The Marriage Gap Read Honestly

What's happening

A new Institute for Family Studies report by Brad Wilcox and Grant Bailey, summarized May 6 in USA Today, finds that after controlling for education, race, and age, liberals 22 to 40 are 28% less likely to be married than conservatives. Marriage expectations among liberal teens have fallen 16 points since 2010. The felt-happiness gap between married and unmarried young adults, nearly nonexistent in 2000, has widened sharply. Wilcox calls it "the Left's marriage problem." Progressive writer Matt Yglesias concedes "a fair amount of marriage-skeptical content in highbrow media." Gen Z Democrat Harry Sisson: "I'm a Democrat. I want to be a husband. I want to be a father one day."

What the Text says

Malachi closes the Hebrew canon with a strange complaint. The altar is wet with the tears of women whose husbands have walked away, and the prophet says God refuses the offerings of the men responsible.

Malachi 2:13-1613This again you do: you cover the altar of Yahweh with tears, with weeping, and with sighing, because he doesn't regard the offering any more, neither receives it with good will at your hand.14Yet you say, 'Why?' Because Yahweh has been witness between you and the wife of your youth, against whom you have dealt treacherously, though she is your companion, and the wife of your covenant.15Did he not make you one, although he had the residue of the Spirit? Why one? He sought a godly seed. Therefore take heed to your spirit, and let no one deal treacherously against the wife of his youth.16For I hate divorce," says Yahweh, the God of Israel, "and him who covers his garment with violence!" says Yahweh of Armies. "Therefore take heed to your spirit, that you don't deal treacherously.

The original audience was a community exhausted by exile and rebuilding, where marriage was being quietly dismissed as one more obligation that was too costly to keep. The prophet does not idealize marriage. He names its dissolution as treachery against a partner, and he locates the damage in the people who broke faith, not in the institution. The text engages marriage from inside its difficulty, which is where the contemporary skepticism actually lives.

The reflection

The conservative reading of this data wants a culture-war trophy. The progressive reading wants the data to be moralism in a lab coat. Both readings let the reader off.

What the felt-happiness numbers describe is something older than either tribe. A practice humans have attempted in nearly every society we have records of is being abandoned by a generation, and the people abandoning it report less happiness, not more. Whether the loss is justified is a separate question from whether it is a loss. Malachi watched something similar and wept at the altar. He did not write a policy memo. He named what was being broken, and he named who was breaking it.