Why Is Marriage So Controversial?

GETTING married is better than not getting married. Your health is better. You’re richer. You’re happier. More important, children who are raised by two married parents have an advantage over those who are not.

Nothing about these factual statements should be controversial.

Brad Wilcox, professor and director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, is the author of the new book “Get Married.” In it, he lays out all these benefits and more.

Wilcox noted on Twitter, “Most troubling finding related to children in Get Married is that boys who raised [sic] outside of an intact family are more likely to end up in jail than to graduate from college. By contrast, boys from intact families are about 4x more likely to graduate college than go to jail.” The corresponding chart shows that by age 28, more boys from blended families or raised by a single mother or father or even by adopted parents end up in jail than as college graduates. It’s startling.

Yet sharing findings like this or asserting in general that marriage is good have become contentious. Wilcox often finds himself arguing with people who are themselves happily married and stable yet think it’s inappropriate for him to advocate that same stability for others.

Melissa Kearney, a University of Maryland economist, was warned by colleagues not to publish her recent book, “The TwoParent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind.” Kearney found that kids raised by a single parent were far more likely to live in poverty. This was true even when she adjusted for education.

Kearney told The Free Press that “even if you compare across moms of the same education group, you see that kids who grow up in a household with two parents have household incomes that are about twice as high.”

I interviewed Wilcox in October and asked him whether living together or simply being partnered without the paperwork has the same effect as marriage. “Cohabitation doesn’t measure up here because it’s just much less stable. What we see is that folks that are cohabitating don’t tend to go the distance. They’re lacking the legal recognition, the big ceremony, for some it’s the religious piece, they don’t have all the cultural benefits that marriage still today delivers in this country,” he told me.

There is an avalanche of research, which Wilcox and Kearney cite often, to support their claims. Meanwhile, with no evidence it would improve anyone’s life, there seems to be an all-around push to make relationship concepts like polyamory more acceptable. Apparently we don’t need proof that people would be happier if their spouse were having sex with someone else.

The New York Times has had about 10 articles about polyamory in the last year, from a story about polyamorous couples holding Celtic ceremonies last February and “To Fix a Broken Marriage, an Experiment With Polyamory” in March to “Interested in Polyamory? Check Out These Places” in May.

It’s published interviews with therapists who suggest polyamory, answered ethical questions from men who want to pressure their wives to open their marriages, reviewed a book by a deeply unhappy polyamorous woman and finally covered the “solo poly” person, whatever that is.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post reviewed Kearney’s book with the subheadline “Melissa S. Kearney looks hard at the data but doesn’t dare to imagine new possibilities for societal structure.”

Wilcox and Kearney have to worry people will tar them as “social conservatives” and thus not take them seriously while concepts like polyamory and other “new possibilities for societal structure,” which seem to go against every human instinct, get foisted on us with no research at all.

Life won’t always go the way we might want it to. People get divorced, people have children out of wedlock. But it isn’t judgment to say one path is better than others.

The idea should be to shield the next generation from bad ideas and nudge them in the right direction.

The only solution to the evidence Kearney and Wilcox present is to tell the truth about it.