Marriage in the Age of Polarization

As gender roles shift and politics deepen the rift, marriage is becoming a casualty of modern life.

There’s a quip attributed to Henry Kissinger that, “Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There’s too much fraternizing with the enemy.”

But while no one can win, maybe both sexes will end up losing.

The Wall Street Journal ran an essay last weekend about how women are turning away from marriage:

After a handful of underwhelming relationships and dozens of disappointing first dates, Andrea Vorlicek recently called off the search for a husband.

The 29-year-old always thought she’d have found her life partner by now. Instead, she’s house hunting solo and considering having kids on her own.

“I’m financially self-sufficient enough to do these things myself,” said Vorlicek, a Boston-based accountant. “I’m willing to accept being single versus settling for someone who isn’t the right fit.”

…

Stories of women complaining about the lack of quality men have long infused pop culture—from “Pride and Prejudice” to Taylor Swift’s oeuvre. Yet women throughout history rarely questioned whether finding and securing a romantic partner should be a primary goal of adulthood.

This seems to be changing. Over half of single women said they believed they were happier than their married counterparts in a 2024 AEI survey of 5,837 adults. Just over a third of surveyed single men said the same…A rise in earning power and a decline in the social stigma for being single has allowed more women to be choosy. “They would rather be alone than with a man who holds them back,” Cox said.

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The share of women ages 18 to 40 who are single—that is, neither married nor cohabitating with a partner—was 51.4% in 2023, according to an analysis of census data by the Aspen Economic Strategy Group, up from 41.8% in 2000.

…

Katie spent the first half of 2024 going on three or four dates a week with men she met on apps, such as Hinge and Bumble, in the hopes of finding a husband before turning 30. By the end of the year, she had ramped down the search, calling it “the only thing you can put 10,000 hours into and end up right where you started.”

Many of the men Katie met, she said, either seemed turned off by her ambition or weren’t career-oriented enough for her. She felt discouraged by just how many of her male friends similarly said they expect their future wives to prioritize their families over their jobs.

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For Christina Ralstin, a 31-year-old wildland firefighter in rural Republic, Wash., who didn’t go to college, buying a house was confirmation she didn’t need a partner to be content. She paid $90,000 for a two-bedroom on half an acre of land in 2022. “I’ll have it paid off in the next two years, so I don’t feel like I need to be tied financially to somebody,” Ralstin said.

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Single people in large cities where home prices have surged in recent years are finding that their marital status has hampered their finances. Although the wealth gap between single men and women appears to be shrinking, real-estate prices have helped drive a near doubling of the wealth gap between singles and couples from 2010 to 2022. Married couples had $393,000 in median wealth in 2022, according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve, while unmarried people, including those who were partnered but not married, had $80,000.

…

For Alicia Jones, not having anyone else to financially depend on—or split rent with—is the worst part of being single. “Especially with the threat of layoffs, it’s much more stressful being a single person,” said Jones, who is 38 and works in communications for a real-estate company in Washington, D.C. Her last long-term relationship ended two years ago over conflicting views of their shared future. “He wanted the white picket fence and me at home with the kids,” Jones said. This despite the fact that her salary was nearly 50% higher than his.

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A growing political divide between men and women has compounded the challenges of finding love. Around 39% of women ages 18 to 29 identified as liberal in 2024, according to Gallup, compared with 25% of their male peers. This gap has more than tripled in a decade: 32% of women and 28% of men called themselves liberal in 2014. These differences aren’t merely about preferences or votes, explains University of Denver psychology professor Galena Rhoades, who researches romantic relationships. Rather, politics have become an expression of one’s “core values” about everything from economic inequality to bodily autonomy.

Click over to read the whole thing.

This piece pulls together a number of stated and unstated trends that are undermining marriage in America.

• Women’s economic self-sufficiency, either through earned income (or in some cases government assistance) greatly reduces their need to marry for financial purposes.

• Women want to marry up or at least not marry down. Declining economic prospects for working class men render many of them unmarriageable and make it difficult for women to find a spouse. A similar problem exists in the white collar world as women are now earning significantly more college degrees in men. Except at the very top of the market, women are simply outperforming men in America today in many domains. Note the examples here of women far out earning the men they are dating.

• Women, and the media, put the blame on men for this state of affairs. It’s the proverbial “good man shortage.” Undoubtedly this is true to some extent. But the marriageability of women is never called into question. All women are assumed to be marriageable. In reality, men, especially the kinds of high quality men women say they want, also make judgments, and they may well not find a 38 year old single mother desirable. Many women today don’t themselves have the traits that would enable them to land the kind of man they want under the current conditions of scarcity.

• Relatedly, women are encouraged to be able to live their life entirely on their own terms and have a man slot into that. They are increasingly less willing to compromise in order to get married. If they can’t find exactly what they want, then remaining single is preferable for growing numbers of women (and men to some extent as well). Combined with the above, this means in essence some women have priced themselves out of the market. In these cases, getting out of the dating market and accepting singleness is actually a rational decision.

• Gender cultural and political polarization is creating legitimately incompatible views of the good life that make marriage impossible. If men wants the white picket fence life and the women want to be focused on career ambitions, that’s going to be hard to reconcile. While compromise is inevitable to get and stay married, some divides are so fundamental they can’t be bridged.

• While undoubtedly there are major confounding variables here, as the article makes clear, married people are much wealthier than single people. Also, contrary to popular belief and what the people in this article think, married women are on average happier than unmarried women, per research from Wendy Wang.

This piece also hints at a major future risk facing the Millennial generation.