The Decline and Fall of American Marriage

Marriage is in decline. At a time when America has generously opened the institution to non-traditional couples, fewer people are getting married. Will the strangeness never cease!

Mark Regnerus has the numbers:

As recently as 2000, married 25- to 34-year-olds outnumbered their never-married peers by a margin of 55% to 34%, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. By 2015, the most recent year for which data are available, those estimates had almost reversed, with never-marrieds outnumbering marrieds by 53% to 40%. Young Americans have quickly become wary of marriage.

Why is this happening?

Regnerus dismisses the argument that men are less desirous of conjugal bliss because they are less able to support wives and families. To that we should add that women might be less willing to marry men who are insolvent. This argument is not one way.

He continues to say that most men do want to marry eventually, just not now. Today they prefer to wait until they are around 30… a significant increase from the historical norm.

Regnerus examines the argument that men believe that marriage is a bad deal. One might ask how many women want to become wives and then to ask how many women want to marry when they are in their twenties. Even if most women do want eventually to marry, many of them today do not want to marry young. Again, we ought to consider the possibility that the decline of marriage has multiple causes.

Be that as it may, Regnerus offers his own hypothesis. Men are not getting married because they can get all the sex they want on the cheap. So, why get married and feel like they are paying for it. While that last sentence follows reasonably from the first, Regnerus does not quite put it that way. If bachelorhood offers cheap sex, doesn’t that entail that marriage offers more costly sex?

Were we to examine the implications of having a lot of cheap sex, we would also notice that… sorry to have to say it… in this life you often get what you pay for.

Regnerus does not say so in his article, but I will add that the cheap sex movement began began in the 1960s with the call for free love. Apparently, once love is free fewer and fewer people are willing to pay for it. But this assumes that you think that free love and free sex are the same thing? Besides, the Regnerus argument does not aim at free sex. It argues for the influence of cheap sex. When what used to be free is now cheap, maybe we are making progress.

Regnerus offers this argument:

For American men, sex has become rather cheap. As compared to the past, many women today expect little in return for sex, in terms of time, attention, commitment or fidelity. Men, in turn, do not feel compelled to supply these goods as they once did. It is the new sexual norm for Americans, men and women alike, of every age.

What caused this transformation? Regnerus says it began with birth control:

This transformation was driven in part by birth control. Its widespread adoption by women in recent decades not only boosted their educational and economic fortunes but also reduced their dependence on men. As the risk of pregnancy radically declined, sex shed many of the social and personal costs that once encouraged women to wait.

One needs to add that many women also came to believe that marriage was an oppressive institution. They did not really want any part of the classical marriage. Why marry a woman who does not want to be a wife? Why marry a woman who wants you to become a househusband. Could this be part of the issue, too?

And then there is the omnipresence of porn. Apparently, women in porn videos never say No:

Online porn has made sexual experience more widely and easily available too. A laptop never says no, and for many men, virtual women are now genuine competition for real partners. In the same survey, 46% of men (and 16% of women) under 40 reported watching pornography at some point in the past week—and 27% in the past day.

Porn is ubiquitous and it is free. True enough, it can and has been used to satisfy sexual cravings, but there is more to life than satisfying sexual cravings. Men gain no prestige and no status for watching porn. If they have nothing but porn in their lives, their prom or homecoming dates might be their hands. If so, the bros are not going to think you are a stud. I am not going to say that these men are missing out on the joy of a relationship, but I will say that they lose status for being unattached, for not having dates.

Some people have argued that pornography is degrading to women. Might it be that the more women are pornified, the more they feel that they must compete with porn stars through sexting, the less they seem to be marriage material. 

In this context, let’s not forget the influence of young men’s mothers. They, above all other people, will look seriously askance at a young woman who engages in sexting and hooking up.

Given one singular momentous event that occurred this week, we must mention that the Playboy Philosophy espoused by Hugh Hefner played a role in the way men saw their relationships with women. Hefner’s promotion of decadence for the masses told men that they did not need to shoulder the responsibilities that accompany serious relationships. As my friend Susan Brownmiller pointed out in the New York Times, Hefner relieved men of the responsibility to be breadwinners. He was not the only one who disparaged the role of breadwinner, but certainly he was influential. Hefner lived his life like a pasha with a harem.

With his passing, the media world has arisen en masse to praise him as a champion of women’s rights and the first amendment.

And you were wondering why our culture is in decline.

Anyway, when we are calculating the advantages that men gain from having lots of cheap sex, we cannot honestly overlook the risks. Among them, the STD risk. The New York Times reports on the latest from the Centers for Disease Control. Given that 110 million Americans now have an STD, at least we know that they did not get it from porn. One suspects that they got it from Tinder:

The incidence of chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis is increasing, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An estimated 110 million Americans now are infected with a sexually transmitted disease.

Chlamydia is the most common S.T.D., and the number of cases rose 4.7 percent from 2015 to 2016. The increases occurred nationwide; rates were highest in the South and lowest in the Northeast.

Chlamydia is usually asymptomatic, and the number of reported cases may have grown in part because of newer, more sensitive screening techniques.

Adolescents and young adult women have the highest rates of chlamydia: one survey found that 9.2 percent of girls aged 15 to 19 were infected, as were 8.0 percent of women aged 20 to 24.

And also:

From 2015 to 2016, gonorrhea infections increased 22.2 percent among men and 13.8 percent among women, the C.D.C. reported. Almost 92 percent of cases are in people 15 to 44 years old.

And finally:

The rate of primary and secondary syphilis in 2016 is the highest it has been since 1993, and it increased among both men and women from 2015 to 2016. Men account for almost 90 percent of cases, and most are among men who have sex with men.

Hmmm.