Partnership Is a Privilege
My take on the gender wars is that it isn't really about gender. Also I went on NPR (!)
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You really can fake it ‘til you make it, folks. I was invited onto NPR’s Weekend Edition to chat with Ayesha Rascoe about Marriage These Days. She wanted to know if The Discourse on dating and marriage matches up with reality.
My basic take was that, on both the left and the right, there’s been way too much focus on the challenges that highly educated, high earning women are having in finding suitable partners. (See, for example, the WSJ’s piece on The American Women Giving Up On Marriage or the infamous NYT Magazine piece on The Trouble With Wanting Men or this recent piece in The Cut about the economist who Crunched the Numbers and Stopped Dating Men). To the extent that there has been a breakdown in gender relations in this country, it is largely playing out at the low end of the socioeconomic spectrum.
In my view, the story isn’t so much “highly educated, ambitious women can’t find men who are up to their standards” or “women have simply had it with men” or “no one wants to marry a girlboss” but "committed partnership is increasingly a privilege.” Male or female, those on the lowest rungs of American society are struggling to partner up. To make my case, I walked them through stuff that I’ve covered in The Atlantic and here at Family Stuff:
The marriage rate among college educated women is broadly stable. It is women without much education that are not getting married anymore.
The marriage rate among high earning women is rising.
It’s true that there is an emerging “shortage,” if you will, of college-educated men, which raises a question about how college-educated women are still managing to find spouses. The answer is that they are increasingly marrying men without college degrees, which I wrote about for The Atlantic (gift link). That said, when you look at the earnings of non-college educated men, those who are marrying highly educated women have fared pretty well. Meanwhile, the earnings of non-college-educated men who aren’t marrying college-educated women have tanked over the years. So highly educated women are dipping into the pool of non-college-educated men and plucking out the highest earners.
For both men and women, higher earnings translate to a greater likelihood of ending up in a relationship.
The less education you have, the more likely you are to be single: “44% of adults ages 25 and older without a high school diploma are unpartnered, whereas 30% of those with at least a bachelor’s degree are.”
It’s not just America: Over in Europe, the likelihood of ever entering a cohabiting union of any sort (married or unmarried) has dropped off more steeply among women and men with the least education than among those with more. As I put it when I first reported on this study, “independence is starting to look less like a privilege of the rich and more like a burden of the poor.”
My impression is that as marriage has become less necessary for economic survival, our standards for what constitutes a “good” marriage have risen, which I also wrote about for The Atlantic (gift link). People aren’t as willing to settle when it comes to settling down. Ultimately, this is leading to both the delay of marriage, and its stratification along socioeconomic lines.
Anyway, it was really something to hear this little Substack mentioned on National Public Radio. Definitely a “wait, how did I get here” moment. Five years ago, I was a SAHM using my three half days of subsidized childcare to cold pitch publications, begging literally anyone to let me write something for them. Of the first 60+ pitches that I sent that year, one was accepted, by a tiny little digital magazine you’ve probably never heard of. They paid me $75. So the fact that NPR reached out to me to pick my brain about marriage trends is sort of surreal.
This is really interesting. Good data against the right’s strategy of blaming women’s ambition and success for everything. Also very cool about NPR but I’m in awe that it took less than five years for you to be writing pretty regularly for the Atlantic!
The shift away from marriage as economic necessity has really raised the bar, people expect emotional fulfillment and companionship, even personal growth from a partner in ways previous generations didn’t.
Still, what looks like delaying marriage for the lowest earners perhaps isn't waiting for the right person at all, but about not having the stability (financial, social, even housing) to make long-term commitments feel possible.
Congratulations, too! You are certainly very worthy of even more accolades!