Marriage is down because it’s bad for women

I think we’ve (I’ve) been overcomplicating the question of why marriage rates are down in the US and other developed countries.

The main reason is actually very simple.

It’s a bad deal for women.

I’m aware of the raft of books published in the last few years extolling the virtues of marriage and encouraging everyone to get hitched. They’ll tell you, correctly, that marriage is associated with a bevy of important benefits and very few downsides, on average.

It’s just odd to me that, for some reason, these books almost universally fail to adequately acknowledge two really fundamental caveats:

1. Marriage is associated with positive outcomes. We cannot say it creates or causes them.

2. These positive outcomes are averages. Marriage isn’t the same for everyone.

It just seems really sus to me to tell everyone to get married while ignoring who, exactly, is driving down the marriage rate and what their marriages tend to be like.

In our case, women in the bottom-half of income and education are almost exclusively driving down marriage rates.

Would you be shocked to learn that their marriages don’t tend to look anywhere near as good as top-half marriages?

First, let’s acknowledge two good reasons for all single women to question whether marriage is a good idea:

1. Single women are simply better catches than single men. Whether we’re talking about intelligence, looks, happiness, social skills, or health, the average single woman marrying the average single man would be “marrying down” across nearly every measurable dimension.

2. Marriage benefits men more than women in literally every measurable way.

So that’s at least part of why women in general are giving up on dating and marriage.

And yet, women in general aren’t driving the trend away from marriage. Let’s talk about why marriage is an even worse deal for bottom-half women.

One thing to know is that bottom-half women used to be able to “marry up” in terms of income or education. Today, they can’t do this anymore because US marriages are assortative. People marry people with similar levels of income and education.

“Okay,” I can hear you saying. “That seems like it should be fine. I mean, besides all the stuff about single women in general bringing more to the table than single men and benefitting less from marriage than their husbands, a bottom-half woman should be happy with a bottom-half man.”

Well, not exactly. Remember those aforementioned male-female disparities? They’re even bigger and more consequential among the bottom-half.

If you’re new here, or don’t watch much news, bottom-half men are not actually having that a great time lately. Their wages are stagnant, which they are decidedly not making up for by improving in other areas.

In fact, non-breadwinner men do less housework and childcare and are more likely to beat and cheat on their wives than breadwinning husbands, on average. Speaking of wife beating, it happens in about a fifth of all relationships, but is even more common in bottom-half marriages. This is just one way in which bottom-half marriage is a completely different institution and one reason these marriages have a much higher divorce rate.

The bottom line is this. Marriage is already a questionable deal for the average woman. But it is, by all objective measures, a much worse deal for women in the bottom-half.

It may be that marriage was never a good bargain for bottom-half women, but economic necessity and cultural and family pressure forced them into it anyway and we were always going to start saying no the moment we could. Have you ever noticed how much less frequently wives poison their husbands nowadays? Or, maybe it’s gotten worse. It’s probably a bit of both.

What I can say with a decent amount of confidence is that bottom-half women are increasingly saying no to marriage because, in 2025, it’s simply less attractive to them than being single.

I’m increasingly convinced that the reason the airport book writing class steadfastly refuses to ask why bottom-half women are leaving their shitty marriages and refusing to get into them in the first place the moment we get the option is that the answer to that question is both really obvious and a lot harder – and more important! – to fix than “marriage promoters” are prepared to admit or deal with.

Why male wages are so important to this story is something I want to explore in further detail in a future post. Please stay tuned for that, my babies. And, if you’re not already, please consider becoming a paid subscriber so I can afford to keep churning these out as my full-time job. <3