, where the fertility rate has significantly decreased to 0.75 and 1.15 babies per woman, respectively, compared to the U.S. rate of 1.6, is that men in those nations perform significantly less domestic work and child care than men in the United States. According to social scientist Alice Evans, women worldwide are embracing the “egalitarian frontier,” but men in some cultures have stuck to their traditional ways. Evans states that “the sexes drift apart as a result.” This could help explain why South Korea’s fertility rate has dropped to the lowest in the world and marriages have stagnated.
In the United States today, there is no one ideal marriage model, and the majority of couples face difficulties. Men continue to perform less housework and child care, and some couples experience stress due to arguments about how to divide up household chores. Breadwinning is one of the traditional qualities that many women still value in men, and some men’s unreliability as breadwinners causes stress for both them and their wives. According to a 2016 study on divorce that was published in the American Sociological Review, a husband’s risk of getting divorced increased by 33% the year after he lost his job, while a wife’s chances of getting divorced remained unchanged. One of the main causes of the lower marriage rates among the working class compared to college graduates is the employment challenges faced by less educated men.
Olga Khazan: Why is it so difficult to persuade so many men to do more housework?
However, marriage generally benefits both men and women. Married men and women between the ages of 25 and 55 are more than twice as likely to be “very happy” with their lives as their peers who are not married, per the 2024 General Social Survey. Compared to Americans who are single, married people—men and women alike—live longer, are more financially secure, and accumulate more wealth.
I collaborated with YouGov to survey about 2,000 married men and women in 2022, asking them to rate their spouse on a variety of metrics and their level of marital happiness overall. According to the survey, the happiest wives rated their husbands favorably for being fair, caring for them, providing for them, and being protective (i.e., making them feel safe, both physically and otherwise). In particular, 81
% of very happy wives agreed or strongly agreed that their husbands were fair to them.
The happiest wives also rated their husbands as being less likely to criticize them, get angry, complain, or put down their wives. Very happy wives were 75% less likely to say that their husbands criticized them. A striking 92% of very happy wives said that their husbands cared about their feelings, compared to only 51% of the wives who reported being unhappy in their marriages.
How have changes in marriage affected men?
Despite recent changes to the institution, many married men continue to have traditional responsibilities as providers, and others are embracing more active roles in domestic and emotional labor. The institution’s evolution makes sense given that married men on average are better off than unmarried men on a variety of outcomes, such as mental and physical health, financial stability, and life satisfaction.
Men benefit from marriage, but those benefits are not evenly distributed. On average, men with higher earnings, better education, and greater job security experience stronger benefits from marriage. Conversely, men with lower incomes, unstable employment, or less education are less likely to marry or stay married, and when they do, the benefits may be more limited.
The current social environment—with changing gender norms, economic pressures, and shifts in family structures—presents challenges for many men navigating marriage today. These challenges are reflected in the debates and critiques, from voices like Andrew Tate’s on one end of the spectrum to family scholars and social scientists on the other.
