The Real Reason Why Americans Aren’t Getting Married
(ANALYSIS) The modern secular world has engineered a brilliant liturgy of despair and its high priests come with PhDs in economics. You’re no doubt familiar with the prevailing narrative, as familiar as it is depressing. Marriage has become a luxury product, crushed by stagnant wages, soaring living costs and, in many places, a housing market where buying your first home is about as likely as getting struck by lightning twice while shaking hands with Bigfoot.
The premise is alarming, but its simplicity is strangely soothing. By assigning blame to massive, impersonal economic forces beyond human control, modern singles are granted an absolution of epic proportions. If the global market has decreed that a man cannot clear the financial high bar expected of a modern husband, then he can hardly be blamed for remaining a boy forever, safely ensconced in a rented apartment with his video games and a dog that receives more emotional validation than most actual children.
It is much easier to curse the Federal Reserve than to examine one’s own soul. But researchers from the Institute for Family Studies recently did some examining of their own, and what they found is certainly worthy of a discussion.
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Their report reveals that the entire economic excuse for the collapse of marriage is little more than a cleverly constructed myth. For decades, the public has been treated to trendy social media posts featuring magnificent photographs of 1950s couples raising four children in a spacious suburban home, complete with a station wagon — all on a single high school graduate’s income. The message is clear: The good life was perfectly viable, right up until the economy paywalled the entire American Dream.
Except paradise was actually a lot smaller and far more crowded than the internet remembers. According to data compiled from the Decennial Census and the American Housing Survey, young men in the 1960s and 1970s — when marriage rates were near their peak — generally earned less in inflation-adjusted dollars than young men do today. When the median age at marriage for men was 23 in 1970, only a quarter of those young husbands owned a home. The homes they did buy had an average of four rooms and a median of 1.3 rooms per person.
By contrast, the modern thirty-year-old married man enjoys an average of 6 rooms, multiple bathrooms, and a luxurious 2.0 rooms per person. In 2025, young men’s median earnings hit a roughly 50-year high.
Objectively, today's young men have more wealth, greater job stability, and nicer amenities than the fathers and grandfathers who managed to vow "until death do us part" without requiring a full forensic accounting of their future spouse's lifestyle inflation.
The difference has less to do with wallet and more to do with what constitutes an acceptable life. In earlier eras, having fewer resources was considered a normal starting point for a life built together.
Today, marriage is viewed not as a foundation to build upon, but as a crowning achievement to be entered only after one has secured a fully funded investment portfolio, a three-bedroom detached home, and two impressive-looking cars. Material expectations have soared into the stratosphere, converting a sacred covenant into a corporate merger that requires an impossible amount of capital to close.
This shifting goalpost is not a product of economic necessity, but of profound cultural devaluation. The report notes that the proliferation of low-commitment relationships, no-fault divorce, and the normalization of cohabitation have made modern relationships notoriously unstable. When marriage is no longer viewed as an unbreakable vow before God, but as a conditional contract, financial independence becomes a defensive shield. People delay marriage because they are preparing for the eventual divorce.
Simultaneously, the connection by men to the workforce has weakened. In 1955, 97% of prime-age men were in the labor force. Today, one in three working-age men is sitting on the economic sidelines. They are neither drawing a traditional paycheck nor actively looking for one.
The data show this is not due to a lack of jobs but to a lack of interest. Loosened criteria for government disability programs and a welfare system that allows households to function without a father have effectively subsidized the obsolescence of the family provider.
The financial apocalypse narrative is a dangerous distraction. It allows a culture that has abandoned biblical virtue, personal responsibility, and sacrificial love to blame its loneliness on inflation.
Fixing the marriage crisis will never be a matter of adjusting interest rates or offering tax credits. It requires confronting a culture that loves luxury more than commitment, and comfort more than God. Until a generation learns that a great marriage can begin in a crowded four-room house with a used car, the altars will remain empty, and the economists will keep reciting their sacred talking points.
John Mac Ghlionn is a researcher and essayist. He covers psychology and social relations. His writing has appeared in places such as UnHerd, The US Sun and The Spectator World.