Men need women more than women need men

Here’s the deal: Men need women more than women need men.

In particular, marriage benefits men far more than it benefits women.

Let’s look at some facts:

Single men are more socially isolated and lonely than married men. The opposite is true for women. Single men are also less healthy and happy than married men while single women are healthier and happier than married women. Married men earn more money and live longer than single men. Married women earn less (depending on the study). And marriage extends life expectancy more for men than women.

Today, single men face worse economic outcomes than they did in 1990 while female singledom is no more of a struggle than it was before.

Women file for divorce 70% of the time in the US even though divorce greatly increases a woman’s chances of ending up a single parent and/or in poverty, but not a man’s. Even still, less than a third of women regret their divorce.

In October 2024 Emily Shugerman wrote for The Cut:

It is a statistical rarity for a man to be the one to initiate the end of a marriage. According to a widely cited study by researchers at Stanford University, some 69 percent of divorces are set in motion by women, who are more likely to feel relieved, liberated, and happy after the split. Men, meanwhile, are more likely to feel dissatisfied with life and report a first instance of major depression.

Living alone is far better for women than men. Solo-living women have more time to pursue their hobbies and interests while cohabitating men say the same.

Just 5% of never-married Americans say they never want to marry. More than half of never-married adults want to marry and ~1/5 of previously married adults want to re-marry. Men are more likely than women to say they want to remarry and almost twice as likely to actually remarry as women.

Also, this: https://x.com/datepsych/status/1848563330111488237?s=46&t=mzC3hPIZqViNIMyjrws4XA

I cannot think of a single dimension on which women benefit from marriage more than men.

It seems very clear to me that men stand to lose a lot more than women if rates of sex, dating, and marriage keep falling.

Why is this?

I think there are several reasons:

1. Wives spend more time than husbands on childcare and domestic labor. This is true even when the husband doesn’t work at all. Married men have 37 more minutes per day for hobbies and leisure and less stress than married women.

2. Women’s habits tend to be healthier and habits are contagious. On average, women eat better, drink less, smoke less, sleep more, and go to the doctor more often. When they marry, men’s habits improve and women’s worsen.

3. Women have more meaning in their lives and get it from more sources than men.

Shugerman again:

John and his ex-wife both worked and made equivalent salaries, which he says made dividing their assets relatively easy. But it’s been harder for him to adjust to his increased responsibilities as a parent. “I think that a lot of times men can’t distinguish or separate their roles as fathers from their roles as husbands,” he says, adding that he, too, saw his roles as husband and father as “one and the same.” He admits: “To take on 100 percent of both roles, 50 percent of the time was — I can tell it was a much harder adjustment for me than it was for her.”

Or, as Michelle Parise put it in Alone: A Love Story, the only way for the modern working mother to get a break is to get divorced and share custody.

But, number three is the big one.

As previously discussed, the most important factor for health, happiness, and meaning is the number and quality of your social relationships.

And your health and happiness are strongly correlated with everything else marriage seems to impact, including earnings and longevity.

It stands to reason, then, that social connectedness could explain most, if not all, of why men need women more than women need men.

What seems to be happening is that men start out lonelier than women. Women tend to be more satisfied with their number of friends and are less socially isolated than men on average. According to the American Survey Center, women are “significantly more socially engaged than men” on average. Their data shows that not only do women do a better job than men at managing their own social connections, but women also take on the lion’s share of social connection management for their families and at their jobs.

When they marry, both men and women become more socially isolated and less connected to their communities. There’s no gender gap here. “Marriage is equally likely to constrict women’s and men’s social relationships,” said Sociologist Naomi Gerstel.

But the woman can better afford the loss because she started out with more community.

So why are married men still less lonely than single men, despite becoming more socially isolated once they marry? I believe it’s because a wife provides so much of everything a person needs to feel connected. She probably provides even more than the people the husband is no longer as close to. One thing The Hazards of Being Male (review here) really harped on was the low quality of most male friendships. Author Herb Goldberg even had a section on how men can deepen their friendships, which inspired me to write 7 steps for men who want closer friendships.

But the husband doesn’t provide very much of everything a person needs to feel connected for the wife. The wife loses the same amount of social connection as the husband when they marry, but gains less from him than he gains from her. That’s likely because women are socialized to be great friends. We are trained from a young age to listen, empathize, caretake, show contentiousness, remember, pay attention, validate, hold space, etc. Men are not.

Today, marriage erodes the average woman’s social connectedness. And as we know, a decrease in social connectedness is extremely costly in terms of health, happiness, meaning, longevity, income, and more. Marriage also reduces her free time.

Before roughly 1980, most husbands brought home a paycheck that could do a lot to buy their wives free time, better health, and opportunities to create and maintain social bonds. A man didn’t necessarily need to have great friend potential in order to be worth marrying. But as men’s earnings stagnate and male labor force participation declines, that paycheck is increasingly either nowhere to be found or not big enough to make up for the losses a woman incurs by marrying.

It seems really clear to me that nothing about women ever made us intrinsically incapable of succeeding in education and paid work. We were simply excluded and socialized to believe we were inferior in those areas.

Similarly, nothing about men ever made them intrinsically incapable of succeeding at domestic and emotional labor. They’ve simply been excluded and socialized to believe they are inferior in these areas.

That, and demand for labor that required physical strength declined while demand for labor that required emotional intelligence and the ability to sit still and work diligently for hours increased.

Even if there is some biological impediment to total parity, I don’t see any reason in this world men can’t become as good at domestic and emotional labor as women have become at education and paid work.

This would help every man become less lonely and more connected. Which would mean every man would also be healthier, happier, and lead a longer, more meaningful life. Just as we created a movement to reduce the barriers to women entering careers, we must create a movement to get men into community, connectedness, and relationship. LFG, my babies. LFG.

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