Episode 83. 5 Keys to a Strong, Stable Marriage: With Dr. Brad Wilcox
The 5 C’s of Lasting Love: Why Marriage Still Wins
We live in an era obsessed with “life hacks.” Eat more protein. Track your steps. Meditate five minutes a day. Download this app. Buy that supplement.
But what if the ultimate life hack isn’t something new—but something ancient?
Marriage.
That’s not just romantic fluff—it’s what the research actually shows. Dr. Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, has spent his career studying what makes families thrive. And according to the data, marriage is still the single strongest predictor of health, happiness, and stability for adults and kids. In fact, Wilcox says the marriage advantage is growing stronger—not weaker—in today’s world.
So what makes the difference between couples who just get by and those who flourish? Wilcox’s research points to five powerful pillars—the “5 C’s”—that every couple can build on.
1. Communion: Shifting from “Me” to “We”
The happiest couples stop keeping score. Instead, they cultivate a “we before me” mindset. Wilcox points to something as simple as joint bank accounts: couples who pool their finances are more likely to report higher levels of trust and satisfaction.
Why? Because money isn’t just math—it’s meaning. A joint account says: we’re in this together.
👉 Try this: Ask your spouse, “What’s one way we could make our lives feel more like a team this month?”
2. Children: Not Just Fun, But Chores
Surprisingly, Wilcox’s research shows that what bonds families isn’t only vacations, game nights, or movie marathons—it’s chores. Yes, you read that right. Families who clean, cook, or garden together tend to report stronger connections than those who only focus on leisure.
Shared work = shared identity. Even eye-rolling kids on Saturday morning are learning something powerful: we carry this household together.
👉 Try this: Turn one chore into a family sprint this week. Put on music, set a timer, and see what happens.
3. Commitment: Love with a Seatbelt
When couples treat marriage as a permanent bond, not a conditional contract, they flourish. Regular date nights are one small but mighty way couples “re-up” their commitment. In Wilcox’s studies, couples who go on at least one date night per month report 25% lower divorce risk.
It’s not the fancy restaurant that matters—it’s the ritual. A repeated message: you are my person.
👉 Try this: Plan one date this month that’s just the two of you—phones down, eyes up.
4. Cash: Financial Security = Emotional Security
Money doesn’t buy happiness, but financial instability can erode it. Wilcox’s research highlights that when husbands in particular are reliably employed full-time, marriages are far less likely to end in divorce.
This isn’t about paycheck size—it’s about predictability. Steady income communicates safety, and safety fuels trust.
👉 Try this: Schedule a low-stress “money date” to talk dreams, not just debts. What do you both want your money to make possible?
5. Community: Your Friends Shape Your Future
“You are your friends,” Wilcox says. Couples surrounded by peers who value marriage and family are far more likely to thrive. By contrast, if your circle normalizes chaos, affairs, or constant criticism, your own relationship is at risk.
Faith communities are one of the strongest predictors of flourishing marriages—not only because of shared beliefs, but because of shared support. Rituals, accountability, and encouragement all make marriage more durable.
👉 Try this: Audit your circle. Who in your life cheers for your marriage? Who quietly undermines it? Invest more in the first group.
Marriage as Civilization’s Secret
Here’s the kicker: marriage doesn’t just change individuals. It shapes entire societies. Wilcox points out that communities with stronger marriage rates also enjoy higher social mobility, less crime, and greater happiness.
In other words, every date night, every joint bank account, every family chore session isn’t just personal—it’s public. Strong marriages ripple outward. They stabilize kids, neighborhoods, and even nations.
Your Next Step
You don’t need to overhaul everything at once. Pick just one “C” to lean into this week:
Communion: Ask a team-building question.
Children: Do one chore together.
Commitment: Put a date night on the calendar.
Cash: Dream about your financial future.
Community: Spend time with marriage-positive friends.
Marriage may not be perfect. No marriage is. But the research is clear: if you want more joy, health, and meaning—not just for yourself, but for your kids and your community—marriage is still the ultimate life hack.
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0:02
Welcome to Marriage IQ, the podcast for the Intelligence Spouse.
I'm Doctor Heidi Hastings.
And I'm Doctor Scott Hastings.
We are two doctors, 2 researchers, 2 spouses, 2 lovers, and two incredibly different human beings coming together for one purpose, to transform the stinky parts of your marriage into scintillating ones using intelligence mixed with a little fun.
0:34
Hello everyone, welcome back to Marriage IQ.
We're so glad that you joined us today.
We have a special guest today.
He was on our dream list of people that we wanted to have on marriage IQ and it's so amazing to me that he agreed to spend some time with us.
0:52
I just reached out.
I will take the credit for that.
But no, it's exciting to have Doctor Brad Wilcox with us today.
He is a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, and he directs the National Marriage Project, which studies the health of marriage and family life in America.
1:12
That sounds a whole lot like what we do.
Maybe we need to join forces.
I He spent his career looking at how strong marriages shape the lives of men, women, and kids.
He's been a leading voice on why stable families matter for our culture as a whole.
1:30
Brad is also the author of the popular book called Get Married, Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization.
We have our own copyright here.
Love it.
Lots of things underlined in there and we highly recommend it.
1:50
Beyond his research, you've probably seen his work in places like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, or even on the Today Show.
Brad is married and has nine children.
Is.
That really right?
Yeah, that's correct, Scott.
There you go.
And we are really looking forward to hearing his insights today and what makes marriages thrive.
2:12
So please welcome Doctor Brad Wilcox to Marriage IQ.
Thanks for being with us today, Brad.
Thank you, Heidi.
It's good to be with you both.
So Brad, we really want to get to find out who people are.
2:28
We have 4 cornerstones that we feel are essential to a thriving marriage.
Identity is one of them.
And just tell us a little bit about who you are and how you got caught up in all this, this marriage stuff.
2:44
Yeah, No thanks.
Good to be with you both today.
So I was raised by a single mom in Connecticut and went down on scholarship to the University of Virginia and at UVA kind of came to the view that, you know, marriage was that key institution that kind of connects dads to their kids.
And with that, you know, conclusion kind of forming in my my mind and my heart at UVA.
3:05
I'm back a few years ago, worked briefly at a think tank in Washington DC and then went on to study sociology at Princeton University for about 6 years.
Had a brief postdoc and then came to teach full time at UVA again in sociology.
And I've been teaching on family and religion and statistics here at UVA since then and really focusing in on the role that marriage plays in advancing the welfare of kids for much of my career.
3:31
But I've been focusing a bit more to on the importance of marriage for adults in recent years.
And my new book does a lot with kind of thinking through the ways in which marriage matters for adults because I think that's become a bigger issue for the young women and young men.
3:47
And I speak to about marriage at UVA, but I, in the context of going to grad school, got married to my wife Danielle, with whom I met her at UVA as an undergraduate.
And we went on to adopt 5 kids and then, surprise, surprise, had four biological kids after our adoptive kids.
4:03
We weren't expecting them, but we obviously welcomed our four extra kids, 2 twins, and then a little boy and a little girl who are now all kind of tweens and teenagers.
That's sort of our family and my life in a very kind of brief snapshot.
So you have a really, I would imagine very busy household in the mornings when you're getting up, getting ready to.
4:24
Work.
Yeah, No.
Mornings are probably our one of our biggest challenges, getting everyone riding out the door.
Exactly.
Yes.
You know, Scott and I are not strangers to those kinds of households.
I grew up in a family of 10 children, of which three were adopted.
Scott grew up in a family of eight children, of which one was adopted.
4:43
And so we have some things in common with you.
Yeah, no, totally.
Well, and, and it sounds to me like you have grown up at least professionally in the academic world, like that's kind of where you reside is the academic world.
And how?
How does this marriage thing?
5:01
How is this received in the academic world?
Yeah.
So initially kind of I had some difficulty here at UVAI was denied tenure by my department, by my Dean.
At that point, what's called her promotion and tenure committee, which is sort of an advisory committee to the Dean, all kind of wanted to deny me tenure back in in 2007, but was able to kind of appeal those decisions to our Provost, the number two person at UVA and get tenure at UVA.
5:28
And then once I had tenure was kind of allowed to sort of teach and research as I thought was needed.
So since then things have been pretty smooth at UVA and been able to kind of research and teach and write on things that I think are important.
5:44
So that's been great.
But there was, I think, some initial concern that my kind of commitments to marriage and family were sort of coded, right, more conservative.
And, you know, in today's Academy, that's a sort of a obviously minority position and one where some faculty members aren't particularly tolerant.
6:05
So, you know, I think we're kind of in a newer moment in the Academy.
People obviously are debating the role and place back in the freedom.
The Trump administration is having its own kind of intervention and higher Ed as well today.
And so there are a lot of cross cutting currents politically and culturally kind of playing out in the American Academy.
6:26
And all that I'm trying to do is to really spotlight the importance, the value of the role of marriage and family, not just for kids, as they said, but also now for adults and at the same time, navigating these currents that we see playing out at UVA and many other, you know, higher Ed institutions.
6:41
I really appreciate that my own experience in both my master's degree and my DOC program in family studies talked a lot about children and very, very little about marriage.
It was very absent to me in the whole discussion on families, and so I really appreciate your efforts of bringing marriage into the look at the family.
7:06
Yeah, well, thanks.
And I think what we've seen in the data is that not only does this marriage matter for kids and for adults, there's a clear link between kids being more likely to flourish in school and to avoid trouble with the law and to be less depressed when they have the benefit of their unmarried parents.
7:25
We're also seeing too, that adults are flourishing more as well, emotionally, social and financially when they're married, stably married especially.
But I think the most interesting thing I've seen of late is that a number of key outcomes, I'll just mention two for your audience. 1 is mortality.
I see a pretty big outcome for us adults.
7:41
We're seeing that the link between being married and avoiding an early death is not just there, which it is, but it's getting stronger, Heidi.
So there's something about marriage in today's world for all of the, you know, cultural and political factors that make it often harder to talk about in places like the Academy.
7:59
There's something about marriage that matters more than ever for adults when it comes to their well-being, including health, mortality, and then for kids.
We're seeing, too, that it looks like having the benefit stable married parents matters not just a lot, but it matters more.
So my own colleagues, including Spencer James at BYU, for instance, have found that the link between the stable married family and college graduation has increased from the sort of the late boomers to the millennials.
8:28
Another colleague has found, Nicholas, that the association between the stable family and avoiding school suspensions has increased in about the last 16 years.
So what I'm saying to you again is it looks like in some ways marriage may be even more important both for kids and for adults on some key outcomes today.
8:46
And This is why it's really important for us to kind of get the marriage message out to the broader public, especially because some academics are not really, and journalists are not really willing to kind of speak that truth to the broader public.
But I thought that academics and journalists were curious about truth.
9:06
Yeah, well, I think.
We know that is.
Sadly, not the case.
And you know, it is amazing.
One of the things I talk about in my book Get Married is what I call a kind of inverted hypocrisy, where a lot of our elites, including journalists, are living what I would say are often exemplary family lives.
9:23
They're stably married.
You know, they're attentive fathers and mothers.
They're navigating the challenges of married life successfully, and yet they don't talk much about the importance of marriage in their roles and their capacities as journalists or professors.
Well, I can't tell you how many Deans professors that I know who are, again, exemplary spouses and parents, but would never kind of talk about the importance of marriage in their classrooms or in their public capacities as Deans and professors.
9:52
And the same thing is true of a lot of leading journalists that I know as well.
So it's kind of your job and my job to help the general public understand that even though there's often a curious silence around marriage, it doesn't matter a great deal.
So I am tempted to feel really good about myself, but I'm not because ultimately I think if you're going to convince people to look at it at our side, so to speak.
10:18
In pro marriage.
Yeah, pro marriage that I need to do it with compassion.
Although it is very tempting to wonder why there is this supposed hypocrisy or a double standard, whatever you want to call it, with those who are in academia and journalism.
10:38
And you're right, they have these stable home marriages.
They see the importance of that in their lives.
We just want to get the word out to as many people as possible.
The things that you and your colleagues are coming up with, you're discovering you're wanting to make known.
10:58
We want to help.
Share the research.
Trumpet it.
Blast it to the world in any way that we can.
The importance of not just marriage, but healthy, happy marriages and families.
And you're really on to something here.
11:16
We really want to support that.
Yeah.
Well, thanks.
I mean, one of the things that I mentioned in the book by way of an example, is that I just point that there are a lot of Californian kind of elites, for instance, both in Southern California but also Northern California, who are again, kind of enjoying stable married families.
11:35
And yet in their public positions heading up major tech companies or entertainment companies are not publicly standing for marriage.
And the example Ioffer in the book is Reed Hastings, obviously the Co founder of Netflix and his autobiography talks about how he and his wife were struggling with his travel schedule when he was starting, you know, a couple of companies early on in their marriage.
11:55
She was not happy with his Rd. schedule.
And yet they went to counseling.
They came up with some kind of, you know, plan some kind of agreement so that they could kind of navigate, you know, his schedule on the road with sort of the strength and the stability of their marriage and family life.
12:15
They've been married more than 30 years.
We've got two kids and now a couple of billion dollars that they are sharing together.
And that's, I think, ironic in some ways.
It's an example of this inverted hypocrisy because again, privately it looks like Reed's probably a good husband and good father and he's got a stable married family life publicly in his role as kind of a Co founder of Netflix.
12:35
We see is a lot of the shows obviously on Netflix are not that family friendly.
And in particular they produce a movie called The Marriage Story that I talk about in the book.
And in the Marriage Story you got this basically professional couple in New York City.
He's in theater, she's in the TV sector and having kind of just the ordinary challenges that a professional couple would have.
12:59
Nowadays, we've got one son and rather than kind of working through this set of challenges, they have a very kind of messy falling out, get divorced and move to California.
A lot of obviously a lot of chaos sort of unfolds in The Marriage Story That was sponsored, produced by Netflix.
13:16
And it's ironic because again, we're seeing today is that most college duty couples like the one that's portrayed in the marriage store actually make it today.
But in the Hollywood rendition that Netflix put forward, we have just divorce and chaos.
13:32
So this is kind of an example from my perspective, the way in which too many of our elites are not like doing their part to sort of tell the truth about marriage either, whether it's as a journalist or as a cultural kind of producer, in the case of Reed Hastings or whatever it might be.
13:49
And my book is designed to tell the truth about both what's happening to marriage, which is that most marriages today go the distance, especially for college educated Americans, for instance.
And the kids were raised and stably married.
Families do a heck of a lot better than their peers who are raised in other non intact family forms.
14:08
But wait a minute, Brad.
I came from a family.
I didn't personally, but let's say I did.
Yeah.
My father beat me, my father beat my mother.
They were yelling all the time.
My mother was drunk all the time.
Like none of this happened to me, right?
But I think here's where I think some of these things might start because I know in the journalistic world, they want to really look at the other side a lot and try to pick it apart.
14:38
Anything that's that's good, which look, they should, what about this experience, that experience if I had a horrible childhood or, you know, let's say it's marriage is patriarchal.
It's, it doesn't allow the woman to do what she wants to do and to be her own person.
14:54
And so a lot of people are going to say this is actually going backwards because we have all these terrible, horrible stories, which we all know, maybe not personally, but someone we know.
What do you say to that?
Yeah.
Well, it's obviously the case that, you know, I think many of us know or come from families, they've been marked by dysfunctions.
15:16
And sort of another course, I think every family has its dysfunctions, but some obviously are profound and just horrifying.
And I think we need to acknowledge that not every marriage is perfect.
Not every family is perfect, but I think we've done a lot of that acknowledging in the last really half century.
15:33
I think everyone knows that there's plenty of unhappy marriages out there.
There's plenty of family dysfunction out there.
But what I want us to also understand and appreciate is that on average, what we see is that for men and women today, those Americans who are married with kids are generally much more likely to be flourishing.
15:52
We've got a new report out with IFS and the Wheatley Institute indicating, for instance, that there is no group of women who are more likely to report that their life is enjoyable than married mothers.
And this runs right against the kind of way of thinking.
It was, I think, well articulated in New York Times a couple of years ago, and it said that married motherhood in America is a game that no one wins.
16:17
OK.
So it's kind of telling us from The New York Times that, you know, married moms basically are miserable.
And yet what we see in the research is that, yeah, there are married moms out there, of course, who are miserable.
But the odds are, frankly, that women who are unmarried and childless are the most likely to be miserable.
16:35
And the women who are married mothers are the least likely to be miserable.
We also find that they report more meaningful lives.
Married moms do, and they have higher levels of physical touch than their female peers who are unmarried and childless.
So again, the point here simply is that the data generally point us in the direction of kind of letting us know that for both men and women, when you get married and have kids, you experience more meaning, less loneliness, more happiness, and also, by the way, more physical touch, which I think in this day and age is often kind of precious when people are spending so much time, you know, on their screens.
17:16
Right.
What I hear you saying is that there may be these episodes of trauma, serious trauma, abuse, horrible chaotic marriages, childhood, which we all know is there.
We're not trying to ignore it.
But if we stand back at a much larger view, a public health view done on populations, we're seeing at least 50% of these married couples in America tend to do better than the other ones who are not married as far as health, mental health, Wellness, well-being.
17:49
Which we did a whole episode on exactly what you were talking about, mortality.
Yeah, actually we did an episode.
It's the Marriage IQ, IQ exclusive, where we had some research.
We put it all together, We actually support this idea that mortality rates are significantly reduced in people who are married hereto those who are not.
18:12
But we also talked about mental health.
We talked about addictions, alcoholism, drugs with marriage and how that's significantly reduced heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes.
We went down through and we have all the references that we shared.
18:28
We typically try to do how to support this idea about marriage may actually be more protective than the cholesterol medicine you take for your heart attack.
Now, some people could argue with me, rightfully so, because we're talking about odds versus risk and that's a little bit of a difference.
18:47
But I think the point is very salient that we need to start looking at marriage like we do these medications.
I'm a physician.
I prescribe medications like we do prescribing some medications to help prevent against heart attack, stroke, other things.
19:05
I mean, because it there's data out there and it's important the people know about these things it for nothing else, for their health.
I want to go back a little bit to what you were talking about with Reed Hastings, if it's OK, who's relation to us.
Darn it.
19:20
But you were talking about how elite people aren't necessarily speaking out against marriage or criticizing marriage in a lot of cases, but they don't stand up for it.
And that made me really think, if more of us across the board, maybe who aren't even elite, started bringing conversations about marriage and family into all realms of our life, do you think that would start helping make a difference as well?
19:46
Yeah, and I think certainly, I mean, you would know this better than I, but I think one of the things that you don't hear about, like when people tend to go to the doctor, for instance, and you're expecting your first child.
There's all the stuff about kind of what you're eating and what you're drinking and exercising.
But I don't think there's in many practices that discussion of well, how is your relationship?
20:03
Are you married?
What's going on in?
That US.
Well, I ask if they're married or not.
But I like the question.
So, but I'm just saying like if we were just to integrate a marriage centric perspective across the professions and in our schools as well, I think that would be just, you know, revolutionary in terms of pushing us in a better and more constructive direction.
20:23
So maybe our listeners in whatever their career path is, if they just consider what's my part in doing this?
And the reason I ask that question is because the subtitle of your book is that Marriage can help Save civilization.
And I would like to hear you speak to how marriage can help save our civilization.
20:42
So I literally kind of, I'm situated here at UVA and to my right is Monticello, where Thomas Jefferson built his home in Charlottesville and it sort of stands down a little mountain.
Monticello is the Italian for little Mountain.
And I've been living basically in Jefferson's shadow in that sense for about 25 years now.
21:01
He's famous for, among other things, writing that phrase about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as sort of three core values in our American civilization.
When it comes to life, we've been seeing, for instance, dramatic declines in fertility since 2009, where we're now at the lowest, basically fertility rate we've seen in our nation's 1.6 babies on average.
21:25
We're also forecasting a record number of of young men today will never have kids, about one in four, probably actually more than that.
So I think a life front, we're not doing as well as we could on the liberty front.
The founders often thought about liberty in terms of economic liberty, and I think about that in terms of the American Dream.
21:43
And we know that the American dream is out of reach for a large minority of poor kids across this country today.
And then when it comes to happiness, we've seen kind of reports of happiness come down in America and what's called the General Social surveys that are the gold standard for social barometers in the US, based at the rich of Chicago.
22:04
So happiness is down.
So more and more Americans are not basically succeeding when it comes to the pursuit of happiness.
And on each of those 3 measures or three key civilization outcomes, you know, births the health of the American dream.
22:20
And then also happens we see is that it's often marriage and family that are the most powerful kind of predictors of those outcomes.
So my colleague Lemon Stone, for instance, finds that the number one factor when it comes to this decline in fertility in recent years is the decline in marriage.
22:37
Raj Chetty at Harvard finds that the number one factor in a 2014 piece of research that he did in predicting the health of the American dream at the community level is the share of two parent families in a community.
When the family is stronger, more poor kids rise across the course of their lives into affluence.
22:56
That Rags Rich's story is much more.
Could it be playing out in communities where marriage is strong, then where marriage is weak?
And then finally, we have new work from an economist, I think, versus Chicago that tells us that in his estimation #1 factor that counts for this decline in happiness across the country is the fact that fewer Americans are married.
23:19
So we can kind of see here that one of the reasons why on some key outcomes, our country, our civilization is struggling is that marriage and family are not strong enough today in the US.
And if we're able to kind of renew the fortunes of marriage and family, we'd be doing better on the life, the liberty and the pursuit of happiness fronts here in the US today.
23:42
I love framing it in that way.
There's three things marriage can really, truly impact.
You know, I'm sitting here thinking, OK, Thomas Jefferson, I was a very controversial person.
Yes, that's true.
And I can already hear people saying, you know, talking about his background, slave owner, all this other stuff.
24:05
I think it's an important thing for all of us.
I'm not really political.
I don't have left or right leanings.
I know that's really hard to believe, but it's true.
I'm not a registered anything.
That's true.
And I really try to apoliticize marriage.
24:22
I, I think there's some basic things for all of us to learn.
And that is as human beings, we're not always going to be perfect all the time.
And so Thomas Jefferson was not perfect.
And, and let's not attack people, you know, because it's one of the first things I'm going to see in the newspaper articles about what this person did in the past.
24:43
Let's talk about what they espouse and the ideas that they have.
And he had a lot of good ones about liberty.
You know, it's interesting.
I was just reading, actually, a majority of American adults are married over 18.
So we're still in the majority married in this country if this study was true.
25:01
So Pew has, they have about it's 51% in their most recent report that I saw.
So it's a slight majority and obviously it's come down a lot.
But yeah, right now we're in a slight majority.
So here's my point though, who does not want to have an intimate, personal, deep relationship with someone else over their lifetime?
25:23
And I even, I looked at the life of Hugh Hefner and even he at the end of his life, it was so cool to see him reflect back on his life and the importance of love and deep relationship with not 500 women, but with one woman and well, probably thousands over his lifetime.
25:47
But I mean, it is interesting, I think.
And we also had a conversation when we're travelling.
We were in Canada.
We talked with a couple from New Jersey, not religious, non religious.
Yeah, they're just the cutest family, all these little girl, and we just started peppering them with questions because this is very interesting.
26:08
Non religious whatsoever.
All of her friends.
And she had a lot of girlfriends from college, from Graduate School, every single one of them.
And they're not religious.
They all wanted marriage, even the most progressive friends.
26:26
And I find that fascinating that at the end of the day, would you strip everything up?
You're down to your DNA and your biology.
We still want this.
We we know we want it.
We came to this earth with it.
It's there.
And some of us don't want to admit it, but but I think it's reality.
26:44
And there was a wake up call.
There's another study too, of young people said they wanted to get married someday, maybe not right away, or at least have a lifetime long intimate partner.
To me, that's huge.
So I think that there's biology here that's driving all of us.
27:02
Again, we see some work done by Nicholas Christakis at Yale University kind of looking at this from an evolutionary biological perspective.
And he would argue that there are kind of really two fundamental orientations that we see among women, especially men.
One is towards pair bonding, which kind of aligns with your comment, your quote, your perspective, but also there's an orientation towards multiple relationships in Nicholas Christakis kind of assessment of the sort of evolutionary psychological scene.
27:31
And his point is that kind of these two orientations are in tension with one another, obviously at the civilizational level and cultures have to figure out which orientation they want to promote.
And so obviously I think we're in the business of kind of helping people understand that if you are interested in fostering a world where you can have deep physical and emotional intimacy with someone over the course of your life.
27:54
Where kids can have the benefit of dad being engaged in an intense and powerful way across the course of kids lives.
And fostering a more social order, More opportunities for ordinary guys to have families.
Then the sort of more monogamous route, the pair bonding route built around some institution of marriage, which of course we see in all the major civilizations is going to be the pathway to pursue.
28:19
And if you're going to, by contrast, embrace the other pathway, they're going to be some consequences for family life, for kids, for a certain degree of social harmony that I think are going to be definitely a subpar, shall we say.
And I heard you use the example in one of the talks that you gave about it truly impacts happiness level as well and impacts feelings of loneliness, if you want to share anything about that.
28:48
Yeah, we are seeing kind of a rising share of prime aged adults, both women and men, reporting that they are not happy with their lives.
And this is most likely be expressed by adults who don't have kids and and aren't married.
29:04
So I think, and I profile both women and men, you know, in their 30s in my book, who are struggling with loneliness, with a lack of meaning, with kind of not really knowing what to do with their evenings and weekends in terms of filling their time.
29:21
And again, this is like the downside to not prioritizing marriage, family and community because obviously everyone's going to get married.
Never, never been the case.
Everyone got married.
And so we have to think about to just strengthening our religious and secular communities as well in ways that kind of allow people to plug in.
29:39
But for most of us, and right now we're seeing a large minority of adults who are not able in the USI think that is is definitely a contemporary tragedy.
Well, I agree with you.
I think it's correct.
I don't think it's ever going to reach more than 50% though.
29:56
I think that fundamentally, I may be wrong, but I think the biological DNA pool of all the people living that there's going to be more people who desire to marry than there are who who are not.
I know some of your research has to do with race and culture and we last night had dinner with several Southeast Asian people from different countries, but mostly India who were very family focused.
30:26
Do you feel like as our country, as more immigrants, that might change the outcome?
And what are you finding, too, about what groups of people tend to fare better as far as?
30:43
Demographics.
Yeah.
So one of the things I talk about in the book is there are, you know, a couple of different groups who are like masters of marriage.
And I talk about four groups in particular.
And when I began this book project, I thought it would be about basically, you know, class, religion, race and ethnicities.
31:00
So I thought it'd be college educated, more affluent Americans.
I thought it would be three groups are really more likely to be married today because they prioritized and, or because they have more resources economically to kind of make marriage work, so to speak.
But I found in the research that I do with my colleague Dr. Wendy Wang, is that there was a fourth group that was also standing out even in a multivariate context, and that was Americans who were more conservative.
31:23
And we do see that, at least right now.
You know, if you look at like, conservative media thinking of like, The Daily Wire, for instance, it's more likely to kind of foreground the importance of marriage and family.
That kind of trickles down into the sort of hearts and minds of many conservative Americans.
So those are the four groups today who are more likely to be married compared to their less educated fellow Americans, compared to black and Hispanic Americans, compared to more secular Americans and compared to liberal Americans where we see less marriage.
31:52
I think when you think about all four of those groups, they just going to reinforce this idea that marriage is partly about, you know, having economic resources could be for the guy.
He's a kind of reliable provider, can support a family financially.
And then also often times where there's a premium and a priority placed on marriage.
32:12
And This is why we see that even when you control for things like education and income, Asian Americans are more likely to be married.
And there is no group of Americans who are more likely to be married than Indian immigrants from the continent of Asia.
They are the most likely to be married and stably married and kind of just tells us there's a kind of cultural premium often on marriage in South Asia that translates into especially high rates of both marriage and family stability.
32:42
We have to appreciate that both economic resources matter when it comes to marriage, but also how much you culturally are prioritizing marriage.
These things both influence entry into marriage and marital success as well.
So I think that's really fascinating, bringing all those together, the demographics of immigrants who are more likely to be married.
33:01
I want to kind of tie that into some of these pillars, these foundations that you have in your book, the five pillars.
They all start with C That's interesting because we have 4 cornerstones that all start with I so.
Yeah.
We want to know how does this translate on a practical level to what makes better marriages, according to what the research that you're doing shows and those of your colleagues.
33:24
Yeah.
So what I argue in my book is that there are basically 5 pillars that I see kind of playing out.
And those pillars are basically communion, children, commitment, cash and community.
And so when it comes to communion, for instance, what I would argue is the couples who have a we before me orientation to their marriage, where, for instance, they have joint checking accounts are more likely to be flourishing than couples have more of a me first approach to their marriages.
33:53
When it comes to children, I'd argue that couples to kind of try to do things both family fun kind of stuff like, you know, watching a baseball game or going on a hike together.
But also this surprised me doing chores together.
So couples who do chores regularly with their with their kids are more likely to be flourishing and that matters more than doing fun stuff.
34:14
And that was surprising because every Saturday morning is short time the Wilcox household and there's still after many, many years, a lot of eye rolling on Saturday morning when it comes to chores.
So it's always a struggle for us.
I mean, that's my failure.
I don't know.
But anyways, the point is that kind of like having this sort of family orientation to both fun but also to productive work in the home is linked to better mayoral outcomes.
34:35
The third factor is about commitment.
It's often the strongest director of marital quality.
And we see as the couples kind of prioritize, you know, their relationship who also kind of understand the importance of sexual fidelity and marital permanence are more likely to be flourishing in their marriages.
34:51
The fourth thing, though, is cash.
And not surprising, couples who have a sort of a stay stream of income, shared assets like a shared home together tend to do better.
And particularly couples who've got a husband who is reliably employed full time, who kind of gives the family a foundation of financial security, are more likely to be forcing.
35:11
Doesn't mean mom can't work.
It just means that generally speaking, still, even today, couples do better when the husband is connected to the workforce on, you know, a long term stable basis.
And finally, in terms of community, that's the fifth C we are birds with feather.
35:30
You know, basically you are your friends.
And if your friends are kind of living a family first lifestyle or are supportive for your single friends of that lifestyle, that way of life, you are way more likely to be flourishing in your marriage.
35:46
And by contrast, if your friends are doing things, drugs, alcohol, you know, relationship stuff, that's not really conducive to having a good marriage, you're way more likely to get into trouble yourself as well.
And so, you know, I just make the point in the fizzy that we should be really attentive to the kind of community that we're a part of and our friends, what they're up to and find a particular couples who are church going are more likely to be flourishing, in part because they're surrounded by people who are prioritizing often times their marriages and their families.
36:19
So those are my 5 CS that are that I find to be kind of, you know, associated with stronger and more stable marriages today in America.
So communion, children, commitment, cash, community.
I like that.
One of the things I like about commitment, I saw that the National Marriage Project did some research a couple of years ago, I believe on date night.
36:44
So I think that date nights are often kind of like a symbolic and practical expression of your commitment as a couple.
And what we see in our research is that couples have at least a date night once a month, although I would recommend twice a month or once a week would be even better.
The couples who have regular date nights report more marital happiness, more sexual satisfaction, and in one study, about 25% lower divorce risks over time.
37:09
So there's just a way in which kind of making that time to be together, doing fun things together apart from your kids is, you know, I think 1 piece of the puzzle for expressing that commitment and having a bit more kind of romance that's kindled on a regular basis.
37:29
So I would definitely recommend a couple's time for date nights on a regular basis.
How about cash?
How does that roll into making stronger, more stable marriages?
So what I would say is that, you know, one thing I've seen, and I'm 55 now, and so unfortunately, I've seen a couple of my friends get divorced.
37:45
And one of the factors that I've seen play out a good bit in those situations is the husband was not a reliable provider.
And I think there's a way in which his wife was feeling financially insecure, frustrated, didn't know where they were headed financially when he was not kind of reliably employed.
38:03
And so I would just encourage, you know, the husbands who are listening in your audience to just be intentional.
Obviously, people can get fired.
That happens in today's economy, you know, on a regular basis.
But just to be really kind of intentional about trying to make sure that you are employed on a full time basis and you're kind of taking your professional work not to sort of an excessive focus there, but just kind of you're making sure that you are stable employed as much as possible and you're giving your family and your wife a sense of a financial foundation that's as secure as possible.
38:34
And when you do that, we see is that guys who are employed full time are marked list like I get divorced and guys who are unemployed are about 33% more likely to get divorced.
What's interesting about that research too is from Harvard study is they're not seeing any effect of women's unemployment on their risk of divorce.
38:52
So it's about kind of the husband, especially being, I think, intentional about working deliberately and staying connected as much as possible to the labor force.
About church, I think, you know, I talk in my book about a New Yorker piece where it was kind of depicting religion in a negative light.
And of course we know that the religious couples who get things wrong, who are floundering or worse, where maybe the husband is sort of patriarchal and abusive in ways that are are deeply problematic.
39:16
But on average we see is that church going couples are about 15 percentage points more likely to be very happy with their marriages, which is a big effect in our world.
They're about 30 to 50% less likely to get divorced.
In different studies that have been done, they report more sex and more sexual satisfaction.
39:34
So on any of the key outcomes that I think we study when it comes to marriage in America today, what we are seeing is the couples who make an effort to live their faith both in a community and also in their relationship are more likely today to be flourishing on a number of important marital domains.
39:52
So even if it's not the religion itself, right, it's just gathering of people, whether you're Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or none of the above, right?
I mean, it seems to me it's just the act of getting together as a community who support each other.
40:10
Have similar thoughts, Beliefs is.
There more to it than that.
Yeah.
I mean, I think it's both a social story.
I think it's also a ritual story using the power of religious rituals.
I think in other work I've done, I've found that couples who pray together experience more intimacy.
I think there's something deeply powerful about praying with your wife or your husband on a regular basis.
40:29
So I think it's it's a variety of things that kind of all tend to sort of engage together for couples who are religious.
And again, there are people, obviously, who are skeptical about the role of religion, American life.
You know, what we see is that on average, religious couples today are more likely to be flourishing.
40:46
That's for a couple of different reasons.
Yeah, the research is different than the messages we're getting in media.
Well, we have a lot to do here to reach out to people.
Yeah.
And our listeners as well, joining us in this very important work.
We're so grateful for you taking the time to come and share some of your research, some of the movements that you are involved with.
41:09
Could you leave us with any parting words that you have for our listeners?
So I would just say that we're social animals, as Aristotle said, and I think we need to understand and appreciate that money, work, career, a lot of things that kind of can distract us are not as important and central as our friendships and our family relationships.
41:29
And so I just want to encourage your audience to invest in friends and family as they think about and ponder this episode with you all.
It's.
Great.
Where can our listeners find more about what you're doing?
So I'm on Twitter at Brad Wilcoxifs and then the blog Family Studies.
41:46
Family-studies.org is a great place to see a lot of research and commentary on family issues.
And the National Marriage Project, right?
They can.
That's also at UVA too.
They can look up at it at the University in Virginia for events related to family here at UVA.
Exactly.
And then where can they find your book?
42:03
Get married.
The best place to get it is on Amazon.
It's just easy, easily accessible there, and you know you can get it for a decent price at Amazon all right.
We are so grateful for the time you've spent with us.
Thank you so much.
Thank you both.
Well, that kind of wraps it up this week, folks.
