Getting Married and Having Kids Is Still the Surest Path to Happiness

The good news is that divorce is declining. The bad news is that so is marriage — and with it, the fertility rate. This is hardly surprising given that our ruling elites have done everything in their power over the past 60 years to undermine marriage and weaken our obligations to one another (even while, in some cases, ignoring their own advice). Yet, despite this, there are still Americans bucking the new conventional wisdom and living by ancient wisdom instead. Happier and more fulfilled, they’re worth paying attention to.

So argue Brad Wilcox, sociologist and author of Get Married, and Tim Carney, journalist and author of Family Unfriendly. In their respective books, these two husbands and fathers to large families give a brilliant rebuttal to some of the worst ideas behind our marriage-and-family-unfriendly culture.

Today, marriage is perceived as a status symbol more than a cornerstone on which to build a fulfilling life. Since the 1960s, the U.S. has seen a widening class divide in its marriage rate.

The state hasn’t helped. Government disincentives to family formation range from marriage penalties in federal aid programs to family-unfriendly housing policies. Wilcox seeks to move the conversation “beyond Nikki Haleyism,” what he sees as Republicans’ failure to recognize that “the financial challenges families face today are different from the ones of the last century,” as well as “beyond Bidenism,” which “caters to the comparatively small number” of upscale, career-driven parents “who value full-time work more than the family-centered care of their own young children.” Carney considers the balance between “alleviating stresses” on parents via child allowances and not inadvertently “discouraging marriage or discouraging work,” a “devilish problem” with “no perfect or simple answer.” He thinks something like the Romney-Burr-Daines 2022 child-tax-credit bill strikes the right balance, though policy alone cannot fix the baby bust or eradicate child poverty.

Even among the affluent, marriage is often considered something to pursue only after other, “more important” things are in place: career, for one, or an established sense of self (whatever that means).

A recent Pew poll found, for instance, that while 88 percent of parents believed that it is important for their kids to be financially independent and have “careers they enjoy” when they are adults, only 21 percent said it is important that their kids get married, and only 20 percent believed it to be important that their kids have children of their own.

Wilcox attributes attitudes such as these to “three pervasive cultural forces: individualism, hedonism, and workism.” Carney similarly diagnoses the problem as “a workist, materialist culture,” the trappings of “overparenting,” the flawed mentality that one should aim for “quality over quantity” when having children — which typically results in shortfalls in both — and the damaging message that “the value we see in our children is in their worldly accomplishments.”

Don’t get too serious, too young, the standard advice goes. Put marriage on the back burner — try living together first. Those who ignore this — cultivating virtues in themselves that are essential for marriage, dating intentionally to find suitable spouses, and then acting decisively after a relationship’s potential for marriage has been determined — are much happier for it.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2022, Wilcox and Lyman Stone wrote that women who married between 22 and 30 without cohabitating first “had some of the lowest rates of divorce in the National Survey of Family Growth,” whereas couples “who live together before marriage are less likely to be happily married and more likely to land in divorce court.”

Couples who have an all-in, “we before me” attitude in marriage are also likelier to be happier than those trying to hold on to their independence. Wilcox gives the example of family finances, citing a study from the University of Colorado that found that couples who “kept their money separate were more than 20 percent more likely to divorce or separate, compared to couples who pooled at least some of their money.” As Carney puts it, in a committed marriage “you come to think of everything you have — including your savings and future income — as the components of a massive sacrifice to be immolated on the altar of family.”

Young people are increasingly buying into what Wilcox calls “the flying solo myth,” the idea that marriage threatens a person’s “identity, individuality, and autonomy.” On the left, women are told that marriage and children may impede their fulfillment. On the right, figures such as Andrew Tate promote a similar message to men, that marriage is a ball and chain that gets in the way of male prowess and success. Really, rather than “losing yourself,” in a happy marriage spouses find true purpose and the best possible version of themselves.

Wilcox notes that, sadly, “a large and growing minority of men and women will not marry or have children, leaving them without any immediate kin as they head into midlife and later life.” But even the unmarried stand to benefit from a culture that encourages strong marriages and families. Large extended families offer support networks and promote a strong sense of community, which are antidotes to loneliness and alienation.

Porn use and masturbation are on the rise, while sex is on the decline. Carney observes that the mysterious “sex recession” is really a “relationship recession.” Happily married people consistently report the highest rates of sexual satisfaction. Wilcox writes that, “specifically, the odds that men and women say they are ‘very happy’ with their lives are a staggering 545 percent higher for those who are very happily married, compared to their peers who are not married or who are less than very happy in their marriages.”

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Same-sex marriage did not so much redefine marriage as formalize a redefinition that was already culturally dominant. So it’s worth quoting from Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion in the 2015 Obergefell decision that “the nature of marriage is that, through its enduring bond, two persons together can find other freedoms, such as expression, intimacy, and spirituality.” (Notably, children don’t make his list.)

This is an articulation of what the theologian Carl Trueman calls “expressive individualism,” the idea “that human beings are defined by their individual psychological core, and that the purpose of life is allowing that core to find social expression in relationships.” Anything that challenges the self’s desires “is deemed oppressive.”

Such an approach inevitably requires children to be sacrificed at the altar of adult desires. The consequences of divorce on children are obscured by what Wilcox calls “the family diversity myth,” the notion that family structure isn’t important, so long as children are loved. In fact, children from “non-intact families” are more likely to experience social and emotional setbacks, from child abuse to prison time.

The traditional Judeo-Christian understanding of marriage from the Book of Genesis is that “the two shall become one flesh.” In Christianity, marriage involves laying down one’s life for one’s spouse as Christ did for his bride, the church. Children, meanwhile, are gifts to be “received lovingly from God,” as the marriage rite says. This translates as “family first, me second,” which, as Wilcox explains, is the “paradoxical route to happiness in marriage” (though the religious observer might tweak that to “God first, family second, me third”).

Wilcox identifies four distinct groups that he calls “masters of marriage”: “strivers,” or ambitious liberals with “bourgeois” values who “talk left but walk right” on marriage; Asian Americans, who are family-centric and instill this loyalty in their children; conservatives, those with more-traditional respect for marriage and family life; and, finally, “the faithful,” religious Americans who “are the group most likely to enjoy wedded bliss.”

Wilcox explains: “Insofar as religions enjoin vices like idleness, infidelity, and drug abuse, stigmatize them socially, and attach those injunctions to ultimate consequences of the greatest significance, they boost the odds that their adherents avoid living for the moment in ways that deny them a good long-term family future.”

Wilcox and Carney, who are both Catholic, belong to the faithful category. The Catholic Church teaches that marriage is dissolvable only by death (except for a declaration that it was never valid, i.e., annulment). It teaches that an openness to children is a necessary precondition of a valid marriage, and that extramarital sex (including sex with a civil spouse after divorce and remarriage outside the church) and contraception are gravely serious sins that, unrepented, can separate a person from God for all eternity.

The church also teaches that God’s love and mercy are constant and unwavering. That Christians likewise are obliged to “bear wrongs patiently.” That suffering — even something as excruciating as the death of a child — is redeemed. That those who die in a state of grace will be reunited with loved ones in heaven. That God will never abandon those who love him. That human life is a gift.

It’s easy to see how these teachings, when followed, promote a robust family culture. Among the Catholic population who attend traditional Latin Mass, the overwhelming majority of whom are obedient to the church’s teachings, the fertility rate is 3.6 children per woman, twice the nation’s average. Even among Catholics attending the form of Mass instituted after Vatican II, a group more likely to disregard church teachings and hold “workist,” “materialist” values indistinguishable from those of the secular population, the fertility rate is above replacement level, at 2.3 children per woman.

Carney sees in Israel a story of how “infrastructure, expectations, and ultimately culture can avert low birthrates in the modern, wealthy, highly educated Western world.” Israeli women average around three babies, well above replacement level. And “even secular Jewish women are having 1.96 children, higher than any European country.” Carney writes:

The best way to understand Israel’s fruitfulness is to imagine a garden. The largest and oldest tree in the center is the tree of religion. Those who eat from this grand tree imbibe the teaching that children are a blessing, made in the image of God. They believe that a large family is beautiful in the eyes of God. They take to heart the first mitzvah, “be fruitful and multiply.”

But there are other large trees in this garden. Jewish tribalism is another one. Zionism or Israeli nationalism is another large tree.

These three trees provide their own fruit, but they do much more than that. They create shade. They feed and provide homes for animals, who in turn fertilize the soil. They spawn an entire ecosystem, and that ecosystem is pro-child and pro-family.

On this point, Wilcox finds the work of Yale sociologist Nicholas Christakis helpful. What best predicts your risk of getting divorced is whether your friends are divorced. Indeed, you are 75 percent more likely to become divorced if you have a friend who is divorced and still 33 percent more likely to see your marriage end if only a friend of a friend is divorced. The lesson, Wilcox writes, is that “the quality and character of your community matter a great deal for the quality and character of your marriage.”

In families (whom we don’t choose), patterns of divorce can be broken, of course. But this is done intentionally. Wilcox notes, “Many of my friends are themselves children of divorce. But they are determined to reject that dark road they were forced to walk as kids. And they are not socially liberal.” He adds: “The divorce revolution seems to have done something no one expected. It spawned a counterrevolution.”

Contrary to popular opinion, marriage is not a game of Russian roulette. It is not a matter of luck which marriages breed contentment and which do not. Part of achieving contentment is managing expectations. In the old-rite Catholic Mass, the exhortation before marriage reads: “If true love and the unselfish spirit of perfect sacrifice guide your every action, you can expect the greatest measure of earthly happiness that may be allotted to man in this vale of tears. The rest is in the hands of God.”

What both Carney and Wilcox convey is that the best marriage advice is to strive for that “unselfish spirit of perfect sacrifice” in yourself, prioritize it in your search for a spouse, instill it in your children, and surround yourself with a community of families doing the same.