#745 - Brad Wilcox - Is Marriage Actually Worth It?

29:54I think I'm right in saying there's at least some data that suggests the single biggest risk of suicide, a suicidality, are men aged 40 to 45. It's this very particular demographic of men. So specifically again for men, I'm going to guess that being married is prophylactic against this period of lower mood. Yeah, and one of the biggest factors predicting both suicide and more broadly deaths of despair for man is marriage. So married guys are much less likely to end up dying from drinking or drugs or suicide more directly. So what about divorced guys though? Yeah, they have a higher risk of all those bad things as well, definitely.

30:42So again, we're talking about this, it seems like a bit of a theme. It's this risk reward ratio. I think that a lot of people are looking at you You sort of hinted at something earlier on with the sat around if your sister or your best friend gets divorced, then the likelihood of you getting divorced goes up to, there is definitely this sort of mimetic thing that's going on. I think a lot of motherhood can be laid at the feet of this. If you are not around mothers, you don't see the joy that motherhood brings to mothers. Therefore, what do you see? Well, you see what everyone else sees, which is Instagram, which is a trip to Bali.

31:18and brunch with the girls and wearing cute heels and not getting stretch marks and all the rest of the things. So you kind of absorb the aggregate culture as opposed to the micro culture because the aggregate culture doesn't optimize for things that aren't flashy and easily displayed on the internet. And I think that you must have thought of this too, this sort of mimetic nature of the R naught number of marriage being either above up a low one based on how many people are getting married at the moment. Yeah, no, I think definitely this goes back to kind of the power of the smartphone and social media and the internet.

31:55And I think one reason we have seen, you know, marriage come down and fertility come down in recent years is that people don't kind of fully appreciate how much, you know, putting your ring on it can matter in positive ways. So there was a study done recently that was suggesting that today a lot of folks think that, yeah, actually men benefit from marriage, but women do not. And when you look at the happiness, you know, story in the general social survey, what you see basically is that, as I mentioned before, married moms are twice as likely to be, you know, very happy as a single and childish women, what you see in basically different data sets is that 60 % of married moms see that their lives are meaningful most or all the time compared to only 36 % of single and childless women.

32:53They're also much more likely to say that they're lonely, right? So when it comes to things like meaning loneliness and happiness, what you're seeing on Instagram or TikTok doesn't correspond to what see in representative population surveys of men and women. But it is difficult to convey that in a 280 character tweet or in a cool TikTok video. And there's this interesting trade -off between happiness, pleasure and meaning and satisfaction in some ways that it's very difficult to portray meaning and life satisfaction through a cool Instagram post, but it's pretty easy to show pleasure and happiness through that, or at least present pleasure and happiness through that.

33:39So yeah, it's a, in that regard, I think, anything, and this is anything that's difficult, anything which is a little bit more subtle, you know, if someone can get the gains of appearing to have the thing without having to do the hard work of getting the thing, they're going to optimize for that. It's very important. Right, and that's the problem with being online too much, right, Chris? Obviously, you know, there's some work done by a famous psychologist at Toronto, and I'm forgetting his name right now, but it's sort of just basically talking about how folks who are kind of experiencing both a lot of suffering, which wouldn't surprise us, but also like virtually no suffering are the worst off.

34:26and folks who kind of experience kind of that middle range of suffering are actually the best off. They're like the most emotionally resilient, kind of the best spirit. So we were actually we're built to some extent, right? To experience some degree of pain, some degree of, you know, of suffering, some drama on our lives. And if all you're doing is kind of, you know, eating well, drinking well, you know, and spending all your day on this device, you know, It doesn't actually end up both for you longer term. Is the point. How does being married change or impact mental and physical health? Well, yeah, in terms of things like depression and anxiety, tend to go down, happiness goes up, as I said before, loneliness goes down.

35:15When it comes to physical health, there are the stories a little bit more complicated. On one indicator in particular, women and men who are marrying do worse, and that is their weight. When you're married, you're off the market and you're, you know, you're kind of eating it, it may be eating at home more and whatever, it may be snacking more, etc. So you're not, you're not kind of like making that same effort to, you know, to keep the pounds off. And so we do see that's why, but generally speaking, folks who are married are doing better, health wise. For instance, space of looking at, indicate that people I'm more likely to recover and do okay in the wake of some kind of cancer diagnosis.

36:01If you have parents, older parents, been to the hospital, you see that oftentimes that spouse is really kind of working the nurses and doctors in ways that tend to read down to the benefit of her husband or his wife. So there's just no question that folks who are married do better on the vast majority of health outcomes and live longer, especially true for guys. They think it's eight. What's the tell me the stats then? Eight, nine years is what I've read and worked on by Linda Wade and Maggie Gallagher, you know, that men who are stable in married live in eight to nine years longer than their peers who don't get married or who get divorced.

36:46So, and women who are married live longer too, but they don't enjoy the same kind of premium as married men do. That's the part we think too, because men who are single are just much more likely to do crazy things like ride motorcycles, goals, getting fights in bars on a Friday or Saturday night, you know, what have you. So men are just more prone to engaging the kinds of risky behaviors that put them at risk of an earlier death. But married men tend to steer clear of a lot of those behaviors. And there must be a mediating effect of loneliness here as well. I had Robin Dunbar on the show a while ago and he was talking about this inner circle.

37:30He says that you can keep around about five friends in the inner circle, but a relationship takes up two of those five slots. So if you have a partner, a significant other, you've maybe only got space for three other people, but the most common answer at the moment when people are asked how many close friends do you have to call on an emergency is zero. That's not the average, but it's the most common. It's more common than any other number is zero. I think the number of men who say that they have no close friends triple no five X from 3 % to 15 % from 1990 to 2020 So you know in the wake of this atomized individualized Bleep bleep cyberpunk 277 hellscape Having one person that's always going to be in your boat with you rowing seems like a pretty good fallback Yeah, that's right.

38:22I mean, there's, you know, there's certainly been sociologists and psychologists who want to sort of talk up the virtues of living single and obviously not everyone is single is doing badly. Plenty of folks are doing great and there are plenty of folks who are married who are miserable, but on average, I think that's because we're hardwired to connect people who are married and more likely to be flourishing. And that's, you know, that's sort of the average story. What role does wanting kids have in encouraging people to get married? Have you been able to pass out someone early on knows that they want kids therefore they get married in order to be able to have kids?

38:59Is that like a predictor? Yeah, I think we do see today in a more secular world people are less motivated to kind of get married, you know, just for religious reasons or to kind of, you know, you know, legitimate their relationship, you know, in terms of living together, what not. So I think once they begin to think about having kids, they're more likely to think about doing that in the context of marriage, wanting to kind of give their kids the gift of married parents. And we see even, you know, in Northern Europe where marriage is sort of much more optional that after, you know, after the first child or, you know, before the first kid, you know, as folks kind of think about parenthood or they want to kind of give their kids that experience of married parents, they'll get married.

39:47So I think there's still a way in which people who are kind of more child centered think about marriages as the ideal place to bear and rear kids. And of course they're right. There's just no question that kids are more likely to be benefiting when their parents are married then kids who are in other, you know, other situations. What impact do kids have on marriage, marriage success and then on happiness as well? So there's no question that kind of having a baby is a hugely stressful thing for couples. And so you do see mirror equality dip, especially after the first child comes along. But I think what often happens is that kind of couples reach a kind of equilibrium, you know, some six months, year, whatever it might be after the, you know, the baby comes and they begin to adjust to this new, this new creature and this new reality.

40:48Now, I think this, this adjustment can be harder for people who've spent a very long time living without children. because kids do take a lot of time and energy and effort and you know they can be obviously extremely difficult and frustrating in different ways. So I think the transition to parenthood is certainly a challenge. But what's interesting though Chris is that there was a lot of research before kind of 2000 that indicated that parents were less happy than their childless peers. And since 2000 we've seen that relationship switch so that parents today are happier than childless adults. And of course, no group of parents are happier than married parents.

41:36So again, when you look at the general social survey, what you find is that the happiest group of women and men, particularly kind of in midlife, in sort of 30s, 40s, 50s, are married parents. And I think what's happening here in part might be that childless adults have fewer of those sort of resources, social resources or connections, you know, school connections, sports connections for folks who are religious, religious connections that tend to flow from being a parent. So I have a lot of kids and my days are often very busy and you know, kind of can be stressed I'm never lonely. You know, I'm going to a, you know, basketball practice.

42:21I'm dropping off kids at school in the morning, you know, going to church with a family on Sunday morning. So there's all this social stuff happening. I'm saying it's sociologists. It's that's worth kind of noting. And my peers who are single and childish, you know, they don't have those child related activities. And then when it comes to just kind of like free time too, like you just, you can't spend, you know, So too much time on a device. If you're halfway decent husband, wife, father, mother, right? So I think that's also - Getting married or having kids is a anti -phone use technology. Totally.

42:59Totally saying that. I think so. I think the rise of smartphones and screens in the last decade or so, I think maybe. And I haven't seen any really good evidence on this. But my hypothesis is that married parents may be less likely to get sort of sucked down that electronic rabbit hole than folks who are single and childless. What about the reverse relationship? What are the differences in outcomes for kids from married versus nonmarried homes? There's a lot of people that would say, what I don't need to get married in order to be able to raise a child. It's useless. It's just a piece of paper.

43:37or in any case, look at how many people get divorced, what's even the point? Yeah, there's been, I think, really since the 1970s, Chris, with their dramatic rise in divorce and non -metal childbearing, a lot of folks have been making the argument that what matters for kids is not their parents' marriage, but just getting love and maybe money as well. So what matters for kids is not marriage, but it's money and a loving family. And that can take many different forms. I was raised by a single mom, and I think I turned out okay, my sister turned it okay. Many kids turned out okay from different family forms.

44:18But I'm also sociologist, and an average, what I can tell you is that kids are more likely to flourish, educationally, socially, and emotionally, when they have the benefit of married parents. I think in my book, probably the most striking statistic that I came up with just in kind of running the numbers with my colleague Wendy Wong is that we find in the National Logitonial Survey of Youth that young men today in America are more likely to spend some time in prison or in jail before they turn 30. Then they are to graduate from college if they're from any kind of non -intact family. And by contrast, you know, guys from intact families are, you know, about four times more likely to graduate from college than they are to land in prison or in jail.

45:07That's probably the most dramatic statistic. It just gives you a sense of how much assembly -mary family matters socially and emotionally, especially for our kids. I've been a fan of your Twitter for quite a while and some of the stuff that I've seen over the last couple of years, I think from you. Young Black women from intact two parent families are more likely to graduate from college 36 % versus young white women from one parent families, 28%. Young Black men from intact two parent families are less likely to be incarcerated, 14 % than young white men from one parent families. Boys who grew up apart from their biological father are about two times more likely to land in prison or jail by age 30.

45:52Fatherlessness is a better predictor of incarceration than race or growing up poor. And 95 % of upper income mums are married, 76 % of middle income mums are married, and 35 % of lower income mums are married. So fascinating. Yeah, these are the statistics. And it's important, I think, to just remind folks that, you know, oftentimes, the biggest privilege that kids have is not how much money their parents make, but whether or not their parents are married in a decent relationship. It's important to kind of that kind of a decent marriage or a great marriage is the best context for our kids. What role does political affiliation have here?

46:33What's seeing an increasing amount of data talking about young Gen Z, Gen A boys, skewing aggressively right and that the girls are kind of going left. But when we get into the older age brackets, what's the political affiliation role? Well, Christian, when it comes to marriage, a lot of folks in the media and the Academy understand and appreciate that you know education and money matter that folks who are college educated folks are in that upper middle class bracket are more likely today to get married and stay married. What they don't realize though is it's not just a class it's also culture.

47:07So a majority of college educated Americans in the US and then 1855 bracket are married but also a majority of folks who are religious and a majority of folks who are conservative. where as the majority folks who are not religious are not married and majority folks who are either self -indeed as moderates or liberal are not married as well. So what I'm saying to you, Chris, is that it's both class and culture today that predict who is getting married and who is staying married. Now on the sort of politics point more concretely what we see is that for single adults, about one five young adults under the age of 30 are not going to be able to find someone at least right now who kind of shares their ideological commitments.

47:54And so what that means more concretely to is that, you know, liberal women are going to have difficulty oftentimes finding enough liberal men and conservative men who are single are going to find, you know, or have difficulty finding enough conservative women who are kind of sharing this. There's an increase in an unprepidness of people to date across the aisle as well. I saw you tweet about that. Yeah, and so I think that hard thing about this too, right, is that I think particularly when it comes to sort of how you think about work and family and how you want to organize the division of labor in your own household, how much you think it's important for moms to care for young children, for instance, or for men to be good breadwinners.

48:41Couples who are not in the same page on those issues really struggle. So what I would say to couples who are dating is, it's fine to date someone who doesn't share your politics, but it's really important to kind of come to roughly common ground when it comes to thinking about how you want to raise your kids and divide up work and family. because those things are very real issues for couples today once they have children. Yeah, so you could have somebody who doesn't share your particular political ideology, but does agree with you about how family life should be set up inside of the house. And that might just make for spicy Thanksgiving day dinners, but outside of that, the structure of how all of this stuff is put together is interesting.

49:28I had a conversation with a friend who I'm not going to name, but this was their controversial thesis, which they have no intention of sharing publicly, that the current dating and mating crisis is good in overall cultural evolutionary terms. Many are called to propagate their genes beyond the demographic pinch point few are chosen. Whoever manages to propagate their family in the face of a structurally anti -natalist, anti -culture will manage to do so by virtue of having developed strong enough immune response to toxic messages. A celibate clergy is good because it screams out a propensity for fanaticism out of the gene pool and that's from Carl Sagan.

50:08Yeah, I mean, the only thing that I will say there I think is that, you know, I'm conservative as you know, but I think, and I would certainly acknowledge that, you know, in the last seven years, are there plenty of things that conservatives can and should be concerned about in their own tribe? I think what progressives don't appreciate though is that they have their own challenges in their own tribe. I think what for progressives, some of their biggest challenges surround marriage and family. We do see in my book and elsewhere, some evidence, and someone that comes to getting married and having children that kind of not only is there a gap between conservatives and liberals in their likelihood of getting married and having kids, but that that gap is growing because I think progressives for a wide number of different reasons are less oriented towards marriage and less oriented towards parenthood.

51:10And they have fewer of the kind of the norms that would sort of steer them into marriage in the first place and then allow them to sort of more easily navigate marriage in the second place. So one concrete example of what I'm talking about is we've seen for instance, in recent years, growing kind of interest in polyamory or support for polyamory, and less kind of support for like the classic marriage norm that you should be faithful in marriage. And yet we see in the data in the General Social Survey that couples who, or husbands and wives who believe that, you know, that sex outside of marriage is always wrong, are more likely to be happily married.

51:52And I certainly see, you know, there are also more other data that's more stably married. So I think the challenge for progressives is that some of the newer ideas, some of the newer norms that have kind of filtered into their tribe, into their camp in recent decades, are ones that are profoundly, either profoundly anti -nuptial and anti -natal. And so that's a challenge that I don't think progressives have fully wrapped their heads around. And that is the way in which a lot of their newer commitments are making it more difficult for them to find a spouse, to prioritize getting married, and then to have a family.

52:32Yeah. And also, there's a good chunk of data that suggests people who are left of center are more unhappy. Presumably, this could be done whilst controlling the marital status as well. So you have someone who's worldview or psychology or lifestyle predisposes them to being less happy than their centrist and right of center counterparts. It also discourages them from getting precisely the kind of union that seems to be very robust in improving their level of happiness. And then for the people who are doing it, you know, for the movement, because I want to be sort of a good liberal, whatever, whatever that means, because political orientation is moderately genetically heritable, like all of our traits are, if you are someone who genuinely cares about propagating liberal ideology long term, but you are anti -natalists in your philosophy, you are creating a dying future for the philosophy that you say that you care about, which is this sort of, it's still as far as I can see, that because also people left of centre reject behavioural genetics largely, or a lot of the time, that is a hammer blow that I think hasn't hit yet properly.

53:48And I think that if people on the left understood and realized that they would have a different approach. So a couple of things that would say in response to that. One is that I have looked at the sort of gap and happiness between conservatives and liberals and do find that a large minority of that gap can be attributed to differences in the likelihood of being married and the likelihood of being halfway married. So that's that's certainly a real thing that there's a kind of conservatives are happier in general and part of the reason that they're happier in general is I'm more likely to be married in the first place and then happily married in the second place and they're they're progressive peers.

54:29And in terms of kind of like the long -term implications of all this, I think the obviously the one flying the ointment for conservatives is that many of their kids end up, you know, kind of leaving seeing the tribe once they hit young at alt -hood. So there are plenty of obviously progressives out there who are raised and conservative or religious homes who are now no longer conservative and or no longer religious. So that's where we do get obviously new waves of progressives and new waves of more secular folks kind of emerging. But again, what's striking about some of the newer data on marriage and fertility is that the gap seems to be growing between consumers and liberals in ways that might have long -term implications for the ideological makeup of a place like the United States.

55:17Yeah, so one of the things that we haven't necessarily spoken about here is the dynamics when it comes to choosing a mate. What's the sole mate myth? So the sole mate myth is this idea that what really matters when it comes to love and marriage is finding someone who kind of fits you perfectly and is going to kind of make you happy and fulfilled almost all of the time. Kind of like it's a very romanticized view of love and marriage. It's one that you kind of get in, you know, sometimes Taylor Swift songs. It's one that you can get in plenty of movies. It's one that you get in books like Eat, Pray, Love, right?

55:55And so the problem, of course, with this idea, with what I call the soulmate myth, is that We know just physiologically, the butterflies cross fly away within a few months or within a year or two of either dating or marrying someone. There's just kind of like, there's physiologically a high when you first meet someone, when you first connect with someone, and a lot of those hormones just kind of like, go away after a period of time. And so that sort of that magic that you first experience in a romantic relationship begins to dissipate. And so the challenge is how do you kind of move beyond that and recognize that there are other things that connects you to that person.

56:37So I think having a more realistic view of marriage that yes, you kind of try to cultivate the romance in your in your relationship and that's why regular date nights are really valuable, for instance. But you also recognize that marriage is about more than just those feelings. It's about things like money, things like companionship, things like kids. But beyond that, I would say it's kind of a recognition that love is about not feelings, but seeking the good of the other. And so couples who kind of have that, I think, richer view of marriage, one that's not as romanticized or more likely not just to kind of go the distance to avoid divorce score, but they're also more likely to enjoy a higher quality marriage because they just have a richer view of what marriage is all about.

57:31And they're not as sort of likely to be susceptible to the ebbs and flows of those romantic feelings in a relationship. Did you see me a califa trended? I think it was about two or three months ago on TikTok talk for saying marriage is nothing special. It's a piece of paper. And if the person that you are with isn't helping you grow, then it is time for you to move on. I didn't see that particular comment. But again, I think this is the hard thing for people who have that mentality to wrap their heads around. If that's your view, then your odds of failing at marriage are extremely high. But if your view is instead that you love of this person and that you're committed to this person and that you will the good of this person, you know, come hell or high water.

58:26Your odds of making it are extremely high. And your odds of actually being happy within the marriage and in life more generally are going to be high too most of the time. The problem is that we are not able, it is very difficult to make ourselves believe something. We can make ourselves do things all the time. You can stay in a marriage, there are millions and billions of people probably have stayed in unhappy marriages, but believing that marriage is not supposed to be what a recent guest taught me is the confluence era. for as long as you can benefit me and I can benefit you, this relationship works and at the moment that that stops happening, the confluence has gone and therefore we don't need to stick about.

59:12So it's all well and good saying, look, the thing that is best for you is to believe that marriage is supposed to be more than just about this confluence or about the butterflies or whatever. But we are inextrably linked to the culture and the cultural moment and the memes and the trends that we find ourselves in and extricating ourselves from that is difficult. completely agree with you. I think the challenge here, Chris, and this is why my book is subtitled to Five Elites. It's part of the subtitle, right? And, you know, I've gotten pushed back on that from folks that, well, the elites are actually the ones who are, you know, more likely today to get married in the first place and to be stably marrying the second place.

59:49And my own data indicates to be reasonably happy, right? And that's, I think, in part because they talk left and walk right oftentimes, right? They talk left, walk right. So what I mean is - Yeah, so there's, they don't live the kind of individualistic lives that they kind of propagate in on Twitter or if they're heading up a school board or in some kind of mainstream media publication. They actually, they're more likely to honor some of these older traditions that tend to reinforce strong and stable marriages in their private lives. So for instance, I mentioned the importance of fidelity. That would be one example.

1:00:29Or we could talk about, you know, for instance, joint checking accounts. These things are linked to happier marriages, more stable marriages. They even have experimental events. It's really fascinating study in the university found that couples who were randomly assigned to joint accounts and then other couples who were assigned to separate accounts. You know, the folks who were assigned to joint accounts did much better in the first few years of marriage than those who were assigned to the, you know, the individualistic kind of more often I think elite kind of strategy that we're hearing today.

1:01:00Whereas, you know, kind of a lot of the traditions that we have about, you know, marriage and family kind of grew up for reasons that there was a kind of social utility to them, a wisdom to them that emerged. So yeah, I think the challenge is that culturally, you have to defy many of the elite messages that are more individualistic, more me first kind of thinking, you know, both in media and then online and social media today. And if you can kind of steer clear of a lot of that me first thinking and a lot of those me first norms, in your marriage and more likely to flourish in your marriage and to have happily married husband or wife on the journey.

1:01:44How important is mailing come and provide a ship when it comes to being an eligible mate? Obviously this is one of the meta memes of the internet. and I tried to sort of meme it into existence with an idea of the tall girl problem that socioeconomic success amongst young women means that there is an ever decreasing pool of eligible mates for them in the male side. But just how important is it? What makes women happy? What do they want? Well, there's just no question that men's sort of status as breadwinners is very important in both of kind of predicting entry into marriage, meridl stability and meridl quality.

1:02:21Although it's, it has changed in recent years kind of in this, in this way. So what I'm kind of seeing in the more recent data is it's not necessarily sort of who earns how much money in the marriage. So much as it, it's, he is stably employed full time. Okay, that's what seems to predict, for instance, meridl quality and meridl stability in important ways. And what I found was that kind of the precise division of who earns what was not as important in predicting her marital happiness as it has been in some previous research on this topic. Then what it comes to divorce we see is that when she loses her job there is no effect on the stability of their marriage.

1:03:06This is worked done by Sasha Kiliball at Harvard and sociology there. But when he loses his job, his risk of divorce increases, and their divorce increases risk by about one third. So there's something about kind of that stability, that sense of identity, I think, from men that comes from full -time employment, that respect it off, and I think accrues them from their wife. And when he doesn't have that full -time job, it's just much more likely to be a problem, both in kind of getting a relationship started and sustained. So I think people don't appreciate that there still is a very gendered story when it comes to work and marriage And that story is that women are looking for and respect men who have, you know, a decent job and men who are not employed You know full -time Or I think you know just having much greater difficulty even today and still you know navigating marriage successfully Do you have you said you have quite a few kids as some of them sons or they all goes?

1:04:06I have sons and daughters. Yes. So I don't know how old they are, but at some point, your sons are going to begin dating. They're going to enter the dating market. Given the current world of men's advice and the current state of the dating environment, what are you going to tell your sons? Or what would you tell a struggling young guy who reads too much of the internet about about how to be as eligible of a mate to the opposite sex as they can be. Well, Chris, it's interesting. One of the things that I would say both to my sons, but just to young men, and I do say to young men more generally, is that there are a lot of complaints that we're getting.

1:04:49There was a critique of my thesis in New York Times recently from a journalist and she was saying, there are just not any good men out there. My response to that idea is, I think, there are some legitimate concerns. We have to understand the why aren't you finding enough good men out there? I think it's part because we're not kind of giving young men enough kind of concrete advice about what is Is appealing and attractive to women? And so one of the things that I find also in my chapter on gender is that women are happier when You know, they're rating the men their lives to be physically stronger, right?

1:05:21So So what I would say to young men who are interested kind of in dating and getting married is that you know get in shape physically I'm not a, I'm not even a guest, I'm not a big athlete, but I swim regularly. And so if you're not like an athlete, you know, you can find things, you know, to do, run, swim, bike, go to the gym, whatever, but get in decent physical shape. I think that's one thing that I would say to them because women do value, you know, physical strength and they value guys who are, who can take care of themselves physically. That's one thing that I would say. I would say also kind of have a sense of mission in life.

1:06:00I'm wanna do this job wise. It doesn't matter what it is really. I don't think, but just to have a clear sense of like, I'm learning this thing to do this job. And that might change every time, that's fine. But to have a sense of like professionally that you wanna do something. And you have like a plan and a purpose, basically. That extends of course to other things that are of a more civic character. I think women also kind of have a tremendous respect back for guys who are volunteering in their communities as well. They want to, same thing applies to religion, if you're in that religious subset.

1:06:36So I think a sense of mission matters as well. And then I would also say to young men that when it comes to dating, to really take the initiative initially, I ask my women and my large family classes at UVA, kind of what's your preference, you know, when it comes to that first date? Is it that you take the initiative to ask someone out on the date or that he takes the initiative? And about 80 % of the women in my classes, I've got large classes at UVA would say it's their preference that he takes the initiative. It's a sign of his interest in them and it's also a sign of like his willingness to engage age and risk and healthy ways as well.

1:07:18So I would talk to young men about kind of the importance of taking initiative, the importance of having a sense of mission, especially when it comes to something a bit of to school or work to being upon their stage of life and the importance of kind of being in decent physical shape. Because these are all things that women appreciate. And I think we're not telling men enough and adolescent males as well that, you know, you've got to get off the Xbox, You've got to get off your phone. You've got to get out there and hit the gym or do something and get more serious about your studies or your skills, you know, your training, tech, whatever it might be, you know, get a job and make a mark.

1:08:03And if you do those kinds of things and develop competencies, obviously, in certain kinds of areas, then you will garner the respect and the interest of women in your milieu. Yeah, I mean, it's the competence that women, I think, largely are looking for. You know, if you were to just ask someone, would you rather have a competent or an incompetent partner, not clarifying in what domain, by how much, like, who wants to be with a useless partner, that doesn't have any agency, that doesn't have any intentionality, that isn't able to enact change that they want in any area of their life, or even in specific areas of their life?

1:08:40Like, if you're When able to get in shape, it identifies that in some regard, you aren't competent at being able to control your own body and your own physicality. If you aren't able to hold down a job, it shows that you aren't competent at being able to show up on time or be reliable or be disciplined or be whatever the thing is. And Jordan Peterson was on the show a couple of months ago and he said, women use wealth as a proxy for competence. It's not the wealth that they're after. or it's just the most reliable, rough -hune, rubric signal that they can find to say, here is a rank order starting with fucking Elon Musk, whoever's at the top now, some Arab shake and going all the way down.

1:09:18Here is a rank -ordered list of 3 .5 billion men and you can work out a kind of a competitor. It's the best video game ever made. It's the best video game ever made. Yeah, I think a keyword you mentioned there is across agency. I think there's so much passivity among young men today and among teenage boys today. Way too much screen time, way too much video games and at a certain point, you know, women notice that and it's a big turn off, especially when it comes to marriage because they want a guy who has a sense of agency and who exemplifies that in his life in a variety of different domains.

1:09:59What do you think about most of the advice coming out of the manosphere? Obviously, there is this huge market for speaking to men. As you've identified, we're not necessarily telling men the right things. Is the manosphere getting anything right or what are the things that it gets most wrong? What do you wish that you could sort of expand your firm? Yeah, I mean, I certainly think some of the things we've talked about just in the last few minutes are articulated in different ways by people like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate. I think what's problematic is that on parts of the manosphere, It's a very kind of self centered, self oriented approach to masculinity, particularly people like Andriott, obviously, or there's also kind of a there's a way in which women are talked down and you know are described in very you know degrading or demeaning or negative ways.

1:10:50So I think it can cultivate a certain sense of suspicion, needless suspicion in the part of men. Now, obviously, we all, both women have to be discerning because there are people out there who are bad actors or who've got devices, they're going to make them bad spouses or they're just not a good fit for a particular person and you have to kind of figure out, do you have the capacity for friendship with this person? Do they have some key virtues that will make them a good husband, a good father, a good wife, and a good mother? But I think parts of the atmosphere are painting and obviously an overly negative view of women and marriage and are encouraging men to be selfish in ways that will make them, you know, bad romantic partners and reduce their odds of succeeding in marriage as well.

1:11:37Which ultimately results in them dying on average eight or nine years earlier being all of these days. Right. How tall abuse. And this is again, this is what Pearl Davis and Andrew Tiktok really acknowledged her appreciate is that yes, marriage is a risk. No doubt. out. But the guys who are not married today, never married, and guys who are divorced are just much more likely to be, especially if they're not college educated, if they're not kind of doing well professionally, you know, at the top of some game, they are just much more likely to be floundering and to, you know, end up, yeah, sad, lonely, and vulnerable to these deaths of despair.

1:12:14What about from a woman's side, it's not something that I often see coming from the right or for anybody sort of right or far left, bits of dating advice for women, you know, women who want to get married, who want to find a partner, who want to be discerning with their mate choice, but who also know that in a post -MeToo world, men are maybe more reticent about approaching them, they may be more concerned about, they maybe don't have quite the same, like patriarchy fueled agency that perhaps our great -grandfather's would have done. What do you say to women when it comes to attracting, selecting, male partner?

1:12:55So I think for both young and young men, I would certainly say, given the challenges that people are facing today is number one, if you have friends who are kind of wise and discerning and roughly your age or a little bit older or even a lot older, let it be interested in getting married and have them do the sort of mating game. That's also the potential. Matchmaking is I regularly introduce students that I know are interested in getting married or young adults to one another. That can be fruitful. I think, so, you know, letting it be known to people you trust, judgment you trust, I think if you have a religious bone in your body, go to church, synagogue, mos, temple, whatever, the folks who are in those communities are much more marriage minded than the folks who are not, and that's worth kind of, you know, taking seriously if you have any kind of religious interest or background.

1:13:55I would say also kind of for women in particular, kind of given the fact that a lot of guys are worried about the knee too, you know, suspicion, you know, signaling with a smile, with a compliment, with extra attention, you know. Cultivating receptivity is a hugely overlooked way of doing this. I was reminded of the, I guess it would have been the aristocracy during the Renaissance would drop a handkerchief. You need a nonverbal, Q equivalent of dropping a hand chief. Yeah, all that, I think is valuable. And then, you know, if some folks are just not going to have any success in person, right?

1:14:36And so, you know, I certainly know folks who are happily married today who met on some dating service. But just be kind of discerning about the service you pick. So obviously, Tinder's probably not the best option. There are newer sites that are kind of cultivating a more, you know, marriage oriented approach that are accessible online, for instance, you know, that can, you know, be helpful. So I think if you're going to seek out a dating site, you know, pick one that is oriented towards marriage or into towards serious relationships. Brad Wilcox, ladies and gentlemen, Brad, I've been a massive fan of your work for a long time.

1:15:18I'm really glad that you've dug into the deep and dark, murky data that's sort of born all of this stuff out. Where should people go? They want to learn more about your work in the book and keep up to date with what you do. Where should they go? They can type and get married and that'll, you know, go to Harper for the book. I'm on Twitter, Brad Bullcogs, IFS, and then on the web often times at familystudies .org as well. Those are three places to to to look me up. Brad, I really appreciate you. Thank you for the day. It's great to be with you Chris. Thanks for having me on.