American adults are significantly less likely to be married or to live with a partner than they used to be, Derek Thompson writes. In an era of social isolation, romantic isolation is rising as well. “It’s hard, and perhaps impossible, to identify a tiny number of factors that explain hundreds of millions of people’s decisions to couple up, split apart, or remain single,” Thompson writes. “But according to Lyman Stone, a researcher at the Institute for Family Studies, the most important reason marriage and coupling are declining in the U.S. is actually quite straightforward: Many young men are falling behind economically.” A marriage or romantic partnership can be many things, including friendship, love, and sex, but, practically speaking, Stone told Thompson, marriage is also insurance. Women have historically relied on men to act as insurance policies—against the threat of violence, the risk of poverty. To some, this might sound like an old-fashioned, even reactionary, description of marriage, but its logic still applies. And young men’s income has stagnated in the past few decades, even as women have charged into the workforce and seen their college-graduation rates soar. “A lot of young men today just don’t look like what women have come to think of as ‘marriage material,’” Stone said. In the past 40 years, coupling has declined faster among Americans without a college degree, compared with college graduates. “Marriage produces wealth by pooling two people’s income, but, conversely, wealth also produces marriage,” Thompson continues at the link in our bio. “It is the poor, who might especially need the support of friends and partners, who have the fewest close friends and the fewest long-term partners. Money might not buy happiness, but it can buy the things that buy happiness.”
#marriage #family #relationships #loneliness 🎨: The Atlantic. Source: Getty.