What both spreadsheets and life stories are telling us
Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilizations by Brad Wilcox. Broadside Books, 2024. 320 pp., $32.00
I often use the term spreadsheet brain to mock those whose overreliance on statistics and models to understand the world makes them unable to see it clearly. It is increasingly rare to encounter a researcher who uses a quantitative explanation of the world in a way that clarifies rather than obstructs. Brad Wilcox’s book Get Married is that rare success, drawing on the clearest possible sociological methods to explain the benefits, both spiritual and material, of marriage and children.
Wilcox lays out a dizzying array of numbers and charts on marriage. This is a topic that can be extremely sensitive, muddy, and highly emotional—which gets in the way of objective understanding. Something that struck me early in the book is that those advocating against marriage are a funny mix of extreme career-oriented liberal women and extreme scornful right-wing men. You wouldn’t think this would be a coalition that agreed on anything, but indeed these two groups make up the majority of the modern marital critique. Wilcox doesn’t go this far, but in his statistical arguments I see a kind of shared pathology in these two groups.
The liberal women are seeking what they call liberation—meaning infinite choice, unencumbered by the demands of family and the home. There is a seething undertone to their arguments, one of victimhood and oppression at the hand of men. The reactionary men have basically the opposite argument. They are now suffering at the hand of duplicitous and utilitarian women who would sooner use them and leave them. These Andrew Tate followers argue they would be better off seeking the freedom of life unencumbered by family, pursuing their own personal betterment. The Oprahfication of following your bliss is ubiquitous in these arguments. Seek personal fulfillment, personal satisfaction; never mind the potentially infinite upside to belonging, togetherness, and deep connection.
The overall argument of the book is that many of these detractors draw on anecdotes, sometimes driven by personal hardships, but these claims are simply not borne out if you look at the actual data of married people with children. Marriage and family, when within a functional range, make people happier, wealthier, more successful, and more spiritually fulfilled. Wilcox demonstrates this again and again throughout the book in many charts and statistics. Still, I personally can’t help but see the qualitative stories in all of this.
I have empathy for the anti-marriage narrative and feel compelled to consider what spurned it. In the book, Wilcox spends a decent amount of time talking about the carnage that erupted with spiking divorce rates in the 1970s. You can’t help but think of all the terrible experiences that more than two generations of children inherited from this era. They would (of course) latch on to arguments to convince themselves that marriage and family caused their suffering. You can’t blame them for wanting to throw away the institution entirely. I am sure many of them think, “Marriage is a sham, it never works out well for anyone, it’s a scheme for [opposite sex] to control and oppress me, and it only leads to pain.”
So many have simply given up. They have thrown the baby out with the bathwater and sought some unholy arrangement of endless casual sex or lonely pet parenthood. But in terms of any possible measure of life satisfaction and success this is no alternative. To me, the qualitative story is that throwing out an institution will never be the best answer, because institutions take a long time to build.
Marriage is an institution that evolved over centuries into its modern form. The liberatory approach of the 1970s that looked to dismantle marriage radically shook up one of the foundations of a healthy society. The solution then isn’t to further break it but instead to understand how to rebuild it. This doesn’t mean that we must make a perfect replica of traditional marriages of the past. Rather, we should let the institution evolve to meet modern needs and standards while keeping the core of the institution intact.
With this goal in mind, Wilcox lays out four types of people in America who are doing marriage well: Asian Americans, Conservatives, the Strivers, and the Faithful. Since reading the book I have been seeing these heuristics for healthy marriage everywhere within my life. There are subgroups in America who have figured out how to build healthy marriages in the context of modern life. We should look to them as examples, because the statistics show that their success in the realm of marriage and family has cascading effects not only on their own lives but also those of their children and community at large.
I would highly recommend reading Wilcox’s book—less for the statistics than for the stories. Because cultural stories are how we make sense of our choices in life. Statistics will never convince a spurned young man, a product of a broken home, hateful of the opposite sex, to have hope in the institution of marriage. The only thing that can bring forth hope, a real change of heart, is seeing something functional in practice, something to aspire to.
For those of us already married and devoting our lives to our families: Don’t be afraid to tell your story. The world is inundated with painful stories of divorce, of the difficulties of carrying, birthing, and raising children. Those stories are appealing, as is the universal drive toward vice and victimhood and the punk-rock-for-all impulse to smash anything that has caused us pain. In the end these are death drives, which spiral us away from all that is deeply and genuinely good and true—a sense of purpose beyond ourselves.
Less common are those willing to act as pillars of a culture or subculture, unafraid to hold others to a high standard that, when upheld, makes them better as individuals and makes the whole culture more functional. Don’t be afraid to nudge the young single people in your lives to cross the abyss of the unknown that is marriage. Too often in our universalist lean toward libertarianism we feel it is impolite to make suggestions about the good life to one another.
Is there any greater act of hope than to look into the eyes of another and choose to willingly become one? Us against the world. Building something together that could never be built separately. Is there any greater drive toward life than to choose to bring a baby into the world? To steward the most innocent creature gently into life and teach them of the world?
Get married, have babies!
Ashley Fitzgerald is an environmental sociologist, researcher, teacher, wife, mother, and occasional writer. Her work has been seen in Unherd, Nature Sustainability, Front Porch Republic, The Spectator and, now, Current. @rizomaschool.