The Flaw In Marriage's Core Assumption

If we are seeing a decline in marriage, it's multi-faceted for sure. But we need to look at one of the core assumptions to start.

Lots of societal hand-wringing of late about the decline of marriage. If you zoom out a bit, the divorce rate is actually decreasing in America, although it’s increasing for older people, the so-called “Silver Splitters,” which may indicate that people cannot hold a marriage together with semi-increasing life span (statistically, when you factor in COVID, I believe life span is actually decreasing for both genders over the last half-decade).

It is very hard to generalize or talk about marriage in the aggregate, because every marriage is very unique and they occur at the intersection of 900 different things, including:

• How old you were when you met

• Your attitudes about kids

• Your attitudes about sex

• Your professions and your goals therein

• Your religious background

• Where in America you live

• Your familial history with divorce

• Etc.

So again, it’s hard to discuss it in the aggregate, but we can semi-try a little bit here.

I watch this lady Pearl sometimes on YouTube. A lot of her stuff is insufferable, but periodically it’s interesting. Here’s a short:

In that one, she makes a binary argument about marriage:

1. Men want sex.

2. Women want stability.

Then she says 1 in 4 marriages are sexless. I’ve never seen that specific stat, but it wouldn’t surprise me. I’d be the first person to tell you that people need to get laid more, especially within marriages.

So Pearl “destroys this feminist” (as the video title tells you) because she says, well, women ain’t offering sex, so how can they demand stability? There are a lot of things wrong with this whole ecosystem of an argument, including whether men want sex (some want fast mile times and to play video games in peace) and whether women want stability (some just want kids, or a thriving career). But if you assume “sex for stability” is the baseline of a lot of middle-class marriages (which again, is a wide-ranging assumption), then maybe that part has broken down, and maybe that’s tied to divorce rates and later marriages, etc.

It’s a much bigger picture than that, but I can offer you a couple of random pieces of intel here.