The end of marriage?

From princess stories to romance novels to religious ideology, American culture paints a rosy view of marriage for women. It's presented as the end goal, the highest aspiration, the outcome that all women are supposed to want.

But those fairy-tale images too often prove to be mirages. The princess dreams and cozy cottagecore images collide with the reality that, for many women, marriage is an endless, thankless parade of drudgery.

What will happen when women realize this and act accordingly? We're already seeing rumbles of it.

Rosy images, impossible expectations

In the traditional picture, men work and earn the income while women manage the household and raise the children. Even though this mythologized scenario lacked equality, at least it had a clear expectation of what each partner is—and isn't—responsible for doing.

But this white-picket-fence scenario was never a universal reality, even in the postwar era. Today, it's less realistic than ever. Jobs are more precarious, workers' rights are under relentless attack, and the price of essential goods like housing, health care and education is ballooning. With America squeezed in the vise of inflation, a stay-at-home spouse is a luxury that increasingly few couples can afford. More and more middle-class families need two working adults just to survive.

In fact, since women are now more educated than men, often it's women who are the breadwinners in their marriages. They bring in the income that keeps their families afloat.

However, even though women's careers have blossomed, the gendered expectations traditionally placed on them haven't gone away. All too often, married women work full-time jobs while also being expected to do the cooking and cleaning, raise the children, keep the family's schedule, and perform all the other invisible labor that's required to keep a household running.

Meanwhile, the gendered expectations for men have scarcely changed. They're hardly ever expected to do more chores to support their working wives, or to pick up a greater share of parenting duties.

In too many instances, men not only don't help out, they proactively make their partners' lives more difficult. They treat their wives as unpaid servants whose job is to cook for them and pick up after them. Some studies based on time-use diaries find that married mothers with male partners do more housework than single mothers:

After adjusting for other factors, married mothers did significantly more housework and slept less than never-married and divorced mothers, which runs counter to the notion that single mothers are time poor because they lack a partner to help with household chores and work for pay...

And on top of that, there's the widening political divide between men and women. As women become more educated and independent, they're becoming sharply more liberal. They want to have their own careers, earn their own money, and be in control of their own lives without having to depend on anyone else or ask anyone else's permission for the things they want to do.

At the same time, more men, including young men, are being drawn to conservative ideologies that demand their wives submit to them, and that seek to ban abortion, outlaw contraception, even restrict divorce. In short, ideologies whose main goal is to deprive women of autonomy over their bodies and lives.

READ: The fertility freeze

All these factors converge on one result: increasingly, women are finding marriage unappealing. They see it as a ticket to second-class status where they're expected to subordinate their own lives and dreams to the desires of men.

The data bears this out. According to a new poll, for the first time ever, 12th-grade girls are less likely than 12th-grade boys to say they want to get married. Significantly, the number of boys who aspire to marriage has been unchanged for thirty years, but the girls' numbers are dropping.

Another poll finds that male conservatives now rate having children and being married as among their top priorities, while for progressive women, both of those have dropped to the bottom of the list.

More and more American women are staying single by choice. According to a Wall Street Journal article reporting on analysis by the Aspen Economic Strategy Group, over half of women ages 18 to 40 are single. And they're happy that way: Pew data suggest only 35% of single women are looking for a relationship, versus 50% for single men.

Red-state women going their own way

It's not just a bunch of blue-state feminists who are questioning, "What's in it for us?"

Even in socially conservative areas, women are coming to see marriage as a raw deal. Red states like Georgia, Oklahoma and Alabama have divorce rates higher than the national average:

Overall, marriage rates remained stable between 2012 and 2022 while divorce rates fell across the country, according to the US Census Bureau. However, in some conservative states, including Georgia, Alabama and Oklahoma, divorce rates were significantly above the national average.

...In 2023, data from the National Center for Health Statistics showed that three in every 1,000 people living in Alabama and Florida got divorced, compared to 2.4 in liberal New York.

This is the predictable outcome of a culture that pushes women into marriage whether or not that's what they genuinely desire. In these conservative areas, churches and other cultural institutions tell women that they should get married and start a family as soon as possible. This one-size-fits-all blueprint never gives women a chance to make up their own minds about what they want. Often, they're pushed to marry before resolving basic questions of compatibility.

Many women, especially in older generations, grudgingly accepted this because they didn't know things could be different. The internet, for all its faults and misinformation, has changed that.

Widespread access to information has helped women see that they don't have to be trapped in unfulfilling marriages. They can make their own choices and be happy. As this realization spreads, they're heading for the exit door.

The fact that women are becoming less religious is almost certainly another force driving this trend. In the past, religion was the main force smoothing over the mismatched expectations and entrenched inequalities of marriage. Religious beliefs conditioned women to accept subordination as their God-given role. No surprise that, as more women see through these patriarchal lies, they're less willing to be subjugated to men's desires.

The propagandists freak out

The falling interest in marriage and rise in divorce rates haven't gone unnoticed in conservative circles. As you can imagine, it's provoking intense alarm among them.

One obvious way to fix the problem would be to urge men to be better partners. After all, it's rational for women to reject marriage when they perceive it as a bad bargain. You could imagine that religious conservatives, who claim to be pro-marriage and pro-family above all else, would want to redress this imbalance. You could imagine church leaders and cultural authorities telling men that, if they want to get married and have a family, they have to be good husbands and fathers. They have to make their wives' lives better, rather than dragging them down.

But, of course, they're not doing any of that.

Instead, they're intensifying the propaganda. They're doubling down on their insistence that women don't need education or careers, and that getting married, ideally young, is the sole path to fulfillment.

The most rabidly misogynist are loudly insisting that giving women political power and economic freedom was a mistake. As disgusting as it is, this is a telling admission: they know the life they're offering is so miserable that people won't choose it if given the choice, so the only thing to do is to take away that choice.

So, is marriage doomed? Are straight Americans fated to be alone forever, as women boycott heterosexual relationships? Will the institution of marriage go extinct, or will it evolve to meet the new cultural reality?

However the future unfolds, one thing we can be sure of is that women's political and cultural power isn't going away. This means conservative pundits should "stop prescribing women as the cure" for male loneliness, directionlessness and anger. That's not going to work anymore, and the more they try, the more marriage rates are going to keep dropping.

The good news for men is that they can still fix this. Women have the power to choose, which means that if men want to be chosen, they have to deserve it. And the way they show that isn't by performative "alpha male" arrogance, cheap machismo, or obnoxious lectures about what God wants. Instead, they need to show it by being caring, compassionate and thoughtful partners who listen, communicate and support their partners.

If enough men do this, marriage will endure. If they can't or won't rise to the challenge, marriage will die out—and it will deserve to.