Debunking the "Marriage is in Crisis" Myth

An Addendum to The Myth of Hypergamy

This week, I published Part 1 of my serious debunking Manosphere evolutionary psychology, The Myth of Hypergamy. It’s become clear that, considering all the time and number-crunching that goes into these pieces, I’ll always have more to say than wind up in the final article, so I’ll be publishing Addendums, the material that winds up on the cutting-room floor and Quickies, stuff I come up with later, for paid subscribers. Here is my first addendum to The Myth of Hypergamy. More is coming soon.

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After publishing The Myth of Hypergamy, a reader raised a point that resonates with a lot of people: the belief that the institution of marriage is unraveling. This sentiment, coupled with a broader anxiety over the perceived collapse of modern relationships, is a recurrent theme in our cultural discourse. It manifests itself in a collective lamentation and a resigned declaration: “Love is broken.”¹

The narrative is a simple as it is common: young men are languishing and lonely, stymied by the pickiness of women “these days,” and the slow erosion of traditional marriage norms are the result of women today choosing their partners. Conner Beaton, of ManTalks on YouTube, says, “Women are delusional and men are disenfranchised.”²

This misrepresents the statistics to push certain conclusions, ignoring vital context. We’ll come back to Conner in a minute, but first, let’s discuss this idea that relationships and marriage are overwhelmingly failing in modernity, then we’ll dig into some numbers and explore what’s wrong with this picture being painted. And, once again, I’ve come armed to the teeth with charts—three, to be exact—and data.

Marriage in History

In response to The Myth of Hypergamy, the aforementioned commenter said:

Something is very wrong with the marriage process. You cite studies showing that 40% [of married couples without a college education] and 78% [of married couples with a college education] will reach 20 years [of marriage].

This echoes the story of a crisis in heterosexual relationships, where once-stable unions are things of the past, mired in the dysfunction of our modern era. This impression comes from a romanticized past, an imaginary fiction of historical marriage.³

The idea here is that because so many marriages fail, there must be something wrong with our culture that’s producing such failure. After all, marriages are supposed to succeed, right? History says otherwise, and it’s important we keep things in perspective.

Let’s take six famous Romans as our examples, shall we?

• Julius Caesar had three wives.

• His successor, Emperor Augustus—a moral crusader who passed the Julian laws to combat “moral decadence” in Rome, laws that mandated monogamy, criminalized adultery (the punishment was death), and required every Roman to get married—also had three wives.

• His predecessor, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, Rome’s first dictator who seized power through force, had five wives. Surely, all of these women must’ve died in childbirth, right? Augustus divorced his first two wives, and Sulla divorced two of his five.

• Caesar’s opponent in the Roman Civil Wars, the Roman general Pompeius Magnus, also had five wives (he divorced two as well). Cicero married twice and divorced twice (and died single). Caligula married four times, divorced twice. Even the ultraconservative, rabid misogynist Cato the Elder had two wives.

Divorce was commonplace in both the Roman and Hellenistic worlds. And I needn’t remind you that Henry VIII had six wives (whom he executed as a loophole for divorce). The idea that, historically, marriages were overwhelmingly successful and that modernity (or gender equality) is destroying the institution completely misses the mark.⁴

Unfortunately, marriage is hard. It’s not an easy thing to make work, and it’s a lifelong process—you can’t press pause and take a break. It reminds me of my friend Bob, a ninety-something-year-old war veteran who survived both prison and heroin addiction, who told me, after a long, chaotic life, “Marriage is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

Marriages dissolve for numerous reasons, mostly because people are miserable. So what explains the discrepancy between educated and non-educated couples? Since poverty certainly makes most people miserable, it's easy to see a connection: lack of education > poverty > misery > divorce.⁵

The Decline in Marriage

The idea that marriage is declining stems from a few key data points. One is the decline in marriage Pew Research has seen since the 1990s. After The Myth of Hypergamy, someone brought an article to my attention titled The Demographic Dating Market Doom Loop, by Freddie DeBoer, that pushes the same tired description of love and marriage in catastrophic decline.

DeBoer discusses the decline in marriage rates over decades and goes all in on the hypergamy myth—women can’t find suitable mates because there aren’t enough “high status” men to go around, in part, because women are getting degrees are nearly twice the rate men are and thus must “marry down,” and are choosing to stay single instead.