The Sean McDowell Show - The HIDDEN Key to Happiness (Hint: it’s NOT what you think)

Episode Date: June 22, 2024

Is marriage actually a bad deal for men and women? Is it dangerous for people to get into? Brad Wilcox is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia and Director of the National Marriage Project. He will go over why you shouldn’t be scared as a man or woman if you want to get married and share the most shocking statistics Brad has come across on marriage to support that. *Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf) *USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for 25% off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM) *See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK) FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sean_McDowell TikTok: @sean_mcdowell Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/ Website: https://seanmcdowell.org

This is one of the most important interviews I've done in a long time. Our guest today, author and sociologist Bradley Wilcox, believes that the health of our civilization is quite literally at stake in terms of how we approach marriage, family, and happiness. And I agree. Dr. Wilcox, it's great to have you on. Thanks for writing a great book known as Get Married. We're going to dive into it and appreciate you taking the time to join us.

Thanks for having me on today, Sean. Appreciate it. So let's jump right in. Your subtitle says, Americans must defy the elites, forge strong families, and save civilization. Do you really think civilization is at stake with marriage and family? And if so, why? Yeah, I do. And I'm actually sitting here literally almost in the shadows of Monticello, which is Thomas Jefferson's home, of course. And he was famous in part for writing the Declaration

and those words about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And when it comes to those three core American ideals, we're seeing some pretty troubling trends. And the life point, for instance, we're seeing deaths of despair mount by the hundreds of thousands in recent years, Sean. When it comes to liberty, we're seeing a lot of Americans express the idea that the American dream, economic liberty is sort of beyond them. And when it comes to the pursuit of happiness, we're seeing happiness trends in America across multiple data sets fall.

And so when you look at those three outcomes, the American dream, dust and despair, and also this trend in happiness, we can kind of trace back all those three trends to the decline of marriage, the retreat from family life that's kind of going across our country. Just to give you one example, there's a recent study from University of Chicago that says the number one factor that explains why fewer and fewer Americans are reporting that they're happy is the fact that fewer Americans are married today.

So just gives you some sense of how these trends in terms of our love life, our family life, whatever you want to call it, end up being important, not just for us as individuals, but also for our civilization, our American civilization more generally. Okay. So the subtitle also says we're supposed to defy the elites. Now, I'm curious who you mean the elites are. And here's just a quote directly.

You said, the very group that dominates elite America, college educated liberals, for instance, is the group that is least likely to say marriage is good for society. So who is this group and why must we defy them? Yeah. So the irony is that when my title first kind of was going across Twitter is I got almost immediate pushback from Matt Iglesias, who's a smart center left journalist. And he said, what do you mean defy the elites? The elites are the ones who are getting married and staying married. Now, the irony is that my book actually makes that point

very clearly. And what I say is that our elites tend to walk right in private and talk left in public. And further kind of ironically, Matt Iglesias is sort of one of the objects of my commentary in the book, because I think by all accounts, he's happily married, nearly got a kid. I think everyone, you know, everything's going well on the home front, right? But he had written an article in Vox, this prominent, you know, online left-leaning platform a number of years ago that said basically that the decline

of marriage in America is not a problem. So it's like, he's like a classic example of my point in the book, which is that do not listen. Do not listen to what our elites are often saying about marriage and family. Watch what they do, not what they say. Right. And so this is the classic it's what I call a kind of inverted hypocrisy, classically hypocrisy is about sort of, you know, saying the right thing in public, doing the wrong thing in private. For our elites and the family, it's the exact opposite. And I think it's the opposite because they realize at some level that getting married, being an involved dad, you know, in

Glacius's points, that's a good thing, you know, for them, for their, you know, their spouse, their kids. But publicly to affirm marriage and family life in a kind of powerful way is often seen as today, unfortunately, as kind of conservative or right wing or whatever. And a lot of elites don't want to be kind of pegged as taking a pro marriage position in public. Might an example of this be how there's been recent articles in the past few weeks kind of promoting and explaining polyamory within the New York Times. Is that an example of this? If so, how? Yeah. So you have just probably dozens of articles, unfortunately, promoting polyamory in the New York Times, New York Magazine, even Wall Street Journal had a piece. There's a new

series on one of these platforms, Peacock, I think it is. It's like from couple to throuple. You know, so there's all this kind of commentary and even a new show that's promoting polyamory. And yet I think what we have seen based upon some work done by Rob Henderson, a promising young psychologist, has kind of been talking about this issue as well

and talking to some folks who've been proponents of polyamory is that, you know, they're kind of offering this to the public, but they would not personally, you know, expect that their partner or their spouse would be up for polyamory, you know, in their own private lives. And the reason that polyamory is problematic is that, you know, it really kind of forces people to kind of discount how much time and attention, not to mention money they're going to devote to their spouse, for instance, and also it's going to make it much harder for them to really care for their kids in a meaningful way. And I think most problematically, we know kind of one of the top factors when it comes to risks for kids of physical, emotional,

sexual abuse is being exposed to unrelated adults in their households. You know, so the classic, you know, unrelated boyfriend problem is a real issue. And so I think the problem with polyamory is it's just going to put a lot of adults, you know, into the path or on the path of kids who, you know, should not be in touch with these adults. So polyamory, I think there's more to say about that, but I mean, it's one example of how our culture often introduces new ideas, new norms, new relationship options that seem attractive in some way

or to some people, but end up being harmful to adults, kids in the communities that, you know, allow them to take hold. Early in your book, you mentioned being a boy growing up without a father and how this affected you. I'm curious if you'd be willing to share a little bit of that. And did that motivate you to become a sociologist that studies the family? Yeah, no, my dad died when I was three. And, you know, as I kind of came, you know, of age in, you know, the late 1970s, you know, hadn't sort of the sense that there was an absence in my life, you know, no one to throw a baseball with in the backyard or football, you know, no one to kind of grill with, I mean, you know, in a paternal kind of way. And then as I kind of went to college at the University of Virginia, just this sense that

there was an absence in my life was a lot more salient and came to think about the ways in which sort of marriage as an institution connects men to their kids on average. So that was certainly one of the factors that motivated me to shift from my study of politics as an undergraduate at UVA to getting a PhD in sociology at Princeton, where I studied religion and family at Princeton. So one of the things I appreciate about your book is that you clearly advance what might be considered a more conservative view about marriage. You're open about having certain faith commitments, but you're not afraid to critique the other side politically. And you also say there's a common thread now attacking or undermining marriage,

both from the elites that you're talking about, but also from the right. How do we see this on both sides? And what is that common thread that underlies kind of the criticism? Yeah. So as I was kind of finishing up this book, Sean, I saw a kind of a headline that was trending on Twitter about a year and a half ago. And it said basically that women who don't get married and don't have kids are richer. This was in Bloomberg. There was another kind of article in the New York Times that was saying that, quote, married motherhood in America is a game no one wins. So the point here is that there's been a lot of kind of more left-leaning commentary from mainstream publications

that's sort of encouraging women to steer clear of marriage and motherhood. Okay. And I think everyone kind of that's listening to this on your platform knows this has been a long-running theme in parts of the left. But what's new today is we're now getting a similarly kind of anti-nuptial and anti-natal message that is against marriage, against parenthood, but it's targeting men. It's coming not from the left, but it's coming from the online right.

People like obviously Andrew Tate, who argues there's basically zero statistical advantage, is his phrase, that basically goes to marriage for men today. And part of their concern is rooted in an understandable worry about divorce. And their thought is that most marriages today end up in divorce court. And so a lot of guys are hit hard financially and emotionally when it comes to custody and

some kind of spousal or child support arrangement in the wake of a divorce. But what both those two groups of folks don't understand and appreciate is that A, most marriages today are happy ones. Most today go the distance they do not end in divorce court and married parents both married dads and married mothers are Markedly happier on average than their peers who are single and childless and even their peers who are married Without kids so as tough as being a spouse. So as tough as being a spouse can be, as tough as being a parent can be, we can all fill in the blanks with everything

from dirty diapers to late nights when you've got little kids to teenagers who are having some kind of emotional breakdown over a bad boyfriend or something else. It's tough being a parent. But we do see in our work at the Institute for Family Studies that married parents are often almost twice as likely to be very happy with their lives compared to single and childless adults. And that kind of story doesn't get enough traction in the public square. Okay. So let me lay this out and you can tell me if this is right or not. So married people, general happier than non-married people. Married people with kids

on average more happy than people who are married without kids. And marriage is more statistically significant towards happiness than race, education, work, frequency of having sex, gender, etc. So on the planet, or at least maybe in America, the happiest people are married people with kids. Is that true? And is there any other category you could think of that would be happier on average than that group? Yeah. So again, I'm looking at just sort of this whole question in a demographic way. And so just to kind of give you two sets of stats to kind of illustrate the point, because they run against the sort of Andrew Tate and the, you know, the kind of New York Times writer that I mentioned. So 40% of married moms are very happy with their lives compared to just 22% of single childless women in that 18 to

55 bracket. Then for men, 35% of married dads are very happy compared to just 14% of childless and single men. And then there's no group of unhappier women than women who are single and childless. And there's no group of men who are unhappier than guys who are single dads, often not residential dads. So it just basically tells us that kind of putting marriage and parenthood together for the average guy and the average gal is associated with a lot more happiness, also less loneliness, and reporting a more meaningful life as well, which are, of course, also important outcomes too. Okay, so maybe take a little bit and talk about what is it about marriage that increases happiness?

Because I love where you talk about kind of the paradox of marriage. One of the things I've said for years, which I think is biblical, Jesus is like, seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and then all these things shall be added unto you. If you seek after happiness, seek after yourself, you won't find it. So the secret to happiness is to stop looking for it and try to make other people's lives better. That's something I've just preached because I think it's biblical for years. You applied this to marriage. So what is it about marriage itself and that approach that tends to bring happiness?

So, Sean, what I would argue, based in part on the psychology literature, is that when it comes to sort of happiness in general and then happiness in marriage in particular, that, you know, men and women who directly pursue happiness in life or directly pursue happiness in their marriage tend to be frustrated. It's like that, you know, you're like in the desert and there's that mirage on the edge of the horizon, looks like water, you keep walking towards it, it keeps, you know, going to the edge of the horizon, you never get there. And by context, if you're kind of pursuing a, you know, a real route to a real place in the desert, you'll often end up at an oasis, you know, where you have access to good, you know, good clean water and refreshment, right? And this is sort of the same thing when it comes to marriage. Americans are just trying to be good husbands and good wives, you know, kind of recognize the point of marriage is to, in St. Thomas Aquinas' terms, will the good of the other not to feel good, right? I think a lot of people

think about marriage and what I call kind of the soulmate model it's about kind of like these good feelings romance all this kind of stuff is intense emotional connection and then they're surprised to find after five months or two years that that kind of emotional connection is more frayed and more fleeting than they hoped it would be and they're like well what's you know what's going on here what's next what's what's keeping me in this marriage they often don't do very well. By contrast, those husbands and wives who recognize, realize, appreciate that the point of marriage in large part is to will the good of the other. And then any other, you know, kids that might come into your marriage will the good of the others, plural, your kids as well. And if you kind of have that, what I call family first mentality about your

marriage and your life more in general, you're more likely to be flourishing. And it does, you know, echo the kind of biblical point that you made. I talk about this too in terms of Aristotle saying that we are social animals and that our friendships and family relationships end up being more important for us than how much money we have in our bank account or the kind of degree on our wall. Well said. I remember when I was struggling with what I wanted to do with my life, read a quote from a former US president

who said, sometimes college age students just have anxiety about their future. He goes, but ask yourself the question, what can I do to make other people's lives better? And you'll find a meaningful life. And I'm like, that's so simple, but I've never forgotten that.

You apply that to marriage. Now, you also call marriage our most important social institution. Now, if I let that sit for a minute, people would say, wait a minute. What about the Supreme Court? What about education? What about the church? What about fill in the blank? There's a lot of vital social institutions.

Why is marriage the most important one in your estimation? So I would argue that kind of it's just foundational, that there's a way in which marriage by providing kind of an opportunity for, you know, men and women to kind of connect in a long term relationship by providing kind of a context where kids can be raised in a stable setting, by providing opportunities for, you know, families to share money, emotional support, practical support, you know, that all these kinds of goods, you know, end up being incredibly important for most, you know, men, women, and children. And then when you look at a lot of these, as I said, kind of these big civilizational outcomes, you often find that marriage or the quality of marriage is,

you know, kind of the top predictor of things like trends in happiness in the United States, trends in deaths of despair in the United States, you know, trends in kind of the in the United States, you know, trends in kind of the health of the American dream at the community level. You often find that either family structure or marriage is, or deaths, you know, of despair. These are the things that really are kind of most influenced by the health of this most finance institution in, you know, in the United States. And it has some social implications as well, doesn't it?

Like there's one stat in your book that just stunned me. I got to make sure I find this. I think it's on page 67. Make sure I get this, get this right. You said young men from families without both of their parents are incredibly more likely to go to prison 21% than they are to graduate from college 14%. example of how either fatherlessness or divorce has social consequences outside just the privacy of the home for society as a whole. So what are some of those consequences? And why are they so profound? Yeah, so that was the most striking thing when it came to looking at kids and their welfare as it relates to marriage, was that boys are more likely to spend some time in prison or in jail than graduate from college if they're from a non-intact family. And then by contrast, as you were saying, they're four times more likely to graduate from college than they are to spend any time in prison or in jail

if they have the benefit of both their parents you know on the home front i also see too when it comes to you know depression or sadness that kids are about 50 percent more likely to be sad when they're raised in a non-attack family it's also important to kind of note that sort of like there's a there's a boy story and a girl story in the book and that is that on the social and emotional piece boys are more likely to act you know act out to be suspended you know to be incarcerated, to be arrested, for acting out in some kind of visible way. Whereas girls in the face of some kind of trauma or difficulty are more likely to turn inwards, to be anxious or depressed when things are not well for them. And so we tend to see kind of the manifestations of family instability, Sean,

a little bit different for boys and girls. So boys, again, are more likely to get in trouble with school or the law when, you know, there is instability on the home front or pathology of some sort. Girls are more likely to, you know, be anxious, depressed, you know, cut themselves, whatever it might be when, you know, mom and dad are not getting along or mom and dad are getting a divorce. That was one of the big takeaways for me is the way you described that boys from broken homes are more likely to externalize that behavior and girls are more likely to internalize that behavior. So there's pain for both, but especially this behavior is affecting society. It's affecting schools. It is costing us financially

and safety and so that's why the government cares about healthy marriages literally for the stability of society now that's an argument that goes beyond your book but that is that just kind of jumped out to me page after page now you and i are both professors and i this one thing you said i've been thinking about for a while and i shared with my students is that you're at the University of Virginia. And you said, surprisingly to me, that your students hardly ever talk or even think about dating or marriage. Now, I'm in the other side of the country at Biola, which obviously is a private Christian school. And some would even joke that Biola stands for the Bridal Institute of Los Angeles. As far as I can tell, there's a whole lot of talk and conversation about this

that can in some ways dominate maybe too much somebody would make the argument rather than the opposite. Why the difference between those two? So, and I want to be clear, there's, it's not like they're never talking about, you know, dating or marriage at UVA. It's just that it's kind of more on the sort of the distant radar for a lot of the students at UVA. They sort of think about it in terms of this is what you do when you're 28, 29, 30s. You kind of get serious, get married. But their kind of more immediate focus is on kind of what I call the Midas mindset. You know, it's like, it's focusing on education, graduate education, including that education kind of bucket. It's focusing on kind of building their own brand and focusing on, you know, getting a great job. And so they're not devoting a lot of attention to dating, love, and marriage, generally speaking at

UVA. And I had kind of one practical experience of this with a graduate student with whom I work. Asked him, you know, do you wanna get married? Oh yeah, I wanna get married. And I had just been talking to him about his kind of professional plans before that question. And he kind of a very clear kind of plan in his mind about how he was gonna do this job,

then get that graduate degree, and then, you know then take that step professionally. So we also roadmap for his professional life. But I asked him, are you dating anyone? Do you have any plans to ask anyone on a date, et cetera? Silence. So it's just kind of an example of how practically a lot of my UVA students, they're kind of theoretically interested in love and marriage, maybe at some point down the road, but there's kind of no plan, no roadmap. And I think in this new world that we're living in, Sean, what I'm also talking about in the book is that a record share of young adults

today will never marry because of the new obstacles that we see in our culture and in our economy for young adults, when it comes to things that are related to love and marriage and come with them second but um so you know i encourage this particular graduate students to be more intentional about you know looking around and asking someone on a date um and he did that and was pleased to see him you know in our local church at st thomas aquinas you know two three weeks later, circulating with a young woman whom we had asked out on a date. I don't know what their status is right now, but it was kind of like he needed that encouragement to kind of like basically be as agentic on the dating front as he was on the professional front.

So you talk about people less likely to get married. If they get married, they get married later. Now the average is 30 years old, less likely to have kids. And in your chapter on the American heart closing to marriage, you talk about the dropping fertility rates. We're about 2.1, which is roughly what it takes for a civilization to maintain itself. Of course, immigration plays a role.

And how this dropped down significantly, I think it was 1.6 or 1.7, starting at 2009, which is 7 million less people born, statistically speaking. Now, some people might say, good, people are ruining the planet. We need smaller civilizations, you know, because the environment, they might make that case. You think something very different follows from the drop in fertility rate. It concerns you. Why? So I'm concerned about kind of like a rise in kinlessness, you know, where more and more adults are going to be living in a world where they don't have a spouse and don't have children. And again, kind of recognizing that I would look at people as a resource,

you know, not as a, you know, some kind of pathology for the planet. And so, you know, when you're sort of seeing, as I did see a lot of young adults who are not married and don't have kids, you know, they're more likely to be struggling with life. So I have a guy that I call Scott in the book. And Scott is about 34 years old, living in the outer suburbs of Washington, D.C. And by the standards of what I call the Midas mindset, he should be doing fine. He's got a graduate degree. He's got a good job. He makes more than, you know, $100,000 for his work. But he's single and he's childless. And he said this to me. He said, a good job. He makes more than $100,000 for his work, but he's single and he's childless. And he said this to me, he said, you know, I've got degrees on my wall. I've

got accomplishments and certificates, but it doesn't mean anything in the end. He told me, it's not like I can take any of that with me after I die. He said, I've got to get every day, look in the mirror and realize I'm alone. I have nobody. So Scott is suffering from kind of a, you know, profound sense of loneliness, meaninglessness. He just comes home, walks his dog, you know, watches TV, gets on social media and does kind of the same thing on the weekends as well. And if he had a spouse and kids, you know, I'm not saying it's a magic solution, but his life would be a lot fuller, richer'm not saying it's a magic solution, but his life would be a lot fuller and richer.

So he's kind of an example of how this can play out in a profoundly negative way. Not to say that all singles are in his predicament, but just they're more likely in our day and age to be struggling. Now, last time I interviewed you for my podcast, not here on YouTube, I asked you if happier people get married or if marriage actually creates happiness. And one of the things you said is that it might be some combination of

both, but marriage actually changes people. And there's a chart that just is amazing in your book at how single average male makes $42,000 a year. And then a cohabiting male, it's $68,000 for the family household income. But then someone who's married, it's $95,000. So from $42,000, you'd expect it just double to $84,000. But instead it's $95,000, which is maybe 10% to 15% more. So what is it about marriage that actually changes men? So it's important to acknowledge here, right, that part of the story is what we call selection

effects, you know, in the sciences, where the kinds of people who are selecting into marriage are just different, you know, than their peers who are not. So they might be more religious, they might be more educated, more affluent, you know, they might have better social skills, might be more attractive physically, right? And so these are the kinds of things that would correlate with both getting married, staying married oftentimes, and also just sort of being happy with your life more generally. So I don't want to kind of minimize the idea that part of the story here is that marriage has become more selective.

It's fair. And that means that, you know, more religious people, more educated, more affluent people, for instance, are more likely to be tying the knot, so to speak. But we'd also note, too, that marriage actually has a kind of causal impact upon people. You know, you're taking a set of vows before family and friends, even in a secular context, in a wedding usually. And kind of just doing that can be transformative

in terms of signaling your commitment to your spouse and to the broader community. And we know, for instance, just going to give you one empirical example of how this plays out. There was a twin study done in Minnesota looking at identical twins in part, found that the guy twins who were married earned about 26% more than their identical twin brothers who were not married. So it's just one, I think, suggestive piece of evidence that kind of tells us there's something about marriage per se that tends to have a big effect on both women and I think especially on men in terms of changing their orientation to life and their experience of life as well.

I think what's really helpful is you talk about how it shifts a man's risk tolerance. It shifts a man's working hard that all of a sudden he's responsible to care for, you know, at least contribute to significantly, in some cases solely care for a spouse and kids. It kind of almost creates just, I'm going to work harder because of this. So it has that transformative effect, which is again, why society should care about marriage itself, influencing and affecting men. Now you have a whole bunch of myths that you walked through. We won't have time to go through all of them, but you have this idea of what you call the family diversity myth.

What is that and what do you make of it? So there are plenty of scholars and journalists and public intellectuals who would kind of make the argument in public that every family form, Sean, is sort of equally valuable. You know, single-parent families, set families, co-housing families, intact married families, they're all kind of the same. And what really matters for kids is not the form of their family,

but kind of the substance in terms of love and money. So what kids need, Sean, is just, you know, love from any kind of family form, any kind of parent figure. And they also need, you know, a certain kind of, you know, minimum level of financial resources to kind of flourish. And, minimum level of financial resources to kind of flourish. And while I would certainly acknowledge that both love and money, family process and financial resources are certainly very predictive of kids flourishing. I think what this perspective doesn't

really acknowledge, as I point out in the book, is that there is a structure, there is a form that's more conducive to giving kids on average, the love and money they need to thrive. And that of course form is the intact married family. No other family form is associated with as much financial security, even controlling for things like education and race of the parents, for instance.

And no other family form gives kids as much attention and affection and consistent discipline as the intact married family, in part because it brings into play the two people who've got the biggest stake in history with the kids. And the challenge with step families and single parents, and I was raised by a single mom,

so I know that kids can thrive even in obviously other family forms but the challenge is it's just hard um either as a single mother or as a step parent to kind of um you know basically handle all the challenges and responsibilities of parenting either on your own or with someone who doesn't have the same kind of connection or tie with the kid as the biological parent typically does. And again, there are exceptions. We know that there are biological families, intact families that are pathological. And we know there are plenty of single parent families, for instance, that are great.

We also know too that many kids do fine in say a single parent context. My sister and I are doing fine, you know, married many years, got a bunch of kids, you know, it's all good. But I'm also a sociologist and I can say that on average, kids are more likely to struggle and they don't have the benefit of their own, you know, married parents in their corner. When my wife and I got married, I think it was about four years before we had, we had a kid. And I remember our first reading some stat. The number was like the average child costs like a quarter million dollars before they leave the home. I don't know what the number is now.

But I remember it was framed in a certain way. You better count the cost economically before you have a kid. Because it might end up stealing your ability to buy things you want, go on vacations, live a life of freedom. And I didn't believe that. I always wanted to be a dad, but since kids are expensive, stressful, and the argument is that they, you know, reduce happiness, what is the dad actually showing? Why? So it is true that the first you know I think child the first baby is it you know is a major challenge for married couples and they see their marital happiness dip you know in the immediate wake of having their

first child but once they kind of like acclimate to the baby once they acclimate to it you know having kids more kids don't seem to have as much of an impact on them. And then often, by the time they reach, you know, the 30s, 40s, 50s, you know, they're in a better place than their childless, you know, married peers, and especially their childless single peers. And so my colleague, Dr. Wendy Wang, for instance, looked at moms and just found again that in that 35 to 55 direction to our lives you know i mean we've got soccer we've got basketball um we've got you know church on sunday we've got youth group on sunday night with the kids you know it's busy a lot of driving you know a little bit of a hassle but you know my life is rich right and i you know i've got peers who are single and childless, and their evenings can be pretty empty at times.

So that's the sort of simple way of expressing this idea for a broader audience. Makes sense. In my experience, for example, I play college basketball at Biola. I love it. Gym rat. And it's just one of my favorite things. But I found more joy watching my kids play sports that they love than I ever experienced. On the flip side, when I see my kids in pain, it hurts more

than any pain I've ever been in my life. So in some way, being a dad has enriched my ability with joy, but also the flip side of pain. I think those go together, but it also just makes life more meaningful. And it seems like the data backs that up. Now, one of my favorite parts in your book that Nancy Piercy in her book on kind of toxic masculinity, use some of your data. I don't think from this book, some of the similar data that you've made here, that there's a certain narrative, maybe it's come from the elites and even from some probably that are somewhat conservative, pushing back on traditional masculine virtues as really harming women, so to speak, or at least making women miserable.

What do you find in your data on that? So what I find there is that when you kind you look at what is linked to women being happily married, especially when they've got kids in the household, so married moms, they can have here especially, what you tend to find is that women appreciate a guy who's physically fit, who is strong physically, who is protective. That's a huge predictor of women's happiness in marriage. think protectiveness we didn't define it we let them kind of imagine whatever that means I think it's like a physical piece but also like even like if you're at a party and your husband's kind of like looking you know

out to make sure that you're you know that you're comfortable that you're socially engaged whatever or that you know you're not kind of being ignored or in some way discounted. So I think protectiveness can be understood in a variety of physical and social ways. And then also who is a reliable breadwinner. So also women are happier when they would rate their husbands as good breadwinners. And so what I say in my chapter on gender in the book is that across the spectrum for women today, whether they're secular, religious, liberal, or conservative, some of these sort of classic virtues and classic traits in terms of being stronger, more protective,

and being a reliable breadwinner are still linked to women flourishing, provided that their husbands are emotionally engaged with their wives, a lot of eye-to-eye contact, date nights, things like that. And then also that if they've got kids, they're really engaged dads. And that was true for women across the spectrum, conservative, liberal, religious, secular.

Dad's involvement with the kids was a big issue like you know for them if dads were engaged that's all you know that's really good for the marriage if they were not it's a problem now who does you know pay work and who does housework and you know um was less important for women overall but of course the story there varied a lot by whether or not the women themselves were more kind of traditional in the orientation or progressive in ways you would expect. So it was less exactly how, say, household chores were divvied up, but that the father was providing, carrying his weight, so to speak, and just present with the wife and with the kids. That's really the key dividing line in terms of happiness. Is that accurate? Correct.

And what's striking to me, though, too, talking to some more progressive women for the book, I can remember a successful young Southern attorney recently married, and she was kind of just acknowledging to me that when she was in college, she was thinking about marriage and sort of acknowledged to herself that ambition was a big you know attraction point for her um she also kind of talked about working in brooklyn you know a number of years ago and sort of like noticing the guys who were more physically you know strong in brooklyn and and appreciating that too so again here's a very kind of progressive, you know, young,

successful lawyer, you know, but when it comes to the things that appeal to her about men, they kind of correlate with things we would classically associate with masculinity. Now, there's a lot of conversation in your book about faith and religion that, as with the other chapters, pushes back on a lot of the commonly accepted beliefs, both sometimes within and without the church. And maybe before we get into some of the particulars, walk through what some of the findings are about what religion plays in terms of happiness in marriage, stability in marriage, individual happiness, etc. What role does faith and religion play there? Yeah, so what we see sometimes in the media, for instance, or kind of on social media as well,

is that there's this idea sometimes that kind of Christians are, you know, hung up with things. Like, so I talk about a New Yorker story where they interviewed the sociologist Sam Perry, and he was kind of basically saying that, you know, a lot of Christian men feel guilty and, you know, about any pornography use that they've had and that their wives are, you know, intolerant of that and that their wives are more likely to divorce them if they have a problem with pornography. And, well, I think everything he said was like technically correct sean it would leave the ordinary reader of that new yorker piece with the idea that christian couples and christian men are uniquely challenged by pornography and sex you know because of their kind of archaic hang-ups right what was completely missing from this new

york interview were a couple of facts. Number one, church-going couples are happier than secular couples. Number two, they're between 30% and 50% less likely to get divorced than secular Americans are. Number three, today, what I find in my book is that two-thirds of church-going couples have sex at least once a week or more, and less than half of secular couples have sex at least once a week. That was one of the most surprising adult findings in the book. And then when it comes to sexual satisfaction, there are about 25 percentage points more likely to be very happy than the religious couples with their sexual lives compared to the secular couples.

So all that was completely missing from this New Yorker article, right? And so what we see in this sort of broader empirical portrait that I paint in the book is that generally speaking, faith is not a magic pill, but it does tend to be associated with better outcomes for couples on a number of fronts, including on the sexual front in ways that I don't think our culture really understands or appreciates. So you have this quote, let's, we'll jump there now since you brought it up. And the quote said, for most husbands and wives, more faith equals better sex. Now you specifically say, if I read it correctly, in terms of quantity, which you just said, about 50% more, but also in

terms of quality, why would that be the case? Well, I think, you know, one of the issues here is that, and this doesn't really get, well, one issue is actually is that, yes, pornography can be a problem, you know, across the culture, and in some some ways particularly for more religious men who um have moral um strictures against pornography use but it's important to note that religious couples you know religious men and women use pornography less than secular couples so i think that's you know could be one um advantage you're not kind of comparing your spouse to some you know idealized figure online that's that's a good thing um I think we know, too, in general, that commitment and trust, emotional security, that these kinds of things are conducive

to a more satisfying sexual issue for both women and men. And so if you have like, you know, a deeper commitment, which religious couples tend to have towards both their spouse in particular and marriage in general. I think that's creating a context that's conducive to more satisfying sex as well. Then another thing that seems to come through in my book is about kind of what we call an ethic of generosity when it comes to sex. And what we see is that, of course, there are exceptions,

but generally husbands are more interested in sex on a more frequent basis than wives, you know, in most marriages. And so there's a bit of a gap between, you know, husbands and wives and their interest in having sex. And so if the husbands are kind of generous in acknowledging that their wives are not always interested in, or interested in, you know, physical intimacy on a more frequent basis, they can kind of like, I think if they're religious or more likely to just sort of think, you know,

I get it like tonight's not the night and I'm not going to, I'm not going to press the issue. Right. But likewise, I think the wives, you know, if they're religious and more likely to um you know compromise you know like sure that's fine you know we can we can do that right and so in kind of talking with couples and looking at the data it looks like there might be a bit more of a kind of an ethic of of generosity in this you know this department of physical intimacy or this domain of physical intimacy that accounts for why religious couples today have more sex than their secular peers.

But it is striking. There wasn't a gap between religious and secular couples in 2000, Sean, in what's called the General Social Survey. So this gap with the murdered looks like it's a new thing. And we're still trying to figure out why there's a gap between religious and secular couples. But those are some of my kind of, you know, theories about why we're seeing this right now. Yeah, that's really interesting. And that needs to be stated,

because it really challenges the narrative that I think we see, whether it's on social media, whether it's in movies, the educational system that marriage traditionally stunts sexual frequency and sexual pleasure. And the data is like, maybe we should take a second look at that. Now, that doesn't surprise me at all, because I think there's a God who designed sex and we flourish when we live according to his design. But of course, that goes beyond the sociological data that you're specifically unpacking this book. Now, last time I mentioned, I'd love to do a full show on this, maybe down the road,

but your thoughts just in terms of the research you've done on cohabitation and living together and its effects on happiness and a lasting marriage. So the issue with cohabitation is that a lot of Americans, Sean, including most of my students at UVA, think it's a great way to prepare for a marriage, you know, that you kind of can do like a test run you know with your

relationship and kind of get some wisdom about you know does does your you know your boyfriend or girlfriend pick up you know after themselves you know in the bedroom or really dirty dishes on the kitchen counter you know that kind of And, you know, it kind of makes sense, right? Like, if I was going to, you know, move to Charlottesville, Virginia, I'd want to kind of come to Charlottesville and, you know, have at least a couple of nights to kind of check out the place and, you know, take it all in. So there's a certain logic to it. But I think what people don't appreciate theoretically is that cohabitation is not the same thing as marriage, because one of the distinctives about marriage is you're kind of making, ideally, right, a permanent commitment to someone, you know, for as long as you shall live. And then once you make that commitment, it really changes the character of the relationship itself.

Whereas, by contrast, couple couples have a much more provisional, oftentimes, commitment, often an asymmetrical commitment, where one party is a lot more committed than the other. So it's really not a good training ground because it's not preparing you for what might come in the future. And one thing we see, for instance, is cohabiting couples tend to have separate bank accounts, which makes sense because they're not fully committed at that point. But then they tend to bring that pattern into their marriage. And we know that married couples with joint accounts are much more likely to be flourishing, not just financially, but otherwise, than married couples who have separate accounts.

There are kind of patterns that can kind of creep up in a cohabiting relationship that then bleed into the marriage in ways that are not good. But in periods what we see is that there are kind of two big issues with cohabitation in terms of risk for both greater divorce and less marital happiness. One is cohabiting prior to a public engagement where people are kind of like sliding into cohabitation.

They're not necessarily on the same page. They haven't talked about their future. They don't necessarily know what their common values and aspirations and goals are. And oftentimes too, one party is a lot more committed or interested than the other party and that's the recipe for disaster. And the other kind of risk is having multiple collaborating partners prior to marriage, right?

And so we see across the board, whether it's collaboration or other kinds of partnerships, that people have more partners prior to marriage and more likely to be unhappily married and more likely to get divorced. And so cohabitation can be a vehicle today, especially now, because cohabitation are less stable today than they were say 20 years ago,

where people get on this kind of like, you know, rotating platform, if you will. And, you know, they cohabit with Joe and John before marrying Bill or with Jane and Sally before marrying Elizabeth. And there's just something about having had multiple experiences of like, you know, this kind of intimacy that I think ends up negatively coloring their marriage and their relationship and maybe their assessment of their spouse, you know. So that's all to say is that, you know, I think the easiest sort of takeaway here is you can kind of steer clear of those risks by waiting to cohabit and, you know, after

the wedding ceremony. I just have to highlight again and again, almost page after page, you are pushing back on some of the common narratives in our culture as a whole from the elites, also from the far right. Some myths I see, like the soulmate myth believed within the church. But on this one, there's probably a lot of people whose parents divorced in the 70s and 80s who think cohabiting is going to help them have a more successful marriage. They listen to the elites. They go into it. But what I tell my students is you think it's setting you up to know what marriage is like, but it's missing the very thing, commitment and shared resources without any hesitation

that makes marriage really work. And so thinking you're getting prepared when you're not actually sets you up for disadvantage because you go into it with a kind of an illusion of what marriage is really going to be like. Right. And I think this issue of commitment is often, you know, when we look at kind of the research, commitment is often the best predictor of marital quality. You know, so if you have the sense that your partner is with you and for you, you know, for the duration, that's incredibly powerful as a predictor of your satisfaction in marriage. So again, the challenge of cohabitation is that oftentimes people are not symmetrically committed. This was playing out for me here in Charlottesville. We lived downtown a number of years ago. We had a neighbor. She started cohabiting with her boyfriend when she was about 28. He was, I think, around 25,

younger guy than she was. And she had 33. So five years she devoted to this guy. She wanted kind of a clear message, was she gonna get a ring or not from this relationship? And he said to her, well, I'm not ready for that kind of commitment. And she's like, what? I've devoted five years of my life with you and for you. And she was expecting a ring and she wanted to have kids

in fairly short order at age 33. But she realized at that moment in time that he wasn't that committed to her. And so she broke off the relationship. I think she was single for a while. She did, you know, find a husband in her late 30s, but she never had kids. And I think had she kind of looked for a guy who was really committed to her, you know, in her late 20s or early 30s, she might have found, you know, a husband who was and might have had kids. So just the point here too is like, it's not just about the risk for divorce or unhappiness in marriage. It's also like the

risk you may miss out on, you know, marriage and, you know, parenthood period if you're kind of spending a lot of time with someone who's not fully committed to you. I think a lot of girls will live with a guy with a hope of showing their commitment, seeing their compatibility. But actually, the guy's like, hey, I'm kind of getting what I want here. There's no rush to get married and actually sets him back. Now, last question for you. You have a section at the end on what the government can do. Now, I guess my bigger question is part of me wants to say, no matter what the government did, I'm not leaving my wife. I have a commitment to her. She has a commitment to me. But I also came from a stable family. Most people around me have stable families. I'm at a church where this is preached. So I probably have a tendency to play down what the government can do. You point out some specific things that you think the government can

and should do for the sake of civilization. What are maybe two or three of those things? Yeah. Before we kind of go right to that question, I would just also say too, people don't realize, a lot of folks think there's nothing government can do to sort of strengthen or affect marriage. They don't realize is that the biggest federal agency in America, and what do you think that is, Sean? Oh, gosh, I have no idea, actually. So the U.S. Department of Defense, right, is the biggest federal agency, you know, affecting the most Americans directly. And we know is that men who've served in the military are currently serving in the military way more likely to be married than their peers.

Roughly similar backgrounds. It's true for African-American guys, it's true for working class guys who are less likely to marry in general. But if they're in the military or have served, way more likely to be married. There's a lot going on there, but it's in part because in the U.S. military, you cannot get an extra housing benefit. You cannot get health care for your partner. You can't have your partner kind of getting an opportunity to shop on base if they are not married to you. Right. So there's a very clear link between kind of incentives, medical status in and military, and it's linked to behavior.

So everyone who says nothing Uncle Sam does can affect marriage, they don't know the research on the U.S. military. Now, there are problems with the military in terms of deployments and stress and trauma and combat, which are linked to things like some divorce risks. But I'm just sort of saying on the idea that the government can't do anything, the military case refutes that. Now, where do we go from there? I would just sort sort of say two things one is we've got to end the marriage penalties we've seen a lot of our means tested programs like medicaid that affect working class couples with kids today i talk about that in the book readers i mean listeners can look at the book on that score um and then two i would also be advocating for teaching the success sequence in

our schools this idea that you get at least high school education, you work full-time and get married before having kids. If you do that, your odds of being poor are just 3%. As a young adult, I think that our adolescents in middle school and high school, both in public and private schools, can be taught the sequence and just understand and appreciate how much still even in 2024, education, work, and marriage are the three pillars of the American dream. That's fantastic. Hey, there's so much more in your book we need to get to. Get Married, I would say, is one of the best and most important books I've read in a while, and I hope everybody will pick it up.

I can only imagine how much criticism you take from folks, from somebody who takes criticism in a different lane. Keep it up. Don't back down. Keep speaking where the truth is at with just the charity and clarity that you do. Always enjoy having you on. Before you go away, folks, make sure you hit subscribe. We've got some other shows like this coming up.

And if you've ever thought about studying apologetics, we would love to have you in the program here at Biola. Sexuality and family and marriage is something we also talk about making a biblical case. Dr. Bradley Wilcox, let's do it again. Thanks for your time. Thank you, Sean. Appreciate it.