The Case Against Marriage
Crushing myths about the virtues of marriage with data
Okay, I am guilty as charged. This title was deliberately provocative. I am actually happily married for almost 20 years and do recommend marriage. So is the title misleading? Not exactly. This article is written to argue against the idea that marriage must be pursued at all cost and that divorce is the source of all evil.
I wrote this article after debating both American conservatives and Muslim conservatives who both tend to idolize marriage to an unhealthy degree. If you are in a good relationship with somebody you love then get married. Marriage will have many benefits. On the other hand if you are not ready, don’t marry. Likewise if the marriage is bad and neither one of you are happy and you failed to make it work despite efforts then get a divorce.
The idea that one must try to salvage a marriage at almost any cost is misguided. In this article I will also criticize the idea that somehow problems in society have grown due to higher divorce rates or fewer marriages. It is also critique of anti-feminism rhetoric. I will make this case presenting research and statistics on marriage and divorce.
Is Marriage the Solution?
Marriage is an interesting case for the right. Conservatives will advocate marriage as a solution to every social ill. On the other hand the misogynist redpill or incel community will argue against it. They will claim it offers no benefits to men in modern society.
So let us look at some statistics which misrepresent marriage. Conservatives will often point to that marriage makes you happier. There is a correlation, but in this case the familiar slogan “correlation is not causation” needs to be applied. You don’t get happy from marriage (or rather not lasting happiness). Instead happy people get married.
This study show it is a little bit of both:
- Does Marriage Make People Happy, Or Do Happy People Get Married? by Alois Stutzer and Bruno S. Frey
Let me quote some important findings. For instance happy people are more likely to get married and less likely to get divorce.
In a panel spanning a period of 17 years, we find that selection of happier people into marriage is pronounced for those who marry when they are young and again becomes an important factor for those who marry later in life. Moreover, a retrospective evaluation shows that those who get divorced were already less happy when they were newly married and when they were still single. This indicates substantial selection effects of generally less happy individuals into the group of divorced people.
So does that mean getting married doesn’t boost your happiness? You just got married because you were happy? No, reality is a bit more nuanced. Marriage does actually boost your happiness but only for a few years.
Moreover, most of the extra benefits in reported well-being are experienced during the first few years of marriage. Potential, as well as actual, division of labor seems to contribute to spouses’ well-being, especially for women and when there is a young family to raise.
In other words staying married indefinitely isn’t necessarily a benefit. I am not arguing for divorce, but I would argue against staying in a relationship that is unhappy because society has told us that marriage is supposed to be superior to everything. If the boost of happiness is mainly the first years then you are likely much better divorcing an unhappy marriage and re-marry.
Did Feminism Ruin Marriage?
A common argument on the right is that feminism caused families to break apart and thus make everyone more miserable. This doesn’t quite hold up to scrutiny. Feminism allowed people in unhappy marriages to divorce. That is a good thing not a bad thing. More on that later as a lot of arguments are made about divorce ruining children.
I want to address some other claims, such as the idea that modern marriage only benefits women or that the educated women ruin marriage. Basically the right idolize the idea of a career man marrying a younger woman with no education. It is true that men care less about education with selecting a partner. But if you look at actual outcomes in marriage it is not supported.
Again let us look at the Alois Stutzer and Bruno S. Frey study:
In contrast, above median differences in partners’ education level has a negative effect on experienced life satisfaction compared to those couples with small differences.
In other words if you are well educated, you should marry someone with similar level of education as yourself. Going for the hot young bimbo with no education is not the path to happiness for men.
Even modern marriage benefits men as much as it benefits women. So the idea that there is nothing for men in marriage today is nonsense.
Married women and married men report similar levels of subjective well-being, which means that marriage does not benefit one gender more than the other.
There is also this conservative belief that happiness in America has declined because of fewer marriages. First of all that extrapolating too much from an American experience. The Nordic countries have consistently scored as the happiest in the world:
We can look at data from Our World in Data on marriage to compare the US with Nordics:
As you can see Nordic countries have always had fewer marriages than the US but people are still happier. And declining number of marriages in the US actually has a positive effect. It causes a lot fewer divorces to happen:
In other words feminism may have reduced the number of marriages but it also caused a reduction in divorce rate. It could be claimed that feminism caused the initial rise in divorces, but the argument made by conservatives today is that feminism has gone too far in the last years. But if we are to look at feminism and its effects since the 1980s it has been to cause a decline in divorces, not an increase. Sure it is because fewer get married, but isn’t that a good thing? Why should people who doesn’t match well get married?
Does Divorce Hurt Children?
Many parents stay in relationships that are not good because of their children. They do this because year after year of conservative propaganda has told them that children of divorced parents are much worse off than children of married couples.
But here we have a case of “lies, damn lies and statistics.” It is an apples to pears comparison. To know whether divorce or staying is the right choice for a couple we need to compare unhappy marriages with divorced couples. Why? Because happy couples would not divorce. That would make no sense.
So what we care about is to separate correlation and causation. Is the divorce itself which causes problems or a third factor? Research by Joan B. Kelly suggests it is the problem with marriage which is the reason children struggle and not the divorce itself.
This is one of the results found:
Recent studies investigating the impact of divorce on children have found that many of the psychological symptoms seen in children of divorce can be accounted for in the years before divorce.
The paper had this conclusion:
While children of divorced parents, as a group, have more adjustment problems than do children of never-divorced parents, the view that divorce per se is the major cause of these symptoms must be reconsidered in light of newer research documenting the negative effects of troubled marriages on children.
Joan B. Kelly is not the only one finding this conclusion. You find many others in the field reaching similar conclusions from research. An article by Meghan Freed discuss this issue with several experts.
Many useful quote I can make, but I’ll leave this one here:
Dr. Matthews explains, “If you are thinking about your children’s ability to create happily productive adult lives for themselves, then, the answer is no, don’t remain in an unhappy marriage. Try your best to make your marriage work, but don’t stay in an unhappy relationship only for the sake of your children.”
I think this is a very important message to parents, because I have seen many people online who are deeply unhappy in their marriage but force themselves to stay out of love of their children. Judging by expert opinion, that is a bad idea. You aren’t helping your children by staying.
Is Feminism Bad for Society?
So based on what I have covered thus far we cannot really argue that feminism has ruined society as conservatives like to claim. Men like to marry better educated women, so the education revolution is not bad in that case. Also unhappy marriages don’t have value.
But we can strengthen this case further by other findings. Also from Alois Stutzer and Bruno S. Frey:
The difference in happiness between married people and people who were never married has fallen in recent years. The “happiness gap” has decreased both because those who have never married have experienced increasing happiness, and those married have experienced decreasing happiness (Lee et al. 1991).
This makes some sense if we take into account that happier people get married. In previous times due to social pressure even the unhappy people married. Also the benefits or marriage, being single or just cohabitating depends on the society you live in and its culture:
Among the not married, persons who cohabit with a partner are significantly happier than those who live alone. But this effect is dependent on the culture one lives in. It turns out that people living together in individualistic societies report higher life satisfaction than single, and sometimes even married, persons. The opposite holds for collectivist societies.
Out of Wedlock Births
Another popular argument from the right is that out of wedlock births is the source of all problems. Everything from youth delinquency to crime. There is just one major problem with that claim. Some of the most stable and well functioning societies in the world, the Nordics, have exceptionally high levels of out-of-wedlock births.
We can look at 2014 data from Our World in Data on out-of-wedlock births:
And this statistics underplays the difference. We can look at more recent statistics and observations from from IUSSP on a 2020 article written by Ari Klængur Jónsson:
Iceland is among the vanguards in this development: nowhere in Europe is nonmarital childbearing more prevalent. According to recent data, seven out of ten Icelandic children are born to unmarried mothers: 83% of first-born; 67% of second-born; and 53% of third-born (Statistics Iceland 2020).
Why are so many Icelandic children born out of marriage?
The article gives some important observations:
Iceland has a long tradition of nonmarital childbearing and cohabitation, which presumably dates all the way back to the island’s settlement in the 800s and the “Old Norse culture” with its alleged high degree of gender equality and liberal attitudes towards premarital sexual relations.
I think what amuses me as a Norwegian about this is that in my experience the American right-wing, especially the far-right have a fetish for Scandinavia. Not surprising, the Nazis also idolized the Nordic region.
The problem is we never shared their values. We never fit their conservative ideals of how a society should be. Viking society was not Christian, and it was significantly more feminist while also more violent than contemporary societies. This difference has remained.
To many conservative Americans today Scandinavia is a crazy feminist place, but it has always been that relative to other places. Sweden bashing is not new:
In 1960 while addressing the Republican National Committee, President Eisenhower described Sweden as a cautionary tale about socialism and government intrusion into the affairs of individuals. He described Sweden as engaging in an “experiment of almost complete paternalism”, and cited what he said were allegedly high rates of alcoholism, suicide, and divorce, as well as a “lack of ambition”.
Perhaps a bit embarrassing then that suicide rate in the US tends to be higher than in the Nordic countries:
Also alcohol abuse seems to be a bigger problem in the US as well:
In other words Nordic societies have never been what conservatives imagine, nor have Nordic failed or succeeded according the ideas they prescribe to. Nordic countries are thorn in the eye of American conservatives because they demonstrate the success of policies and societal arrangements which according to them is going to lead to failure.
Final Remarks
I may expand on this article in the future. My aim for this article is to have a common reference point for any studies or statistics on marriage and divorce which challenges the conservative orthodoxy on marriage.
For now I would like to add some useful links to other articles challenging orthodoxy.
- Smashing the Stereotype: Women Always Win in Family Court, Maevyn Frey writes about the misconception that women always wins family court. In America the opposite is actually true and in many ways biased against women. Hard to believe? Then read the article.
