An article purporting to explain a ‘decline’ in marriage has had a degree of viral popularity but does its argument stack up?

Is marriage really on the decline because of men's cheap access to sex?

Last week, I read an article published in the Wall Street Journal claiming that marriage was on the decline because of men’s cheap access to sex.

The argument of the article, by sociologist Mark Regnerus, didn’t go much further than the age-old adage: nobody will buy the cow if you’re giving away the milk for free. Regnerus is affiliated with a conservative, Christian thinktank in Texas that local news once dubbed the “no-sex” institute.

“Many women today expect little in return for sex, in terms of time, attention, commitment or fidelity,” Regnerus claims. “Men, in turn, do not feel compelled to supply these goods as they once did. It is the new sexual norm for Americans.”

Women, Regnerus continues, “are hoping to find good men without supporting the sexual norms that would actually make men better”.



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More astonishing than seeing this theory published in the Wall Street Journal was seeing the degree of viral popularity the article still enjoyed nine months after it was first published. Do people really believe women are responsible for the decline of marriage because we are having sex too much, and men no longer have any incentive to pair up?

I found the argument dehumanizing to both genders, and decided to explore its veracity.

I made calls to experts on both sides of the Atlantic. My favorite conversation, though, was with an unmarried male friend who loves pursuing women, and who has so far resisted the siren call of marriage. We’ll call him Tim.

“Tim, are you not married because women are providing sex too easily?” I ask.

Tim, who never appears to have a lull in enthusiastic female dating partners – all on a steady, respectful roster – answers carefully.

“No, I don’t agree with that. If I were to agree with that, it would also imply that people only get married to have sex. Yes, they overlap, but you don’t do one to do the other.”



I knew he would give me thoughtful answers.

“I see marriage as a partnership, almost like a business. You want the company to grow and be as big as you want it to be: being able to have kids, to go to this country … The process of that building, that’s what I see marriage being about.”

Tim is a few years shy of 40. He says the fact that he hasn’t married yet doesn’t mean he won’t in the future. For him, however, him being the right kind of partner is just as important as finding the right person to partner with.

The money factor

“Marriage is not in decline, it is in delay,” says historian Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, a History and director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families.

She points out that the percentage of Americans expected to marry by early middle age – around 80% – is remarkably similar to what it was 50 years ago.

Yet Regnerus claims marriage in the US is in “open retreat”. Focusing on Americans between the ages of 25 and 34, he states that 55% of this age group was married in 2000 but only 40% in 2015.

If you care about the quality of the marriage you enter into, putting marriage off is good thinking

Coontz explains what I already know to be anecdotally true, having graduated college in 2008, the year the economy collapsed: both women and men want to be economically and educationally set before they marry – an ambition increasingly harder for a generational cohort facing crippling debt, poor healthcare and an economy where stable career ladders have been replaced by part-time freelance gigs.

Watching half of our parents’ generation get divorced was probably not the biggest advertisement for marriage either. But dragging our feet may end up helping us on that front too. If you care about the quality of the marriage you enter into, putting marriage off is good thinking: marrying young heightens the probability of divorce, and the longer people know each other before tying the knot the more likely they are to stay together.

The one group where marriage appears to be in actual decline, rather than delay, is adults who are at the very bottom of the socio-economic hierarchy.

For the working poor, getting married is hardly a guarantee of ascendance, explains Amy Traub, an associate director of policy and research at the thinktank Demos. She highlights the reality of surviving with low wages, no paid sick leave, no paid parental leave, and no subsidized childcare. Traub’s research shows that a married couple will see their income go down by 14% after they have a child.

Coontz adds that studies on groups struggling economically reveal that women, not men, are the ones deferring marriage for the sake of financial stability.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, the group most likely to get married? Highly educated women, who are using their economic independence to renegotiate when and how they enter into an institution that previously required their gender subservience.

The sex factor

Regnerus’s argument – which relegates men to brainless automatons whose only on-button for productivity and planning is sex – does little to reinvent or challenge oppressive gender stereotypes.



It also overlooks the fact that millennials, despite dating apps and the moral panic around hookup culture, actually have sex with fewer partners than their elders, not more. Our average number of sexual partners is eight – markedly lower than Gen X (10 partners) or baby boomers (11).

My friend Tim explains that while seduction and the prospect of sex can motivate him into action, it is insulting to think it is the be-all and end-all of male behavior.

Tim also has a hard time grappling with Regnerus’s logic, which has women convincing men to commit using the one tool he allows us: the ability to grant or withhold sexual intercourse.

“Eventually, if you got the cow just for the milk, that milk loses its appeal,” Tim says, challenging part of Regnerus’s premise. “That’s not enough,” Tim exclaims. “The milk is not enough!”

If the framing is insufficient for Tim, now may also be a good moment to point out that women not only seek out sex, but also have growing expectations about quality and pleasure. A male-centric and reductive view of sexuality is painfully outdated.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Research shows that a married couple will see their income go down by 14% after they have a child. Photograph: Hero Images/Getty Images/Hero Images

Caroline Rusterholz, a historian of sexuality at Birkbeck College, University of London, says that the idea of harmonious sex within marriage began in the 1930s – enabled by the publication of pamphlets and the first opening of family clinics, among other factors – but ideas about sex were taught in ways in line with gender expectations of the time.

“The wife is a musical instrument that the husband plays. The husband is the art maker. The wife is the recipient,” says Rusterholz of understandings dating back 80 years.

People believed female orgasms were properly attained through vaginal penetration only, and that the clitoris served only to awaken desire on the path to penetration. This despite studies showing that women mainly attain orgasms by clitoral stimulation, Rusterholz says.

Women started claiming a right to their own bodies and their own sexuality during the feminist liberation movement of the 1970s. But stereotypes and falsehoods about sex didn’t always change accordingly.



Society still expects women to be less sexually active, says Rusterholz. “We expect them to be turned towards maintaining relationships. And only having sex when they are in love.”

But many of us are fed up with double standards. My generation of women have high hopes and loud voices when it comes to challenging the notion of being passive penis recipients – something expressed clearly during the recent #MeToo movement, a continuation of the liberation movement started decades earlier.

The independence factor

I spoke to a female friend – let’s call her Jay – who is in a long-term heterosexual relationship. She wants to establish herself professionally before she considers taking the leap to marriage, even if she has a partner she wants to marry.

When I ask why marriage appeals to her, her language is focused around partnership, egalitarianism, common goals and mutual care.

“I don’t think people realize the extent to which, in the 1950s, marriage was non-voluntary,” says Philip Cohen, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland and the author of Enduring Bonds, a book on marriage and inequality.

For many of us, marriage remains an embodiment of powerlessness

In the mid-20th century, marriage was close to socially mandatory for both genders: women had few economic survival avenues outside marriage and, paradoxically, unmarried men faced job discrimination. That the institution has become more voluntary is a thing to be celebrated, Cohen says, especially for women.

What is entirely absent from Regnerus’s male-centric argument is the fact that women, having gained power economically and politically, now have a real say in our fate. And for many of us, marriage remains an embodiment of powerlessness.

“Married men gained rights over women’s bodies, property and children,” confirms Clare Cambers, a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Cambridge who wrote a book arguing for an end to state-recognized marriage. “Traditionally [marriage] has maintained legal gender inequality, and it has done so to the benefit of men.”

Chambers concedes that many formal inequalities tied to marriage have been denounced and revoked. Marital rape was outlawed in the UK in 1991 and in the US in 1993 – hard to believe there was ever an exemption – and same-sex marriage was legalized in 2014 and 2015 respectively.

Last fall I wrote a callout for the Guardian, as research for a book on the invisible load of emotional labor many women bear.

One of the women who responded told me: “I married my husband in 1979. He was 24, I was 20. Three times in the first five years of marriage he demanded sex and when I adamantly said no, he basically raped me. That created a negative environment of hatred from me. I ended up dreading sex and being repulsed by men. We stopped having sex when I had early menopause (thank goodness).”

Sexual availability was traditionally understood as a woman’s marital obligation. Although no longer legally enforced, that troubling paradigm is only reinforced by claims that women must restrain their premarital sexual activity if they want to attract a husband.

Women may be equal before the law, but these kinds of deep-seated, disturbing beliefs surrounding marriage roles don’t exactly entice us to rush into marrying.

The chores factor

Sexism within marriage still runs deep – in more ways than one.



Studies consistently show that women perform more unpaid housework than men, and that men are able to devote more time to leisure activities. Stephanie Coontz, the historian, quotes a study which found that getting married adds seven hours a week to a woman’s unpaid labor workload – while decreasing a man’s by one hour.

And that’s not even counting the exhausting and chronic performance of emotional labor, a term describing the invisible work – at home as well as on the job – that women put into being thoughtful, forward-thinking and caring; managing others’ feelings and tempers; and cultivating a functional and happy environment. Since these traits are seen as female, their execution often falls on women’s shoulders.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Reinventing rules and being less stringent around fixed gender roles could prove a win-win for all. Photograph: LWA/Dann Tardif/Getty Images/Blend Images

Following the same emotional labor callout mentioned earlier, another woman wrote to me. A feminist in her 60s with a PhD, she described a home environment where her husband, at least when it came to chores and tasks, pulled his weight.

But what fell to her, on top of her own chores and full-time job, was emotionally supporting her husband and children, managing their moods, scheduling their activities and always being emotionally available. Slammed doors were her fault, she says, and her burden to fix.

“Because, of course, the maintenance of peace was my job too,” she writes.

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Emotional labor is one of the last big problems we need to formally fix – but fixing it requires challenging the most rooted of gendered behaviors.

My source, the feminist in her 60s, continues: “Many women live with partners who can be loving, generous and warm one minute and harshly mansplain or lay down the law the next, silencing women with their power. Who have little understanding for the feelings of others because they don’t have to – the woman handles that and covers for them both.”

Reinventing rules and being less stringent around fixed gender roles could prove a win-win for all. Studies reveal that egalitarian couples – those who, for example, divide chores equally – have a better and more prolific sex life.

“Choreplay”, as the Chicago Tribune once put it.

One of the most resilient institutions

Women are far from the only factors in change. Evan Wolfson, founder of Freedom to Marry, one of the bipartisan organizations that successfully campaigned for gay marriage in the United States, has clear views on whether we can blame easy sex for marriage declines.

“Anyone who thinks that marriage is just or primarily about sex knows little about marriage and probably little about sex,” says Wolfson, who has been married for seven years.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest For same-sex- couples marriage is going through a boom simply because it is something that was not an option until a few years ago. Photograph: Marc Piscotty/Getty Images

Wolfson was in a relationship with his now-husband for 10 years before they were able to marry by law. “We already had the love, the sex, the commitment. And now we have the affirmation and the tangible and intangible commitment that comes with it, with equal dignity before the law.”

For same-sex couples, of course, marriage is going through a boom simply because it is something that was not an option until a few years ago.

Wolfson believes that instead of embracing or rejecting an outmoded understanding of marriage, the solution lies in changing it for the better. “Marriage is one of the absolutely most resilient institutions. Its history is a history of change.”

Romance is certainly not dead. Last month, as 29 million Americans watched Prince Harry and Meghan Markle coyly gaze into each other’s eyes as they wed, it became apparent how widespread dreams of love and marriage still are.

But their wedding was also the symbol of an evolution, and a partial break from former rules. That marriage has become more voluntary, that we are hoping to shape it to our own ideals of equality, that we are making up our own minds and own timeline to marriage – these are surely changes to be celebrated. If you want to hurry us along, raise wages, share the mental load as well as the washing load, learn more accurate anatomy and read about consent. And if that still doesn’t work, well, leave us the hell alone.