And as married women head toward retirement in their 50s, they’ve typically accumulated $357,000 in median assets, compared to less than $30,000 for their single peers, according to the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). That’s more than twice as much, even if it’s split with a spouse. But this seductive message in our individualistic age is completely at odds with the facts.Ĭonsider this: in 2020, married mothers ages 18 to 55 had a median family income of $108,000, compared to $41,000 for childless single women in the same bracket, according to the 2020 American Community Survey. The message is clear: leaning into work, rather than family life, is the path to prosperity. I divorced him because I loved myself more.” In the Times piece, law professor Lara Bazelon argued for what might be called the me-first divorce: “I divorced my husband not because I didn’t love him. But this group believes marriage is a bad deal for women.Ĭonsider this recent headline from Bloomberg: “Women Who Stay Single and Don’t Have Kids Are Getting Richer.” Or The Atlanticin 2019, offering “The Case Against Marriage.” Or, in 2021, The New York Timeswith “Divorce Can Be an Act of Radical Self-Love.” The anti-marriage chorus is also rising on the opposite end of the political spectrum. (This is also why she believes that divorce should be illegal.) I think it’s silly to think marriage is a good deal for most men today.” She claims that about 67 percent of marriages end in divorce, and that because most divorces are initiated by women, scores of men are divorced unwillingly and unjustly. Tate is joined by Pearl Davis, a female anti-feminist online influencer who recently posted on X, “I am anti marriage as it is today. In Tate’s view, any man in his right mind ought to stay single, make lots of money, and play with his toys (Tate is partial to his Bugatti), rather than make a long-lasting commitment to love. “I don’t think many men actually benefit from marriages or relationships anymore,” said Tate on a recent podcast. (He was also charged in 2023 with rape and human trafficking in Romania.) A 37-year-old former kickboxer who has been described as the “king of toxic masculinity,” he believes the institution is a bad deal for men in our egalitarian age. If you haven’t heard of Tate, he is the biggest voice in the online manosphere today-with more than 11 billion views on TikTok alone. It is a message invariably repeated on the online right, usually by Andrew Tate, and it’s reaching a lot of teen boys-even a group of Mormon boys that I spoke with last month in Salt Lake City. I don’t need to ask where these men heard that marriage is a trap. These are the kind of questions I get from young men whenever I make the case for marriage at speaking events at colleges and high schools across the nation-recently in North Carolina, Virginia, Texas, and Utah. Isn’t marriage a trap, mostly for men? Don’t most married couples end up getting divorced? And aren’t most men happier when they’re single?
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