Can Marriage Survive the Manosphere?

The appeal of marriage is waning in an age of supercharged misogyny.

When the historian Stephanie Coontz published The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap in 1992, it landed like a gasoline-soaked rag in the middle of that era’s burning culture wars. That was the year Vice President Dan Quayle chided the fictional news anchor Murphy Brown for having a child “out of wedlock,” and Pat Buchanan, speaking at the Republican National Convention, denounced Hillary Clinton for comparing “marriage and the family” to “slavery and life on an Indian reservation.” Coontz, at the time a professor at the Evergreen State College, popped up on daytime television, appearing on Oprah and Leeza to explain to millions of viewers that the nuclear family venerated by conservatives was not only a historical anomaly, but an institution that, in its time, had obscured a great deal of suffering.

In subsequent decades, Coontz has become perhaps the country’s most prominent voice debunking rose-tinted myths about the “traditional family” and the “golden age” of marriage. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy cited her in his majority opinion legalizing same-sex marriage (although he appears to have misunderstood her rather profoundly, attributing to her the idea that matrimony “promised nobility and dignity to all persons,” when she had actually written that marriage had conferred those qualities, for millennia, largely on the husband). In books such as The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families 1600–1900, The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms With America’s Changing Families, and Marriage, a History, she has documented the diverse ways that human societies organize pair and kin bonds, interrogated the very definition of family, and shown how our intimate arrangements reflect and respond to broader economic, social, and cultural changes.

In her new book, For Better and Worse: The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage, she once again turns to the past to make sense of our current marriage crisis—namely that, for many, the appeal of marriage is rapidly dimming. While the divorce rate has stabilized since its peak in 1980, married couples now make up less than half of American households, down from 66 percent half a century ago. Fewer young people even aspire to marriage than in the past: A 2023 poll showed that two-thirds of twelfth graders said they wanted to get married, down from 80 percent in 1993, a drop driven almost entirely by young women changing their minds. Another recent survey showed that Gen Z men ranked marriage as their seventh most important marker of personal success, while Gen Z women put it a dismal eleventh out of a possible 13. In the past few years, publishers have unleashed a spate of divorce memoirs, nearly all of them by women, nearly all of them jubilant about life after marriage.

At the same time, marriage advocates have been frantically attempting to revive the exact fictions about the midcentury nuclear family that Coontz has spent much of her career trying to dispel. The University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox’s histrionically titled Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization looks at demographic groups with notably high marriage rates (the religious, the highly educated, Asians) and argues readers should become more like them to increase their likelihood of getting married. The economist Melissa Kearney’s The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind purports to be a data-driven argument for marrying for the children’s sake. With pro-marriage, pronatalist allies in the White House, conservatives now feel the wind at their back. In January, the Heritage Foundation published a 168-page plan for reviving its version of the American family, calling for measures such as marriage “bootcamps,” paying couples to stay married, and evaluating every federal policy, grant, and contract for its effect on marriage and families.

Coontz recognizes the importance of marriage without making a case for or against it, at least in this book. The most she offers here is that most Americans (and Europeans) consider it “the highest commitment a couple can make,” one that garners extra societal respect and support. Even at a time when many people have become ambivalent about actually getting married, marriage tells us something about ourselves, and, in examining its changing role from Paleolithic times through the present, Coontz shows that marriage has always been the terrain on which “formerly dominant ideas about gender, sexuality, love, and marriage” were “challenged, reworked, or repudiated in favor of new arrangements and ideals.” If it is to endure, she suggests, we will need a deep rethinking of how the institution can accommodate recent and rapid social and economic changes.

What is marriage for? The fact that marriage customs are near universal throughout history is itself evidence that it serves some sort of purpose—social recognition, binding together families, embedding a couple more deeply within a community—that informal coupling up does not. As Coontz observes, “groups denied the right to marry have frequently invented their own marriage rules and rituals,” as did enslaved African Americans who performed a “jumping the broom” marriage ceremony in defiance of their enslavers.

But marriage’s evolution underscores the fallacy that........

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