The Death Of Marriage Is Killing America

In the immediate aftermath of the 2022 midterm elections — a shocking overperformance by Democratic candidates given the fact that Republicans won the national popular vote by upwards of 4.5 percent — President Joe Biden celebrated with his followers. One group in particular, he said, ought to receive credit for the Democratic victory: women. “As I said,” Biden rambled, “women in America made their voices heard, man. I said last year one of the most extraordinary things about the Dobbs decision is what was about to challenge American women when the justice said they have it in their power to basically say let’s see what they’re going to do. Well, guess what? Y’all showed up and beat the hell out of them.”

Buried in this garbled syntax was the genuine kernel of a point: Democrats’ victory was achieved largely on the back of female votes. But not all female votes — one particular type of female votes: those of single women. According to an Edison Research Network Exit Poll, married men voted Republican at a 59-39 percent clip; married women voted Republican 56-42; unmarried men voted 52-45; and unmarried women voted Democrat at a rate of 68-31. 

This makes single women a more reliably Democratic voter bloc than Asian-Americans (58 percent Democrat) or Hispanic-Americans (61 percent Democrat). They’re also a far larger voter bloc than either: there are about 41.8 million never married women in the United States, another 15.1 million divorced women in the United States, and some 11.6 million widowed women in the United States. While single women vote at a lower rate than married women, they vote as a political bloc — and as they grow as a percentage of the population, this would make them the single most powerful political bloc in America.

And their constituency is growing. As marriage scholar Brad Wilcox points out, marriage rates have dropped more than 60 percent since 1970, and fertility rate is down to 1.7. The conclusion: “more than a third of today’s young adults will never marry, and about one quarter will never have children.” And generation upon generation, the percentage of girls who will marry is dropping.

The death of marriage in America is part of a broader narrative about the death of marriage in the West. America still has the highest marriage rate among other Western countries other than Hungary and Israel – but the marriage rate among all Western countries has declined markedly over the course of the last century.

So, what happened?

What Marriage Meant

To understand why so many fewer people are getting married, we must begin with a simple fact: the very definition of marriage has changed dramatically over the course of the last century. Marriage was, for nearly all of human history, predominantly built around child-bearing and child-rearing; as the Bible suggested in Genesis 1 and 2, a man would leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and they would become one flesh; by doing so, human beings would be fruitful and multiply. 

This was not merely normative — it was descriptive of the natural state of mankind. Virtually every known human culture has socially-approved marriage — the joining of a man and a woman. Historically speaking, many cultures showed tolerance for polygamy; almost none showed tolerance for polyandry. This is because even polygamy functions on the basis of a single man and a single woman procreating and a child being raised in the context of that dyad; the fact that the man might have several such relationships with women does not obliterate the fact that each individual dyad is indeed a dyad. There is no known culture historically that treated male-male or female-female dyads as on a societal plane with male-female couplings.

Because marriage was built around the idea of family formation, this meant that the chief attribute of marriage was duty; family was not a “voluntary association.” As historian Gertrude Himmelfarb states:

It has been a “given” of life, an immutable fact, starting before birth (in the lives of parents and grandparents) and persisting after death (in the lives of children and grandchildren). Because the family has had this involuntary, mandatory character, it has also been assumed to have the authority to carry out its primary functions: the rearing and socializing of children and the caring for its weakest and most vulnerable members, the old and the young.

If family was simply a reality of life, it was not primarily rooted in subjective feelings of “love”; love may have been a wonderful component of family, but it did not lie at its root. Duty lay at the root, as historian Robert Nisbet states:

Paradoxical as it may seem, it is not love — least of all sexual passion — that the family has been built around historically, but, rather, duty and obligation….the great strength of the family has everywhere

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