Conservatives are afraid to talk about the real marriage problem

The fact that marriage in America is on the decline is concerning, but few people understand how deep the problem goes.

Recent data shows the dismal marriage numbers in the United States. The percentage of married couples, average age at which couples are marrying, and number of children are all in catastrophic decline. The numbers represent a dramatic collapse in the institution that serves as a foundation for successful civilizations.

Conservatives will often place the blame on a lack of individual virtue, and there is plenty of truth to that claim, but the most important factors are baked into the structure of our society in a manner that Republicans are terrified to address.

Once birth control and abortion made pregnancy a choice instead of an inevitability, everything shifted.

When a movement refers to itself as “conservative” you would think the preservation of marriage would be its top priority. However, when marriage does receive any attention from conservative pundits and politicians, it is in the form of glib advice directed at young men telling them to get out of their parents' basement and stop playing video games.

Part of the marriage problem is certainly the lack of initiative on the part of young males, but this is also the easiest and most cowardly attempt to explain away the issue. Our culture encourages placing the blame on young men, who are one of the few groups that can be attacked without consequence. The real answers require taking on far more sacred cows.

When conservatives are feeling a little more adventurous, they will admit that some aspects of our economy are antithetical to family formation.

The fact that the average age of first-time homeowners is pushing past 40 signals how difficult achieving stability for young families has become. College is now required for even the most entry-level jobs, and the cost keeps exploding, consuming the capital that once went into a starter home.

The costs of health care and food continue to skyrocket so that most households require two incomes, forcing mothers to work, while the price of child care also increases rapidly. The economic issues are real and important, but even they do not tell the whole story.

Love, duty, and honor are all factors that hold our social bonds together, but it is dependence that makes them necessary in the first place and continues to undergird them when everything else falls away.

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Modern people do not like to hear this fact because they believe that maximizing freedom and independence is the ultimate good, but there is a point at which autonomy rips society apart.

Men are, of course, dependent on many things, but women, due to their biological vulnerability, were always directly dependent on men.

Women are physically weaker, less aggressive, become pregnant, must care for children, and regularly need the direct intervention of others to ensure their safety and security. Women could not work outside the home while pregnant or raising children, so they remained dependent on their husbands' income.

People will have sex — we are hardwired to pursue it — so the reality was that women and men needed to get married early to secure the safety of mothers and their children. Family formation was part of the rhythm of life. It was largely unavoidable, and this kept marriage rates among young people relatively high.

Once birth control and abortion made pregnancy a choice instead of an inevitability, everything shifted. Single women became a larger part of society, and the state expanded its reach to provide them with broader physical and economic protections.

The newly emancipated woman needed her own stream of income, and corporations were more than happy to provide it. Women doubled the labor pool, driving down wages. In large bureaucratic organizations, where compliance is key, the more agreeable nature of women is considered an asset in a way that it would not be in a more entrepreneurial economy.

Advantages were built into every level of our system to help elevate women due to the perceived biases that existed when mothers were expected to stay home. Universities gave priority to women, who now earn more degrees than men. Corporations gave hiring priority to women, who now make up a majority of their workforce.

Government assistance and scholarship programs were established to ensure that working mothers did not fall through the cracks. It is not that women stopped getting married — every female must be married at some level — they simply became dependent on the men running the government and corporations instead of traditional husbands.

Women do not date men who earn less than they do, even if they think of themselves as independent. Deep down, females know that in the modern world, income signals status and status means protection.

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Even in our hyper-feminist culture, women still know they could become mothers at any time and naturally seek out protection and stability. The push to elevate women in education and hiring meant that the percentage of well-paying jobs going to men shrank. This resulted in men being systematically removed from the pool of attractive marriage prospects.

Dwindling prospects for both education and career have already set young men on the path to downward mobility, but the lack of prospects for marriage was the nail in the coffin. These changes, coupled with the one-sided nature of divorce and child custody law, means that many men no longer see a reason to bother dating.

Women initiate 70% of divorces in the United States. The truth is that women who do not need men do not marry when they are young and are far more likely to divorce if they do.

To be clear, this is not to absolve men of their responsibility. Both sexes made this mess, both sexes are to blame, and both will need to do hard work to fix the problem.

Men must have the drive and vitality to make something of themselves, no matter what situation they find themselves in. But in the rare instances where conservatives are even willing to address the marriage crisis, they save all their criticisms for young men because they are the culturally approved target.

There are no easy answers to the chaos that modernity has visited on the dating and marriage landscape, but the structural issues are real, and telling men to “get it together” does nothing to change that. Until conservatives are willing to be as honest with women as they are with men about our situation, nothing will improve.