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What we've lost (8): Marriage

Peter Copeland: Stable families anchor communities

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The past 10 or 15 years have not been kind to Canada. Along with a decline in prosperity has come an erosion of the things that made our society great, a decline of what held us together and made us the envy of the world: things like resilience, friendship and service. In this series, National Post writers consider What We’ve Lost.

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“You go on an online app, and the person you’re talking to could be dating three other people at the same time but you can’t say anything because that would be moralizing, you can’t base it on God, because that would be ridiculous, and you can’t base it on tradition, because that would be weird, and so it is just chaos out there.” – Freya India, author of Girls

What we've lost (8): Marriage Back to video

Chaos, indeed. Freya India is precisely the kind of person the sexual revolution was supposed to have liberated: young, raised secular and formed by today’s liberal culture. Instead, she’s written a book documenting her generation’s quiet misery. Her experience embodies the sexual revolution’s promise and price: casual sex framed as liberation, commitment cast as confinement, and a generation raised amid divorce and pornography – with little moral guidance beyond the fleeting pursuit of “authentic” self-expression.

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She speaks for many. Across the western world, marriage rates are plummeting, fertility is perilously low, and loneliness and depression rampant. But it need not be this way. Never has there been such robust data on the benefits of marriage and family for mothers, fathers, and children alike.

In the post-Second World War era, rising prosperity reduced the economic necessity of large families. New household technologies and expanding education made women’s mass entry into the workforce possible. But these positive achievements were overshadowed by a militant strand of feminism that recast the hitherto exalted vocations of marriage and motherhood as instruments of patriarchal oppression, redirecting social esteem away from family formation. We now have a career-first culture marked by a two-income trap in which nurturing a home and family are viewed as obstacles to self-realization rather than rather what some women might see as its fullest expression. Contraception, divorce liberalization and abortion accelerated these trends, contributing to a precipitous drop in Canada’s fertility rate from 4 in 1960 to 2 in 1970.

READ THE ENTIRE WHAT WE’VE LOST SERIES

What we've lost (2): Stigma

What we've lost (1): Masculinity

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It’s not just a western story. Societies with very different histories, like South Korea, Japan, and much of East Asia, face similar or worse demographic collapse. Rapid industrialization and rising wealth are often cited as explanations, but even economists like Melissa Kearney observe it is not finances alone driving the change, but lifestyles. The aspiration toward autonomy, self-expression, and an unencumbered life has become the modern west’s defining cultural export.

Here we find the root of the matter. Beneath these shifts lies a dominant worldview that is the logical endpoint of unchecked liberalism: the conviction that the human person is best conceived as an atomized individual defined by cognitive capacity for choice, and that the good life consists in discovering and expressing your authentic self, free from unchosen obligations, natural limits and ends, or permanent commitments. The sexual revolution is this philosophy applied to the sphere of intimacy. Contraception, no-fault divorce, and abortion are its manifestations, decoupling sex from deeper union and procreation and making relationships subject to consumer logic. Republican-appointed libertarian justice Anthony Kennedy gave this philosophy legal expression when he said that “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence.” This is the view of freedom we have: freedom from attachment, responsibility, and anything that binds the sovereign and solitary self to others, and to higher ideals.

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Autonomy, choice, and expression have a role to play in society. But as a comprehensive picture of the good life, they fall short. And wherever they have become ascendent, the consequences are the same.

Sixty years on, the data is unambiguous. Canada’s marriage rate halved since 1960. Total fertility hit the historic low of 1.24, threatening a demographic and fiscal crunch as the workforce shrinks, society ages, and pension and social security systems strain. Fewer divorces are recorded not because marriages are stronger, but because fewer are attempted. An entire generation is growing up without stable models of lasting love, reinforced by entertainment culture that reliably portrays fathers as bumbling fools.

Individual costs are stark. Married adults live longer than unmarried peers, report significantly higher happiness, lower rates of depression and anxiety, better physical health and higher incomes. Adults with fewer premarital sexual partners report consistently higher marital satisfaction and have lower divorce rates because contra the claims of the sexual revolution, sexuality is a zone of deep intimacy, not mere recreation.

Fewer stable families and children mean fewer social networks, neighbourhoods, friendships and communities. Children are the worst off, profoundly impacted by divorce and irregular relationships, whereas those raised by their married biological (or original adoptive) parents fare better on multiple measurable outcomes, compared to those raised in stepfamilies.

Marriage is not one lifestyle option among many. It is the first natural society and the school of love — the pre-political foundation from which all genuine community grows.

Love is not a feeling to be chased but a commitment to will the good of another through thick and thin — something that deepens through fidelity, sacrifice, and the ordinary work of sharing a life. It is not found in the frictionless pursuit of desire, but forged through the very obligations expressive individualism teaches us to flee. The deepest human goods – to be truly known and loved and belong to something permanent — are only available through commitment that endures suffering and hardship.

Nowhere is this more apparent than parenthood. Unconditional love for a child provides the solid foundation for them to become capable of loving in turn. Every child is conceived by a mother and a father whose unique and complementary biological and behavioural gifts provide the full developmental range a child requires.

Stable families anchor communities. Around them, friendships form, neighbourhoods cohere, and civic life can flourish. Without families, there is only an aggregation of isolated individuals.

Further decline is not inevitable. Israel — the one developed nation comfortably above replacement fertility — combines generous pro-family and child benefits with a covenantal culture in which family is viewed as permanent and sacred, carrying transcendent meaning that spills over into the rest of society.

But you need not look to countries to find the answer. Look at the type of person who is marrying and having children and the profile is remarkably consistent across countries and cultures: conservative, religious, rooted in community and place, anchored to moral values that exist above the self, and participating regularly in institutions that reinforce and support those values. These communities are significantly happier, healthier, and more socially connected than their liberal or secular peers. Amid the wreckage of our current culture, it little wonder there is growing interest in such lifestyles among segments of the population.

We must nurture these seeds of interest to foster a broader cultural shift. Seemingly trivial factors like politicians and celebrities adopting the lifestyle and making it attractive should not be overlooked. The buzz around Freya India’s Girls, Evie magazine’s frank rehabilitation of femininity and courtship, and the visible family lives of William and Kate, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelci, and JD and Usha Vance all signal a renewed appetite for permanence, commitment, and belonging.

The goal is not simply to go back. The ideal of marriage as a free, loving, permanent covenant remains imperfectly realized. The answer to loveless or abusive marriages of the past is not dissolution but deeper fidelity to that ideal. The question is whether we treat marriage as a serious, life-defining covenant, or a disposable arrangement subject to solitary whims. The answer will determine whether the next generation inherits a civilization or its ruins.

Peter Copeland is deputy director of domestic policy at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

Next up in What we’ve lost: Judgement

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