“You can’t live with ‘em, you can’t live without ‘em,” Kermit the Frog sang in 1979’s The Muppet Movie, another voice in the age-old chorus of bemused frustration at the opposite sex that was once a staple of popular culture. A running joke in The Honeymooners featured Ralph Kramden half-kidding about wanting to send his wife, Alice, “to the moon.” Borscht Belt comedians like Henny Youngman got plenty of mileage out of “Take my wife … please!” bits.
References to marriage as “the old ball and chain” have aged about as well as recipes featuring Jell-O and cottage cheese. Today’s marriages are more egalitarian and confer ever-greater advantages relative to staying single. But fewer people are getting married in the first place; U.S. adults today are less likely to be married than at any point in recorded history, and the trend away from marriage shows no sign of stopping.
Initially, that might seem like a paradox. Individual marriages have become stronger, yet the institution of marriage as a whole has never been weaker. But there’s a simple explanation: Largely as a result of our rising level of wealth and stability, marriage isn’t dying, but it is stratifying. And a result, the people who could benefit most from marriage’s social and economic benefits are the least likely to have examples of strong marriages in their lives. This reality should force us to prioritize rebuilding a scaffolding of culture and policy changes that can help today’s young people grow into tomorrow’s adults capable of committing to marriage.
For many years, marriage provided an important economic function for women whose earning power was constrained by law and custom. Women’s rights, economic opportunities, and educational pathways have expanded, and our society has grown wealthier. Women looking at a male as a potential mate today expect more than their sisters of yesteryear. Desirable skills in a partner have less to do with earnings and wages and more to do with social and interpersonal skills. And men, particularly those who are on the bottom half of the income spectrum or without a college degree, are unable to adjust to the fact that the bar over which a man becomes “marriageable” continues to rise.
We might borrow a concept from economics to illustrate this a little more clearly. In labor markets, economists refer to a given worker’s “reservation wage”—the amount below which a certain job just isn’t worth it. If you have a degree in engineering and are looking for work, you might be able to get hired for a $12-an-hour gig making sandwiches, but you’re more likely to hold out until a better offer comes along. As societies get wealthier, a given worker’s reservation wage goes up—there’s a reason back-breaking, low-paying jobs tend to be filled by immigrants rather than native workers.
For most of American history, the bar for a “reservation boyfriend” was pretty low. The question was less whether to marry than who to marry, and the pool was, on the whole, fairly limited. Men and women met at church, or barn raisings, or high school. The plot of 1971’s The Last Picture Show, set in a small town in Texas 20 years earlier, revolves around the pairings-off of teenagers whose eligible partners are essentially the same couple dozen young people they’ve gone to high school with, and the annoyed familiarity that results. You can’t fully understand the “you can’t live with ‘em, you can’t live without ‘em” ethos from outside the context of early marriage and limited pathways to divorce.
Technology progressed, values changed, society liberalized. Marriage used to offer a “bundle” of goods—companionship, sex, old-age security, the ability to have children, some measure of social standing. Overt societal pressure to get married before having sex, living together, buying a house, or having a child is a thing of the past. In the words of Johns Hopkins sociologist Andrew Cherlin, marriage is a “capstone” to a successful young adulthood, rather than the “cornerstone” on which young couples once built a life together. For women, the average age at first marriage has risen from 22 to 28.5 over the past four decades.
We can see this shift any number of ways: Weddings themselves have become more expensive affairs than the church basement receptions of yesteryear. Divorce rates have fallen, both because fewer people marry and the ones who do are more likely to be college-educated and economically stable. No longer is the dominant model of family life one in which one spouse (typically male) is the primary economic earner and the other largely focuses on the homefront; today’s marriages are more likely to be a partnership of equals.
Marriage has become, again to borrow from economics, a “luxury good”—something you are more likely to consume as your wealth and social status increase. Marriage rates remain fairly healthy among Americans with a bachelor’s degree. “Most college-educated women are still getting married, even if the process of finding a spouse is less enjoyable than it once was,” wrote Daniel Cox of the American Enterprise Institute last year. “It’s not only that college-educated women are able to find partners, but they also tend to be quite satisfied with the ones they get.”
In 1980, 9 percent of women in their 40s with a bachelor’s degree or more had never married. In 2023, that fraction had bumped up to just under 15 percent. For women with a high school degree or less, however, marriage rates plummeted. One in 20 non-college women in their 40s had never married in 1980; in 2023, it was 1 in 4. Instead of “settling” like generations before them, working-class women are now able to expand their professional and personal options—and are willing to delay or forgo marriage if nothing better comes along. The cultural and economic dynamics of marriage have changed because the “reservation wage” for women looking for men has gone up.
Women are able to be pickier because society as a whole has gotten richer; they are able to marry not for necessity or societal default, but for partnership. Not even the most punitive tariff regime can restore a healthy dating culture.
Working-class men are struggling to adjust to this new reality. Economic determinists like to argue that men at the lower end of the income distribution are doing worse than their forefathers, but that’s not precisely true. When Scott Winship of the American Enterprise Institute crunches wage trends using a more rigorous analysis, he finds that young men today are doing a little bit better than treading water compared to young men in the past. Of course, they are doing worse than generations past when you compare their wages relative to working-class women. And in a gender-egalitarian labor market, “marriageability” may now be measured less in how much you take home in pay than in the attitude you bring home with you.
The worth of a prospective man in marriage is increasingly less about his relative earning power as a provider and more about the kind of partner and parent he might be. One in 4 young men use weed, and a good many are acting out violent scripts they learned from pornography or gambling their weekly earnings on a prop bet. College-educated men have broadly—not universally!—been able to pivot into a marriage market that selects for interpersonal skills, dependability, and emotional intelligence. Blue-collar and working-class men haven’t.
It’s hard not to see some of the masculinist strains on the right as a way of trying to restore some of the hierarchy they see as natural. Women depended on men, economically, for most of human history, so some see resurrecting that state, whether through explicit discrimination in the labor market or implicit subsidies for male-coded industry, as the pathway to restoring marriage.
But women are able to be pickier because society as a whole has gotten richer; they are able to marry not for necessity or societal default, but for partnership. Not even the most punitive tariff regime can restore a healthy dating culture. When my organization, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, in collaboration with YouGov, asked women ages 18-45 what the biggest challenge in the contemporary dating scene was, the top answer was “meeting someone interested in more than casual hookups” and “meeting someone who treats me with kindness and appreciation,” far ahead of “meeting someone who is financially stable.”
As it turns out, you can, in fact, live without them, and many are doing so. But on a societal scale, fewer marriages means fewer kids and more loneliness: more degrees of freedom today but fewer visitors in a nursing home tomorrow. Some may innovate new forms of family, or family-like relationships, to fill the gap. But for many, marriage provides the surest route to intimate companionship and the construction of a joint lifelong project. And that institution is becoming increasingly unattainable.
For marriage to become more achievable, young people will need to be formed to be more marriageable. That will mean shifting from merely singing marriage’s praises to examining the legal and cultural changes that have made men less “marriageable”—not in an economic sense, but in a cultural one.
How you think about regulating potentially addictive substances—be it drugs or sports gambling or porn—will be different if one prioritizes the long-term best interests of young men, whose brains may still be developing, than if one takes the hypothetical standpoint of consenting adults making fully-informed choices. We need institutions capable of providing men the role models and scripts they need to form a preference for the slow-fuse benefits of family life over the immediate high of opiates, electronic and otherwise.
The days in which everyone, to a first approximation, married, are gone, and with them the “take my wife … please!” era of humor. Today, marriage is optional, and increasingly scarce, not because the demand for committed companionship has plummeted but because what we demand from the institution itself has gone up. In an increasingly wealthy society, marriage has never required less economically, yet never required more personally, and those who could benefit most from marriage’s benefits seem least able to adapt.
