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I wrote recently about the rise of lonely, single men. One thing I mentioned, but didn’t dive deeply into, was the role of income and education in male loneliness and singledom. In a Facebook post, Ilya Somin does a great job elaborating on this point.
College-educated men are doing much better in the dating and marriage market than their non-degreed peers. That’s because:
Women are getting more degrees than men, and make up almost 60% of US college students
Very few college-educated women are willing to date and/or marry non-college graduates, even when they have relatively high incomes
This is likely a large and growing component of the overall decline in marriage rates. It’s a math problem, as my previous post pointed out. It’s also part of why I believe it’s women, not men, who are by and large opting out of heterosexual marriage.
Either way, boosting marriage rates will require men getting more degrees and/or women changing their requirements.
Another wrinkle to this is that people with lower levels of education and income tend to have more “trad” gender beliefs such as gender essentialism and gender inegalitarianism. For instance, men with less income and education are more likely to agree that for a man to be a good husband or partner, being able to support a family financially is very important. While 81% of men with a high school diploma agree, just 62% of men with a college degree do. Also interestingly, 40% of high school graduate men say this is also true of women, while just 25% of those with a bachelor’s degree or higher agree it’s very important for a woman to be able to support a family financially. The same pattern plays out when you look at income, with higher income men and women valuing a spouse that earns a good salary less than lower income people.
In more bad news for marriage rates, boys raised in low-income families have worse adulthoods than girls raised in low-income families. Boys raised in families in the bottom fifth of the income distribution are less likely than girls to be employed or move up the income ladder as adults.
The last thing I want to mention is that while being unmarried is much more likely to correspond to loneliness for men than women, I don’t see marriage as a panacea for male loneliness. Marriage is, on average, good for men. Besides making them less lonely, on average, married men also earn more money and live longer, healthier lives than their single counterparts. However, it’s really hard to tease apart cause and effect. Higher earning, happier, healthier, less lonely men are also more likely to get, and stay, married than their lower earning, less happy, less healthy, lonelier counterparts.
My goal is to help both married and unmarried men lead healthier, happier, and more socially integrated lives. One way to do this is to encourage single men to behave more like single women. To use the parlance of our times, they should lean into self-care. That means eating healthy, drinking and smoking less, exercising, getting enough sleep, going to the doctor, and being intentional about making and keeping up friendships.
We should look at the systemic barriers to self-care for men. Why are men, and single men especially, eating less healthy, drinking and smoking more, exercising less, getting less sleep, going to the doctor less often, and being less intentional about making and keeping up friendships? Is there something about masculinity that discourages self-care? Is there a way to replicate the moderating effect of having a wife without the wife?
Again, we see that men with higher incomes and education lead healthier lives, on average. It follows that better social safety nets could help lower-income men take better care of themselves.
When we talk about men not being okay, it’s important to recognize the vast class divide. Men in the top half of income and education are, by and large, doing okay. But those at the bottom are struggling. And if present trends continue, it’s only going to get worse. And because most women want to marry a man who has at least slightly more income and education, this matters for bottom-half women too.
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