Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 953 | Andrew Tate Is Wrong About Marriage | Guest: Dr. Brad Wilcox

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV

Starting point is 00:00:36 or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Academics and the media want you to believe that monogamy is making us miserable, that marriage is some archaic institution that we need to get rid of, that really we should all just be single, child-free, polyamor, and, but the data actually shows that all of that is what's making us sad, that the happiest people are married people, that the happiest people having the most fulfilling sexual lives are actually Christian married people. And here today to talk about all of this is Dr. Brad Wilcox. He is a professor of sociology and director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia.

Starting point is 00:01:26 his latest book, Get Married, Why Americans Mustify the Elites Forged Strong Families and Save Civilization argues that the real way to satisfaction and fulfillment and the real way to ensure that America flourishes is by getting married and having kids. So we're going to talk about that, all the data that supports that on today's episode of Relatable, which is brought to you by our friends at Good Rangers. Go to Good Rangers.com. Use code alley at checkout. That's goodrangers.com.

Starting point is 00:01:52 Code Alley. Dr. Wilcox, thanks so much for taking the time to join us again. So you have a new book out, get married, why Americans mustify the elites, forge strong families, and save civilization. You're really, in my opinion, like the foremost voice, one of the most prominent advocates of getting married and having kids in an age where all the experts are saying don't do that, don't have kids, don't get married. be polyamorous or stay single forever and do what you want to do to pursue happiness. So tell us a little bit just why you wrote this book in the midst of all of that. Yeah, I was raised by a single mom and I've kind of done a lot of research indicating the value and the power of marriage for children. But as I've been talking to students at the University of Virginia, what I've been hearing, especially from the young women that I speak with, is kind of a pervasive sense of concern of fear about the future for them when it comes to relationships.

Starting point is 00:03:00 and especially marriage. And they just wonder, they worry that they're not going to be able to find a guy who is worthy of commitment or kind of interested in committing and would make a good, you know, husband down the road. So my more recent conversations with students and then just kind of looking at the sort of statistical landscape now have me very concerned about the impact of these larger trends on marriage for adults. And so that's what kind of led me to do this book.

Starting point is 00:03:26 It's really trying to give people a sense of, why marriage is important, you know, for young adults, and then also some ideas, but how they can forge strong and stable unions today. You talk about this New Yorker article that argues that not only is marriage maybe inhibitive for people's happiness, but that specifically Christianity in the marriage that it encourages actually stops people from being as happy as they could be or flourishing as much as they should. And so what do you say to something like that? That really is the popular narrative today. Yeah, there's just so many media pieces out there, Ali, that are basically giving people a pretty

Starting point is 00:04:11 negative view of marriage and a negative view of the role that religious faith plays typically in Americans' lives. So this New Yorker article basically was suggesting that Christian men are porn-addled, their wives are upset with them, and this is leading to any number of, you know, pathologies in their relationships, their lives, and their marriages, and that, you know, Christian men are divorcing their husbands more in terms of, you know, because they're upset with her use of pornography. Now, I think we all understand and appreciate that Christian men using pornography does create real challenges, both for them and for their marriages. So I'm not going to denying that that idea. What was striking about this New Yorker piece was that it had kind of no broader context. It did not tell the audience that

Starting point is 00:04:54 on average Christian men are less likely to use pornography compared to men who are secular, that on average Christian couples are less likely to get divorced, if they go to church, than couples who are secular or non-attending. And that, as my new book shows, there's no group of Americans actually have more sex and have better sex than religious couples in the U.S. So when you're attending church together, what I find is that about 65% of church-grown couples have sex at least once a week. And less than half of secular couples, couples have sex once a week. I was really kind of blown away by that finding. Didn't expect to see that difference. And then when it comes to sexual satisfaction, we see again that religious couples

Starting point is 00:05:39 are much more likely to be sexually satisfied than secular couples. So the broader point here is that, you know, and this is a great example of the way in which kind of the media is painting a negative portrait of the faith and family connection. And yet we see in the data is that on average, the link between faith and family is strong, including what comes to this most controversial topic, and that is sort of sex, marriage, and faith in America. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Alley, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political.

Starting point is 00:06:17 They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. we ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed,

Starting point is 00:06:45 you can watch this D-Day Show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. I mean, what is the motivating factor behind trying to paint marriage and monogamy, particularly Christian marriage, as something that. that is an obstacle to happiness rather than just echoing what the data actually says, as you said, that people in these marriages are much more likely to be sexually satisfied and just happy in general. Is it kind of like in your assessment, a misery loves company thing going on here?

Starting point is 00:07:28 Or is it just kind of the progressive biases we see playing out in the media? Yeah, I think there are a couple of factors here. So in the book, in fact, in the preface, I kind of detail how for a long time the left has been kind of taking, you know, swipes at marriage. And I talk about a piece in Bloomberg that suggests that women are richer if they forego marriage. I talk about a piece in the New York Times that suggests that marriage is a route to misery for women. So that's kind of, I think your audience would kind of be aware of that. But there's also kind of a newer dynamic here playing out as well, and that is the online right, people like Andrews, Tate and Pearl Davis are also now attacking marriage. And they're saying that marriage is a bad deal

Starting point is 00:08:10 for men. You know, there's so much divorce out there that, you know, men are basically taken to the cleaners by their wives on many occasions. So what we have now, Ali, is that the on sort of the online right is attacking marriage and then sort of the mainstream left is attacking marriage. The online right sort of targeting men and the mainstream left is targeting women. But their bottom line, basically, is that folks should just steer clear of marriage. And I think that they're doing this in part from a place of pain. I think there are plenty of men who've been divorced unwillingly and they're upset and they gravitate towards this online right perspective. And there are plenty of women who've been frustrated in their marriages or frustrated in their relationships or frustrated that

Starting point is 00:08:53 they can't find a guy who's sort of worthy of marriage from their perspective. And they're more likely to take a very dim view of marriage as well. But finally, you kind of touched on the progressive angle here. And that is that I think the progressive assumption is that every new pattern, every new fashion that comes down, the family pike, the relationship pike is just great, you know, that we should always kind of embrace that which is new. And so I think that explains in part why this newest fashion, Pollyamory, has been getting so many glowing media hits in places like the New York Times and New York Magazine. Yes. Okay. I definitely want to talk about polyamory and what you said about the kind of progressive assault on marriage. And I think

Starting point is 00:09:41 you made really good insightful distinction there that I'm so interested in fleshing out more that both the online right, which I don't think is representative of mainstream conservatives, but the kind of, I don't know if I would call it far right, but as you said, the very online type of right wing media figures who might describe themselves as red pill. As you said, they are targeting men in that. They're saying, look at how women and specifically feminists have taken advantage of men and look at how everything is stacked against men. Men are blamed for everything, but really women are the problem. Really women are the ones exploiting men. Really, women are the ones taking advantage of men in the relationship. Really, it's women who are the

Starting point is 00:10:39 problem in all of this. So why would you even get married? Just have fun with you, who you want to have fun with. Why even make that investment? Why even take that risk when a woman, because of the divorce laws in this country, could walk away with everything. That's kind of the narrative that you hear. I'd love to hear just more from you on that, like where you think that comes from. If you think that this is going to be a fad that lasts. Is there any truth to what they're saying? What are your thoughts? So I think this is going to be with us for a while, unfortunately. And I think it's a consequence of the fact that we are seeing a growing divide between the sex is partially ideological, where a lot of young men are kind of moving to the right to some extent. And even more women are moving to the left.

Starting point is 00:11:24 And so, you know, this dynamic creates, you know, a kind of separation between the sexes and a skepticism and even hostility between the sexes. There's also, I think, a dynamic, too, where, you know, dating apps often kind of disadvantage a certain, you know, share of men and make them more angry, you know, about the opposite sex as well. And so this kind of feeds into the audience for this red pill right, as you described it. And then, too, there are, you know, men who've been divorced unwillingly and for reasons that wouldn't be counted, I think, as legitimate. You know, I know, for instance, a guy whose wife left him for, you know, their kid's piano teacher and his good husband, you know, all that, you know, all, there was nothing really explicable about, you know,

Starting point is 00:12:09 what happened. And he wasn't treated very well in family court in Virginia. So there are, you know, guys like, you know, like this gentleman that I know, who could be attracted to the Red Pill right for, for that reason as well. So these are some of the factors that are driving this. And I think the algorithms online kind of only, you know, sort of deepen sometimes. you know, some men's hostility towards women and their lack of faith in the possibility of finding love and, you know, forging a strong marriage. Yeah. And I just see this mentality on both the right in the left, but in different ways, this disbelief that strong, happy marriages exist, where both the man and the woman, yeah, sure, they have arguments and conflicts, but they're happy. They're

Starting point is 00:12:57 satisfied. They have a good life. They've kind of figured out as much as they can, the dynamics. And certainly there's a disbelief, I would say particularly on the left, that there are happy Christian marriages, where there's not some like secret compartments in the people's lives, where they're actually deeply unhappy with their station in life and the fact that they're married. It's a total disbelieve that there are people that exist who are happily married and just live normal, truthful, honest, productive, responsible lives together. They like being moms and dads. They like being husbands and wives. They're okay with their roles. I don't know if it's just a product of being perpetually online and just kind of having your little silos of ideology. Or if it's that,

Starting point is 00:13:46 because like you said, because they've been hurt in their own lives, it's difficult to believe that there are people who are happily married and in relationships out there? Yeah, well, obviously, there are tons of kids, you know, who have been raised in, for instance, divorced homes, including homes that may have been, you know, Christian in some way, you know, Stripe or other. And so, again, I think sometimes we're kind of talking about people who are coming from a place of pain and then writing, you know, about marriage or writing about Christianity in ways that are shaped by their own negative experiences. But I think what's unfortunate about some of these dynamics is that they're kind of not putting, you know, the larger picture into perspective here.

Starting point is 00:14:26 And one of the things that my book does, again, is to sort of show how for the average American, marriage is a pathway to meaning, to prosperity oftentimes, and to happiness. And that most married men and women are happily married today. And that most married couples, you know, contra Andrew Tate or Pearl Davis, who actually go the distance. Divorces down since 1980. and that means practically that we're not seeing a one and two pattern where one and two couples are getting divorced in this country. And when you account for, we hear very often that divorce inside the Christian church is the same rate as divorce outside the church. But when you account for particular factors like actual church attendance, couples who pray together, couples who really are taking their faith seriously together, you do see that divorce rate dropped from.

Starting point is 00:15:19 dramatically, right? Yeah, that's striking. In the book, I report that people who are attending church are 30 to 50 percent less likely to get divorced depending upon the data set. I am relying here in part on Tyler Vanderuil, a professor at Harvard of bio statistics who has done work in the space. So there's just my evidence, his evidence, others, you know, kind of just showing that for most people, being a part of a church community is a source of strength for your marriage and not the opposite. And one of the broader points here is that birds of a feather flock together. And what we know from work done by Nicholas Christakis at Yale is that basically divorce

Starting point is 00:15:59 is sort of highly socialized. It sort of is transmitted from one friend to the other, from one family to the other. And what that means practically is that your odds of getting divorced are just much, much higher if you're surrounded by friends and family who get divorced. because, you know, all of us have difficulties and challenges in our marriages. And so if your best friend is getting divorced in the face of an ordinary challenge, you're more likely to do the same thing. But by contrast, if you're surrounding ourselves with people who take, you know,

Starting point is 00:16:29 a high value of their marriage and navigate their challenges successfully, like many churchgrown couples do, then your odds of divorce are going to fall. You talked about this trend of kind of like polyamory. But before we get to that, I do want to talk a little bit more about because I think that we really do kind of have a progressive zeitgeist. The ubiquitousness of the progressive influence is obvious to most people, I think, watching this podcast probably more than they're familiar with kind of like the red pill side. And I think we could probably safely say that most influential institutions in this country, they're dominated at least to some extent by progressive ideology. And I came across this

Starting point is 00:17:20 TikTok video that I thought typifies this progressive mentality. Maybe she wouldn't even see it progressive. It's more like self-love, self-fulfillment, self-satisfaction, which I do deem to be progressive. But this, I think, typifies so much of the mentality about marriage and singleness. And so I just wanted to play this TikTok and have you respond to it. Day in the life of a single woman who doesn't believe in marriage or want children. I spent most of my adult life in a long-term partnership that was safe and comfortable, but deep down I was starving for emotional connection. For years, I ignored my gut feeling that I was deeply unhappy and hoped it would somehow matter.

Starting point is 00:17:56 get better. At the time, I couldn't fathom being happily single because I didn't even know it was a possibility. I've never seen it represented before. Doesn't mean that I don't want to be in a partnership ever again, but I have zero desire to have children, so I'm comfortable waiting it out. In the current political and economic climate, there is no guarantee that I can successfully raise a child with the life of abundance they deserve, and I'm enjoying spending my hard-earned money on me. I thought that last part was funny. Oh, I want to give a child the abundance they deserve, and I want to spend my money on me. That's really kind of what it comes to. down to. So this is, I mean, this is everywhere on social media, totally being glorified. What's

Starting point is 00:18:32 your take on it? Yeah, I talk about this as a kind of a midas mindset, Alley, where we're basically kind of telling through media and pop culture and now social media that Americans should steer clear from marriage and family, you know, and towards mammon, broadly defined, towards work, towards money and, you know, the unencumbered life. So it's all about freedom from family rather than freedom for family. And what people don't realize is that as Aristotle taught us, we're social animals and we're hardwired to connect. And we're just much more likely to be flourishing in terms of meaning and happiness and loneliness being lower when we're married with kids. In fact, there's no group of Americans today who are happier than married fathers and married mothers. And that story

Starting point is 00:19:17 is told obviously my book, get married, but it's not told in many mainstream media platforms, as you will know. Yes, there was a very recent CNN article that said that, that said, you know, no matter how you analyze the data, what you're going to find is that married people tend to be far happier than those who are not. The poll author, Jonathan Rothwell, is the Gallup poll. He said, we see a fairly large and notable advantage to being married in terms of how people evaluate their lives. Married adults who did not attend high school, evaluate their lives more favorably than unmarried adults with a graduate degree. Very often we're told, like, the measure of happiness is through education. The measure of happiness is through how much money you make. And really,

Starting point is 00:20:07 that's not what the, what the data shows. Yeah. So that's that Gallupil is really on the money. My own book shows basically, yeah, education and money do predict happiness, but nothing predicts happiness in our regression models and our statistics like a good marriage, not sex, not money, not, you know, not anything. And so that story is, I think, not being told enough to our young adults and to, you know, Americans more generally. Yeah. And it's, it's really such a shame. It's so interesting in a culture that prioritizes, or we say that we prioritize happiness more than anything else. That's what you hear, especially among young people. I just want to be happy. I just want to be happy. I just want to be happy. And yet we're, it's conflicting messages.

Starting point is 00:20:52 So I think, yeah, I think the paradox, the paradox of happiness, you know, from, you know, both the Christian tradition and the classical tradition as well, like Aristotle, is there's a recognition that kind of directly pursuing happiness or directly pursuing your own kind of immediate desires is the path actually not towards happiness, but the path towards misery. And by contrast, you know, the path to happy is actually is paved both through virtue and through kind of making a gift of yourself to others, including, of course, a spouse and kids. Yeah, that's certainly true within Christianity.

Starting point is 00:21:26 He was willing to lose his life, will find it. And I guess it makes sense that that kind of spiritual and eternal and deep truth would be confusing to a world that seems to be only interested in the material. So I'm interested in talking to you about polyamory. There was this big piece. I think it was in the New Yorker, a practical guide for the curious couple. This is something else that's being so glorified. Why don't we just leave this archaic idea of monogamy, which is so, they would say, I don't know, anti-human and not, you know, it's not with the times anymore.

Starting point is 00:22:17 It's not catching up to what people really want and how we really are. And so we need to just be free to have multiple relationships at once. What's the truth about polyamory? Yes. I think it's one example of the way in which the media and many other cultural elites are kind of advancing this idea that we need to maximize sexual choices, maximize relationship choices for people to keep every option open. And it's also, I think, part and parcel of, again,

Starting point is 00:22:48 a kind of progressive assumption that every new fashion that comes down the pike needs to be baptized as, you know, holy and good. The problem, of course, the polyamory from an adult's perspective is that I'm married. I've been married 28 years. And, like, you know, I struggle to give my wife the attention, the affection and the money, if you will, that she needs and deserves, right? And the idea that just practically speaking here for a second that I could, like, extend my attentions in other directions is just, it's laughable, right?

Starting point is 00:23:20 So that's, I think, part of the challenge. But I think also there's no recognition that this would be a disaster and is a disaster for children. You know, we know that kids are more likely to be harmed when they're in the presence of unrelated strangers, you know, in the household, especially unrelated males. There's a lot of evidence on this score. We know from evidence derived from studies of polygamous, you know, households in other parts of the world, that kids in polygamous households tend to do worse than kids in nuclear families in other regions across the world. So the point I'm getting it is that monogamy serves important social, emotional, and financial goods for adults, for children, and even for the community. There's a Harvard scholar named Joseph Heinrich who's just written a lot about how monogamy is actually powered the rise of the West. So this whole push for polyamory is just so naive.

Starting point is 00:24:12 And we even see, ironically, in this book by Molly Rode in Winter, who's the sort of celebrity right now being profiled for all these. Pallamory stories that when you actually read her book more, there is so much sadness communicated by her about the ways in which her husband kind of pushed her into this way of life. So, you know, this is going to lead to a lot of heartache and a lot of broken families and a lot of hurt kids is kind of the bottom line. Yes. And that's what I see a lot in these kind of TikTok polyamory influencers when they're talking about their relationships and giving people advice on how to navigate polyamorous relationships. There's a lot of what I would call cope. Like they are, they talk about untraining their minds from, you know, the remnants of

Starting point is 00:25:05 monogamy that are still in there. And, oh, when I feel jealous because my partner is on a date with his new girlfriend, you know, that's just me being selfish or that's just me not being progressive enough, but I have to retrain my heart and my mind to embracing the openness of our relationship and realizing that more love for another person doesn't mean less love for me. I mean, they're just pushing down their right and basic instincts that is crying out for stability and monogamy. Right. And the thing is, is that all the polling tells us, you know, that women are much less interested in this than men are. And so again, we have this. crazy situation where this progressive impulse is leading us down a road that is, you know,

Starting point is 00:25:55 making women more miserable. And it's just, it's a sad, you know, part of the story is that this actually ends up making women disadvantaged and, in sense, women unequal in terms of who gets the attention, the affection, the financial resources in these newer relationships. Yes. 51% of adults younger than 30 told Pew Research, in 2023, this is according to the New Yorker, that open marriage was acceptable. I guess that's marriage in which, you know, you can have other relationships outside of the marriage. And 20% of all Americans report experimenting with some form of non-monogamy. Well, that's very troubling. I assume that it's troubling to you, too. Yeah, it is. And one of the things that my book talks about,

Starting point is 00:26:40 too, is sort of the power of commitment, the power of fidelity. And what I find in my book is that couples today who would embrace sort of this classic ethic of fidelity, of saying to what's called the general social survey that infidelity is always wrong, they are significantly more likely to be happily married. And, you know, I mean, this is not rocket science to you and to me, but it's just worth underlying that one of the key purposes of marriage across cultures is just kind of keep the sirens at bay. And to focus your attentions and your attention and your affections on your spouse. And so couples who are doing that successfully are just more like going to be flourishing. And that's, that reality is not acknowledged, unfortunately, a lot of the elite precincts

Starting point is 00:27:26 that are writing about and discussing love and relationships and marriage today. Yes. And you retweeted this tweet from someone named Shadi Hamid. And I think that this is absolutely true. And it gives words to kind of a thought that I was having a couple of minutes ago. He said a self-fulfilling prophecy might be at work when it comes to polyamory. Polyamory. Polyamory. becomes more widespread because we think it's already widespread. Norms around sexuality changed because we think they've changed even if they haven't. Gosh, I think that's true about a lot of things when it comes to the progressive sexual revolution. You start hearing about it more and more and more and you think, wow, this is happening.

Starting point is 00:28:02 It must not be that big of a deal. Things become destigmatized. And so you're more likely to engage in it when really it was just a tiny portion of society to begin with. Exactly. I think that's just how a lot of the cultural changes that have kind of washed over our country. There's a similar story when it comes to the Divorce Revolution, for instance, in the late 60s and early 70s, you know, the kind of the me first mentality that kind of took hold among so many young married couples, you know, in that moment in our history. And that's, I think, now happening with polyamory as well. And again, what you're going to see is, unfortunately, I think here, is that a lot of working class and poor young adults who are getting these messages. are going to be most susceptible to them and their kids are going to pay the biggest price for all of this.

Starting point is 00:28:51 Yes. And you, so you did it, you did this thread and you were, you were refuting some points that have been made about the dangers of monogamy. And what you said was that monogamy actually reduces things like rape, murder, assault, robbery, and fraud, or it can. and it actually increases economic activity, child protection, child investment. It reduces rates of child neglect, abuse, accidental death. Monogamy does that, not just having the two presence of loving adults or the presence of two loving adults, but actually monogamy does that. That's amazing. And again, this is the Harvard evolutionary anthropologist Joseph Heinrich, who's, you know, who's making the claims. I don't think he's a conservative. I don't think he, I mean, I don't know him personally,

Starting point is 00:29:51 but he is a very eminent scholar, and he's been studying kind of kinship, culture, you know, across time and across cultural, across cultures. So, you know, his point basically is that we can kind of organize, obviously, our kinship and sexual relationships and any number of different combinations, but monogamy by kind of giving a stable structure to women and men, and by increasing the odds that men are married to one woman is much more likely to be conducive to a strong and stable social order. Here's an example of someone who says her description on her page says, my life as a solo poly person is extremely fulfilling. So here she is explaining that. I'm poly as fuck y'all, but I know that many of you don't understand what that means.

Starting point is 00:30:53 So I'm going to draw you a diagram to explain what my life looks like as a solo poly person. So I am at the center and I am my primary partner. There are people who I'm exploring, people who I'm dating, my friends with benefits who I'm romantic with and sexual with, my lovers who I'm sexual with, my partners who I'm ten toes down with, satellites who come in and out of my life and playmates who I play with in the kink and swinging spaces.

Starting point is 00:31:21 Okay, so I've seen a lot of things like this. and just explaining who their partners with, who their partners are connected to. I mean, really, this isn't that much of a new concept. Is it we've just kind of put a new trendy name on it? I mean, people have been promiscuous for a long time. That's basically how you get STDs. So I'm not really sure why this is becoming like a trend on social media. Yeah, I mean, I think part of the dynamic here is that kind of we're just building on past trends.

Starting point is 00:31:48 But I think where this is headed, right, is towards a new legal regime and a new cultural status. So that polyamorous, you know, families will be established legally. They'll be given normative support culturally. And again, the concern here is that it's going to make it harder for people who are trying to kind of live the sort of older model or the classic model when it comes to monogamous marriage because they're going to be, you know, exposed to this, you know, newer model. And it's going to be, you know, a temptation for some, you know, spouses. And then again, who's going to be hurt the most by all this. It's going to be kids. Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking. That's what terrifies me the most. I mean, as you already mentioned, kids are much more

Starting point is 00:32:31 likely to be abused or neglected when there is a non-related adult, especially a non-related male that's in the home. And you have so much strife and even just exacerbated, I think, chaos and instability that goes on in these kinds of relationships that kids are just thrown in amidst of all of that, kids once again have to bear the brunt of our social, sexual experiments. Do you think this is the natural progression of Obergefell? I mean, evangelicals at the time said, oh, if we redefine marriage to be anything between a man and a woman, you're going to open up the door to all kinds of redefinitions that is, again, going to, you know, hurt the institution of marriage, which is the foundation of a free society,

Starting point is 00:33:19 but it's also going to hurt children. And of course, we were mocked mercilessly for saying something like that. But is this one of the natural consequences of that? I think you can certainly make that argument, although, of course, many of the proponents of same-sex marriage, you know, we're arguing for, you know, just a two-person arrangement. But I think it's part and parcel of just a broader shift away from kind of seeing marriage's core orientation to providing the ideal context for the bearing and rearing of children. And we've kind of been on this trajectory, you know,

Starting point is 00:33:50 since the 1960s, including with the advent of no-fault divorce. So we're just kind of headed in a moment where a lot of the norms and customs and laws that tended to sort of strengthen monogamous marriage, strengthen the intact family, you know, connect kids to their own parents, have, you know, basically either just eroded, disappeared, or are in the process right now of weakening. But on the good news front, I think it's important just to stress two points here. One is that we actually have seen a bit of an uptick in the share of kids being raised and intact married families. I think in part because, for better and for worse, marriage and parent have become more selective in recent years.

Starting point is 00:34:33 And then two, we are seeing on the sort of social science front, you know, just continue evidence that kids benefit from marriage. And not just that they benefit, but they benefit even more from having married parents today than it was the case in one study, 17 years ago and a different study about 30 years ago. So, for instance, when it comes, just to give you one example, when it comes to marriage and college completion, work that I've done with my colleague, Dr. Wendy Wang, shows that the connection between coming from a stable married family and going and graduating from college is stronger in more recent years than it was, say, 30 or 40 years ago with the baby boomer cohort. So I think that tells us that sort of the intellectual case for marriage is not just their. today, but it's probably getting even stronger when it comes to the welfare of children. And Dr. Wilcox, could you remind us what the family diversity theory is? So the family diversity theory is this kind of idea that what really matters for families is love and money and that it doesn't really matter whether or not, you know, the parents are married.

Starting point is 00:35:39 So any kind of combination is sort of equally good for kids and kids just need, again, their parents' attention and affection that's love and enough money, financial resources, to kind of thrive. And what this perspective, I think, doesn't recognize, doesn't appreciate, is that, number one, we kind of look at different kids' outcomes in my book. We find, for instance, the boys who are raised in any kind of non-intact family, whether it's a single-parent family or a step-family or an adoptive family, are more likely to land in prison or in jail than they are to graduate from college. And by contrast, boys who are raised by their own married parents are more likely to graduate from college, about four times more likely than they are to spend any time in jail or in

Starting point is 00:36:20 prison. So this kind of family diversity perspective doesn't really kind of appreciate the facts on the ground. And then it also doesn't appreciate the ways in which married parents typically have more time to give their kids the attention and the affection they need. They're more likely to give kids what's called authoritative disciplines, kind of constructive discipline. And they also have more money because family instability, you know, alley is often very expensive, you know, court costs, things like that. And single parents to book outbosy have less money than married parents. So this family diversity theory doesn't kind of recognize that for ordinary kids, married parents more likely to give them the attention and the affection that they need to thrive and have the money they need to support them adequately. Got it.

Starting point is 00:37:03 Okay. You talk about how marriage is necessary for the American dream. What is meant by that? So what we know from the work of Raj Chetty, a Harvard economist, is that there are parts of this country where kids who are born poor are much more like an estate poor. And other parts of the country where kids who are born poor have a much higher likelihood of rising economically, kind of that rags to riches story about the American dream, kind of would be understood as. And so we know, for instance, that, you know, Salt Lake City, Metro area is a lot more mobility for poor kids than, say, a region like Adelaide. Atlanta, Georgia. And one of the big differences separating out Atlanta from Salt Lake City is there many more two-parent families in Salt Lake City and having a context, a communal, you know,

Starting point is 00:37:51 context where your kids are surrounded by lots of two-parent families is conducive to more mobility. So that's just kind of one example of the way in which the American dream is stronger in communities and neighborhoods and states where there are more married families, more two-parent families in the mix. And tell me what, can you define the closing of the American heart? That's a concept that you also discussed in your book. Yeah. So the good news, as I mentioned before, I think, is that we do see a lot of, you know,

Starting point is 00:38:22 happily married folks today. We do see the share of kids who are being raised in stable married families. It looks like it's ticking upwards. But the bad news is what I call the closing of the American heart is that adults are having so much more difficulty, so much more trouble in getting married and dating. and having kids. And so we're seeing dating is down, marriage is down, fertility is down. My colleague Lamon Stone estimates that about one in four of today's young adults will never have kids. I've seen research suggesting about one in three young adults today will never have a spouse. So we're just

Starting point is 00:38:58 seeing many more kinless adults kind of coming into our society. And that's problematic because they're much more likely to succumb to death of despair. This is based upon work by Jonathan Ralph both from Gallup, you just referenced a little bit ago. And then when it comes to happiness, we're seeing evidence from the University of Chicago that the number one factor that accounts for falling rates of happiness in America, Ali, is the decline in marriage. So Jefferson talked about the pursuit of happiness

Starting point is 00:39:26 as fundamental in the Declaration. And what we're seeing is that across America, more and more Americans are having difficulty realizing that pursuit, in part because they're less likely to be married. And where can people find your book if they want to know more about this? Get Married is available on Amazon. My website is Brad Wilcox.com. And then family studies.org is a great place to see lots of different family reports and blog posts.

Starting point is 00:39:55 Well, Dr. Wilcox, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. And I do encourage people to read your book and also follow you because you're also always tweeting a lot of interesting statistics. So thank you so much. Okay, thanks, Allie. Appreciate it. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself.

Starting point is 00:40:32 On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity. over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us.

Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 953 | Andrew Tate Is Wrong About Marriage | Guest: Dr. Brad Wilcox

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