There’s No Way to Repair Marriage Without Repairing Men

Our nation’s masculinity crisis is the cause and result of the great marriage divide.

Every now and then you see a statistic that illustrates a societal challenge in stark terms. Yesterday, Brad Wilcox, the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, tweeted data from the Current Population Survey showing that 95 percent of upper-income moms are married, 76 percent of middle-income moms are married, and only 35 percent of lower-income moms are married.

That’s a shocking disparity, but it makes a certain kind of immediate intuitive sense. After all, many married families are dual-income. Of course they’re going to have an economic advantage over single moms. Married families with present fathers don’t just provide disproportionate emotional and psychological benefits to children, but are also more economically stable.

But it’s one thing to say, as I did earlier this week, that rebuilding America’s marriage culture is an “urgent matter of economic opportunity and stability.” It’s another thing entirely to think through how we can address the marriage gap and change the course of so many American lives.

And we can’t think of the how without considering the plight of America’s working-class men. It’s a fact that fatherlessness harms boys. It’s a fact that men are falling behind women in educational attainment. It’s a fact that men are imprisoned in large numbers in this country. It’s also a fact that men are disproportionately likely to abuse illicit drugs.

The cumulative result is that America contains millions of young men who aren’t truly “marriageable” in the classic sense. Many don’t have role models who showed them how to be a husband and father. Many don’t have the education or training that enables them to be a consistent breadwinner (even if they’re not the sole breadwinner). And if they’ve had any contact with the criminal-justice system, their access to economic opportunity is even more limited.

Public policy obviously has a role to play in addressing this challenge. We should rethink our approach to extended prison sentences and mass incarceration as the default response to surging crime. We should consider new and fresh ideas to help boys excel in school. For example, the Brookings Institution’s Richard Reeves argues that we should “redshirt” boys—start them a year later in school to account for the fact that they mature a bit more slowly than girls.

We should also do what we can to make family formation easier, including exploring child-allowance policies to ease child poverty and stabilize family economics, giving young families breathing room and perhaps giving young fathers more of a chance to find their footing.

But every policy proposal I’ve ever read feels like nibbling at the edges of the problem, a slight adjustment of incentives here and there. The core of the challenge is much deeper and much more personal. How do we actually raise young boys to become good men?

The answer, I’d submit, boils down to two words: relationships and community. Again, the statistics are rather stunning. Non-college-educated Americans have fewer friends than their college-educated counterparts. They’re also less likely to be active in their communities, less likely to belong to a church or synagogue, and less likely to belong to sports teams, community groups, or other civic associations.

Men in particular suffer from declining friendships. Both sexes report having fewer friends than they reported 20 years ago, but for men the friendship numbers are much worse. The percentage who report having “no close friends” has quintupled, from 3 to 15 percent. The percentage who report having large numbers of close friends (10 or more) has decreased from 40 to 15 percent.

And if we don’t think friendships are important to human flourishing, consider the results of a 75-year longitudinal study of 724 people from two very different demographics—Boston’s poorest communities and Harvard graduates. What did researchers find? “Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.”

When we speak of there being “two Americas,” we often think of red and blue. But there are other ways to make distinctions, and one of the most important is between those who are lonely and isolated versus those who live within intact families and healthy communities. And many of those folks who grow up lonely and isolated suffer from wounds that public policy simply can’t heal.

Indeed, when we speak of dangers to our nation and culture, I can think of few hazards more acute (and more difficult to solve) than loneliness and isolation, especially the loneliness and isolation that are afflicting young men.

The longer I study the challenges facing men and boys in American life, the less I see an ideological problem, and the more I see a relational crisis. Ideology, after all, is typically far downstream from a young man’s life. Direct arguments about the nature of masculinity tend to be reserved for the upper reaches of American society.

Meanwhile, countless young men are alone in their rooms, playing Call of Duty and watching porn, in desperate need of friends and mentors. We’re in the midst of a vicious cycle. There is no way to repair marriage without repairing men, but it is hard to repair men without repairing marriage.

Identifying the problem is a first step to solving a problem, but I fear that we turn too much to politics to solve challenges that are far more cultural and moral. Instead, this is a challenge that should cause each of us to look in the mirror. What are we doing to sustain our families? What are we doing to build the civic associations and community groups that forge friendships and link communities together? Can I find the time to mentor a kid without a dad?

Unless we can, together, choose to extend ourselves to others—directly and personally—we can expect the two Americas to persist, loneliness to endure, and marriage to remain elusive for even the millions of men and women who seek to form these lifelong bonds.