Marriage, Wealth, and Happiness with UVA’s Brad Wilcox
April 22, 2026
By Matt Miner, CFP®, MBA
Does Getting Married Make You Wealthier? The financial case for getting married is clearer than many want to admit.
A lot of modern professionals have been told a story that goes something like this: get educated, build a career, get financially stable, have fun, and maybe later — if everything lines up — think about marriage and family.
In this episode of Work Pants Finance, recorded in person on the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville, Virginia, I sat down with sociologist Brad Wilcox — one of America’s leading sociologists and the director of the National Marriage Project to talk about what the data actually says about marriage and money.
One of the central ideas from the conversation is simple but important: marriage is not merely a private romantic preference. It is a financial asset. A stabilizing force. And one of the most reliable contributors to long-term well-being.
Married men earn 10 to 20 percent more than their unmarried peers. Married adults are roughly 80 percent less likely to be poor. And heading into retirement, stably married couples have 9 to 10 times the assets of their never-married or divorced peers.
That deserves a second read.
Now, that’s not to say that marriage is easy, guaranteed, or wise in every circumstance. It’s definitely not a “get rich quick” scheme. But it does mean many educated professionals have absorbed the message that marriage is a side issue when it isn’t.
Brad’s book, Get Married, makes the case that marriage is foundational for individuals, families, and society.
This episode of Work Pants Finance covers the data, the class divide, what high earners can do, and what cultural elites keep quietly getting wrong about marriage.
Key Takeaways
Married men earn roughly 10–20% more than their unmarried peers — and Brad says this association holds even after accounting for selection effects
Married adults are about 80% less likely to be poor, net of education, age, race, and ethnicity
Stably married couples heading into retirement have roughly 9–10 times the assets of divorced or never-married peers
Marriage has become increasingly divided by class — college-educated Americans marry and stay married at far higher rates than working-class Americans
Many cultural elites quietly live traditional family lives while declining to advocate for marriage as a public norm
The Success Sequence — finish school, work full time, marry before having children — dramatically improves financial and family outcomes
Male full-time employment is one of the strongest predictors of marital stability
The happiness premium associated with marriage has more than doubled since 2000
Chivalry and protection matter more to wives' marital happiness than their husbands' income
For working-class Americans, religious community may be the single most important predictor of family stability outside of education and income.
The Story Many Young Professionals Are Sold
The dominant script for upwardly mobile young adults goes like this:
Get the degree.
Build a career.
Get your finances in order.
Travel and have experiences.
Keep your options open.
Then maybe marry later.
Brad calls this the “Capstone Model of Marriage,” treating the marriage commitment as a recognition for having everything else in order. Some of that is sensible. Education matters. Career matters. Prudence matters. But this isn’t the whole story. Life is not infinitely delayable. There are windows in life. Biological windows. Energy windows. Relationship windows.
Brad shared the story of Elizabeth, who had a law degree, a job at a big firm in New York, and was marriage-minded and conservative. In her late 20s, she started looking for a husband, but it was much harder than she expected. She eventually told Brad she wished she had taken dating far more seriously in college, when she was surrounded by men on the same trajectory who shared her values.
That window had closed for her.
I mentioned to Brad that Tom Stanley made a similar point in a different context. The essence of his recommendation was the proverb to “shoot where the ducks are at." College may be the single best environment most people will ever be in to find a spouse. You're surrounded by people your age, on a similar trajectory, sharing classes, clubs, and common contexts. That doesn't mean marry carelessly, but it means don't sleepwalk through it.
Brad and I agree on a “Cornerstone Model of Marriage” instead, which treats your marriage as a foundation you build your life on — something you enter into while your life is still taking shape, rather than something you unlock after you've already built it independently. The “we before me” dynamic that makes a strong marriage is easier to develop when you’re young and still forming. Taking two already-independent people and making them into a genuine partnership is harder than building a life together from the start.
Personally, my wife Charity and I got married when she was 20 and I was 21. I am so grateful we did. Every financial decision, every move, every child, every setback, every win — a shared enterprise from the beginning. I wouldn't trade that for the alternative.
The Class Divide Nobody Wants to Name
One of the most uncomfortable parts of Brad’s work is what it reveals about class.
College-educated Americans — professionals, graduates, most of the audience of this show, actually — still marry and stay married at high rates. More than half of college-educated Americans are married and will remain stably married.
That is emphatically not the case for working-class Americans, where less than half are currently married. Charles Murray documented this divergence in Coming Apart, which Brad referenced. But here's the part that Brad brings into sharp focus: the gap between how educated elites live their family lives and how they talk about family life in public.
Brad runs an anonymous quiz at the start of his large family sociology class at UVA. He asks students whether they think having a child outside of wedlock is morally wrong. About 65 percent say it isn't. Then he asks how their parents would react if they came home for Thanksgiving and announced that they — or their girlfriend — was pregnant. Ninety-seven to ninety-nine percent say their parents would freak out. Then he asks whether they personally intend to follow the Success Sequence — finish school, work full time, marry before having children. About 97 percent say yes.
So here is an elite university full of students who personally plan to follow a traditional pathway — and whose parents would enforce it — but who publicly decline to endorse that pathway as a norm worth recommending to others.
That gap is what Rob Henderson calls “luxury beliefs” in his memoir, Troubled. Ideas adopted by elites that signal sophisticated values in public, while the actual behavior of those elites remains quietly traditional. The cost of those beliefs isn't paid by the elites. It's paid by the working-class communities that absorb the cultural messaging without the structural buffers that cushion the consequences.
Brad made a pointed example of Reed Hastings, co-founder and former CEO of Netflix. Here is a man who has been married for more than 30 years, has discussed working through real marital difficulties in counseling, and shares considerable wealth with his wife. By all accounts, his private life appears to be a stable, traditional marriage. Netflix, meanwhile, produced Marriage Story, a film that presents divorce as the natural resolution to the kind of difficulties most college-educated couples actually work through. Talk left, walk right.
My platform is considerably smaller than Netflix. But Work Pants Finance is happy to have this conversation in the open. And I spent time after this recording talking to Darden MBAs about marriage and family finances. A small contribution. But it's mine to make.
What the Government Is Getting Wrong
One thing in Brad's research that surprised me — though maybe it shouldn't have — is the role government policy plays in discouraging marriage among working-class Americans.
When a working-class woman is on Medicaid, food stamps, or the Earned Income Tax Credit, marriage can trigger a loss of benefits. The incentive structure, perhaps unintentionally, penalizes getting married.
Congress has made significant efforts over the decades to address marriage penalties in the tax code — primarily those that affect upper-middle- and upper-income households. Those fixes were real. But the marriage penalties embedded in means-tested programs? Still largely unaddressed.
Brad noted there are workable solutions — adjusting income thresholds for two-earner households, for instance — but they carry short-term costs and haven't attracted political will. The result is a policy environment that makes marriage financially risky for exactly the people who arguably need it most.
Congress got around to fixing the marriage penalties that affect people like us, but it hasn't fixed the ones affecting people who can least afford them. Make of that what you will.
Who Is Actually Flourishing?
I asked Brad a somewhat optimistic version of this question: beyond the groups his research identifies as having strong marriages — Asian Americans, religious conservatives, political conservatives, college-educated strivers — is there anything that predicts flourishing for people outside those categories?
His answer was honest. And a little sobering.
For working-class Americans without college degrees, church community is probably the single strongest predictor of family stability outside of income and education. That's his read of the data. It also aligns with what I've seen firsthand.
I spent part of my early career working in a John Deere dealership. The tractor technicians connected to a church community — with that structure, that accountability, those shared norms — were generally the ones with stable marriages. Those without that connection were more likely to be unmarried, or, if married, to be divorcing or already divorced. I wasn't expecting to have that experience confirmed by a UVA sociologist, but here we are.
Brad was careful to push back on any version of the argument that says working-class men are simply worse. They're not born this way. The normative context has shifted dramatically since the 1960s, around work, sex, marriage, family, and drug use. Those shifts hit working-class communities harder, in part because they lacked the institutional and financial buffers that more educated communities have. The economic shift away from manufacturing toward service and information work has also made it harder for men without college degrees to find work that matches their talents and gives them a stable identity as providers.
He ended on a genuinely hopeful note, which I appreciated. History is not linear. He pointed to Victorian England — an era that followed a period of considerably more drinking, drug use, and out-of-wedlock childbearing, and then shifted toward greater family stability through the work of civic and religious reformers, including the Clapham Group of evangelical reformers and the cultural example set by the Queen herself.
Major cultural shifts have happened before. They could happen again. But they require deliberate effort — and, as Brad emphasized, elites who are willing to live their values in public, not just in private.
Practical Advice for the Listeners of Work Pants Finance
If you're listening to this show, you're probably not an academic. You’re an MBA, a professional, an entrepreneur — someone trying to build both a financial life and a family life at the same time. So I asked Brad directly what he'd tell someone in their 20s or early 30s who wants both.
A few things stood out.
On men: Full-time employment matters enormously. The data is consistent — men who are not working full time are significantly more likely to end up in divorce court and more likely to have unhappy spouses, particularly once children arrive. Culture has quietly deemphasized the importance of male providership. Brad thinks that's a mistake. So do I.
He also said something I wasn't expecting. Women rate their husband's protective role — not just physical protection, but chivalry, attentiveness, gentlemanliness — as more important to their marital happiness than his earnings. Brad described a man in his social circle, a former military officer, who stands when his wife enters a room, always ensures she is well situated, and pulls out her chair. The kind of man whose children notice that dad genuinely takes care of mom. In an age when chivalry is decidedly out of fashion, it turns out it still matters. A lot.
On debt and spending: Be careful. Social media creates relentless pressure to spend — the right trip, the right club, the kids' travel sports schedule. Before you notice, you're carrying debt that creates real friction in your marriage. The connection between financial stress and marital stress is well-documented. Getting ahead of that is one of the most practical things a couple can do.
On women: Brad was thoughtful about this. He generally prefers that women give women marriage advice, and pointed to a few voices worth knowing. Emma Waters has a new book, Lead Like Jael, that he found helpful. He also referenced Debra Soh's Sextinction — which documents the striking decline in dating and sexual activity among young people — and Soh's practical point: in an environment this difficult, women should signal interest more clearly and give men more chances than their first impression suggests.
The literary model Brad offered was Jane Austen’s, Elizabeth Bennet. Elizabeth initially writes off Mr. Darcy as prideful and difficult. She gives him more time to show his true character. She revises her view. Brad's advice: In a dating environment this difficult, patience with men of good character may be more valuable than most people realize — even if the first impression wasn't exactly impressive.
My wife, Charity, made a related point recently during a conversation with a young woman at our church. The question isn't whether a young man is fully formed. It's whether he's a person of good character who is still developing — or someone with a character problem that warrants real caution. Young men often mature more slowly than young women. That's neuroscience, not a character flaw. But it does mean the discernment question is the right one to be asking.
Natural Law, Common Grace, and Why the Data Keeps Pointing in the Same Direction
I asked Brad one philosophical question, because I couldn't help myself.
The Roman Catholic tradition speaks of natural law — the idea that certain structures of human life are written into creation itself and discoverable by reason. My Presbyterian tradition speaks of common grace — the idea that certain truths about human flourishing are accessible to everyone, regardless of whether they hold any religious beliefs. These two frameworks overlap considerably, and both have something to say about marriage.
I asked Brad, “Does the sociological data correspond to what those traditions would predict?”
His answer was essentially yes.
He referenced work by Joseph Henrich, a Harvard evolutionary anthropologist, who has surveyed the anthropological record and found that marriage and monogamy appear consistently across complex civilizations — not because any single religion imposed them, but because they serve real human goods. They provide order to sexual relationships. They connect men to their children. They give both men and women a pathway into meaningful, ordered life.
The point is this: when you look at the data on human flourishing across income, health, longevity, wealth, child outcomes, and happiness, the results tend to correspond to what natural law and common grace would both predict. Stable, committed, monogamous marriage produces better outcomes. Instability and fragmentation produce worse ones.
That is not primarily a theological claim. It is an empirical one. And the data just keeps pointing in the same direction.
Quotes from the Episode
“Instability is really toxic for financial flourishing.” — Brad Wilcox
"A lot of our elites talk left in public and walk right in private." — Brad Wilcox
"Families are more likely to flourish when men have their lives grounded in a stable, full-time job." — Brad Wilcox
"Women actually rate their husband's protective role as more important for their marital happiness than his success as a provider." — Brad Wilcox
"Marriage and family are not side issues to success — they're at the heart of both." — Matt Miner
FAQ
Does getting married make you wealthier?
The association is strong and consistent. Married adults are roughly 80 percent less likely to be poor than their unmarried peers, even after controlling for education, age, and background. Stably married couples heading into retirement have approximately nine to ten times the assets of divorced or never-married peers. Marriage doesn't guarantee financial success, but relationship instability is one of the most reliable wealth destroyers in the data.
Is it financially risky to get married young?
The risk of marrying young has more to do with the character and compatibility of the people involved than with age itself. Brad Wilcox argues that indefinitely delaying marriage carries its own underappreciated risks — a harder dating environment, the difficulty of merging two independently established lives, and simply fewer options the longer you wait. The window doesn't stay open forever.
Why do college-educated people marry more than working-class people?
Several factors converge. The economy has shifted away from manufacturing, disadvantaging men without college degrees as providers. Religious participation has declined more sharply among working-class Americans. Government means-tested programs like Medicaid and food stamps unintentionally penalize marriage for low-income households. And the broader cultural shifts since the 1960s around work, sex, and family hit working-class communities harder, in part because they lacked the institutional and financial buffers that more educated communities have.
What is the Success Sequence, and does it work?
The Success Sequence is a research-supported framework: finish at least a high school degree, work full time in your 20s, and marry before having children. Following this sequence dramatically reduces the probability of poverty and increases the likelihood of stable family formation. It is not a guarantee, but the data supporting it is strong and consistent across income levels and demographic groups.
What is the happiness premium associated with marriage, and is it growing?
According to General Social Survey data cited by Brad Wilcox, the gap in happiness between married and unmarried Americans has more than doubled since 2000. In a period of growing isolation, technological distraction, and weakening community ties, stable marriage appears to be an increasingly powerful contributor to well-being, not less.
Does it matter whether a wife works?
According to Brad Wilcox's research, a wife's employment status has relatively little association with marital stability or quality — there's meaningful flexibility here. What matters significantly more is whether the husband is employed full time. Men who are not working full time are substantially more likely to divorce and more likely to have unhappy spouses, particularly once children arrive. The data suggests the more important question for most couples isn't whether she works — it's whether he does.
The Institute for Family Studies and the Family Table Initiative
If this conversation is interesting to you — and I hope it is — Brad's work at the Institute for Family Studies is worth your time.
IFS does research, writing, and public engagement focused on understanding why marriage and family matter for human flourishing, and on helping people find their way into stable family life. Their work reaches academic journals and major publications alike, and it's consistently grounded in real data.
Their new Family Table Initiative offers supporters a more direct connection to IFS scholars — events primarily in Charlottesville for now, with plans to expand nationally. I've joined as a supporter, and if you value serious research paired with practical wisdom, you'd find a lot to like there.
Brad's book, Get Married, is the place to start if you want the full argument. It's readable, rigorously grounded, and genuinely important. It's available in hardcover and on Audible.
About This Episode
This episode of Work Pants Finance, hosted by Matt Miner, CFP®, MBA, features Dr. Brad Wilcox, professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and one of America’s leading researchers on marriage and family life.
Our conversation explores marriage, class divides, family formation, wealth building, and the relationship between personal decisions and long-term flourishing.
About Dr. Brad Wilcox
Dr. Brad Wilcox is a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and director of the National Marriage Project. He is the Future of Freedom Fellow and director of the Get Married Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies and a non-resident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. His research and writing appear in leading academic journals and publications like the New York Times, the Atlantic, and the Wall Street Journal.
He is the author of Get Married, which makes the empirical and cultural case for why strong marriages matter for individuals, communities, and society. It’s available in hardcover and audiobook.
About Matt Miner, CFP®
Matt Miner is a fee-only fiduciary financial advisor and founder and CEO of Miner Wealth Management, a North Carolina registered investment advisor, where Matt provides personalized, uncomplicated advice to clients for a fee. Matt is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ professional and holds a Series 65 securities license. He earned his bachelor’s degree in finance from Arizona State University and his MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.
Work Pants Finance is Matt’s financial media business where he talks about work, entrepreneurship, kids, money, taxes, investing, and other personal finance topics. Workpantsfinance.com exists to share wisdom and provide general financial information. It is not financial, tax, or legal advice. You are an individual and probably need personal advice for your specific situation. You should consider building relationships with helpful, caring, and competent professionals who understand your unique context and can provide advice that is tailored to your needs.
Transcript
Guest: Dr. Brad Wilcox | Host: Matt Miner, CFP®, MBA
Recorded in person on the UVA campus, Charlottesville, Virginia
Introduction
Matt (00:01)
Today, Work Pants Finance records in person on the beautiful UVA campus in Charlottesville, Virginia with Dr. Brad Wilcox, one of America’s leading voices on marriage and family life and how those institutions shape economic and social outcomes. Brad is the Melville Foundation/Jefferson Scholars Foundation Distinguished University Professor of Sociology at UVA and directs the National Marriage Project, where he studies how family structure affects the well-being of men, women, and children.
He is also the Future of Freedom Fellow and director of the Get Married initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, and a non-resident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Brad’s research and writing appear in leading academic journals and major news publications, including the New York Times, the Atlantic, and — of course — the Wall Street Journal, where I first encountered his work. Dr. Brad Wilcox’s newest book, Get Married, explores why strong families bolster personal happiness and cultural success.
Brad, welcome to the Work Pants Finance Podcast.
Brad
Thank you, Matt
Cornerstone vs. Capstone: When Should People Marry?
Matt
One idea I’ve heard you talk about is the difference between seeing marriage as a cornerstone of adult life versus a capstone. And for a lot of history, adulthood centered on marriage and family — especially in recent history in the United States. Today, a lot of young professionals see marriage as something that you do after you’ve established your education, career, and maybe had a lot of fun in the world. What enables at least some young people today to envision marriage as a cornerstone versus a capstone? And how can we help the conversation move in that direction? As someone who got married when my bride was 20 and I was 21, I’m so thankful for having been able to build our adult lives together and would love for more people to have that opportunity.
Brad
Yeah, I think a lot of young adults are looking at marriage through the lens of this capstone idea. The thought is that you have to get all your ducks in a row — get your college degree, maybe an MBA or law degree, have some real, substantial experience in the workforce, and have some fun. The line I often hear is something like “travel to Thailand.” The idea is you spend your 20s really investing in education and work, and then in your late 20s you kind of look around and find that perfect person, get married, and start a family.
The problem with that approach, in part, is that it doesn’t understand and appreciate how much establishing your marriage as a cornerstone — getting together, building a common life, and starting a family in your 20s, working together to forge a “we before me” approach — is actually more advantageous, rather than trying to bring two fairly independent, established people together around age 30. That’s part of why I would actually encourage younger adults to consider a cornerstone approach to dating and marriage, obviously where possible.
But I think there’s another point I’d make today that is really a new one for me: I am just hearing a lot of young adults — in their late 20s and in their 30s — expressing great difficulty when it comes to dating, finding a lot of problems and challenges in the contemporary dating context. I was talking to a woman named Elizabeth in Texas, for instance, for a piece I wrote called “Get Married Young.” She was telling me how she went to a top college in the South, then to law school in Texas, then to a big law firm in New York City. Hitting her late 20s, she began looking around in New York to date with an eye toward marriage. This is a woman who was marriage-minded and conservative, but realizing it’s pretty hard to do that in New York City. She returned to Texas in her late 20s and found the dating environment extremely difficult — very hard to meet eligible men in the corporate and even church circles she was traveling in.
She told me, as we were talking about her experience, that she wished she had thought about dating and marriage much more seriously in college, when there were lots of guys all around her in her classes, in her clubs, who were kind of on the same wavelength. And so I think we just need to help young adults understand that, given the difficulty people are experiencing in dating in their 20s and 30s, it’s also more prudent — if you’d like to get married — to think about college as a good place to meet someone, or to look in the workplace, or if you’re in a trade school in your early 20s, or obviously at church. Your early 20s are probably the time when you’re going to have the most options to find someone who might be a good partner, a good spouse, a good wife, husband, father, or mother down the road. So this is in part why I think the value of a more cornerstone approach to marriage is actually going to come back — because waiting can be an actually pretty imprudent strategy if you really want to get married and start a family.
Matt
Yeah, mentioning college makes me think of Tom Stanley. I don’t remember which one of his books it was in, but he talked about “shooting where the ducks are.” College is a great place to find a spouse. He also talks about coaching a woman more like in her mid-to-late 20s — I don’t know whether she was a student or a family friend — going to find a college fellowship at a church and noticing whether it’s all men, or what the balance is between men and women, and then finding one that’s in your favor. I think that’s a great strategy.
Obviously you’re an academic sociologist. One of the things I really appreciate about your work is that you quantify this. When you look at the data, talk about how marriage affects home economics in terms of both income and wealth.
The Marriage Premium: Income, Wealth, and Financial Security
Brad
So what we see when we look at the relationship between marriage and Americans’ economic well-being is that there’s a kind of premium for men that’s often between 10 and 20 percent once they’re married. There’s a debate obviously in the research about how much of that is a selection effect — the kinds of men who are married might be more diligent, more socially adept, or have some other kind of advantage that also helps them in the labor market. But there’s no question that there’s a strong association between marriage and men’s success in the labor market today.
We also see that women are making more money when compared to their female peers who are not married. What we do see, however, is a kind of motherhood penalty: women tend to work less, work fewer hours, or not at all once they have kids. But the broader point is that there is a marriage premium in the sense that married adults in American homes, in terms of their household income, have a lot more income than their single, unmarried peers.
What’s also important to understand is that marriage reduces people’s risk of poverty. Adult men and women who are married are about 80% less likely to be poor, net of background factors like education, age, race, and ethnicity. So there’s a real protective power associated with marriage in that sense. And then as people move into their 50s, their assets are markedly larger if they are stably married compared to their peers who are divorced and never married — about nine to ten times as many assets heading into retirement, compared to their peers who are never married and who are divorced.
There’s just a very strong association between marriage and financial security, which you can appreciate given your own work in the financial sector. The other point I want to make is that instability is really toxic for financial flourishing. When people are moving in and out of relationships — cohabiting relationships or marriages that end in divorce — that instability can really tank their financial well-being. So it’s important to understand both that marriage does reduce your risk of that kind of instability, and that once you are married, making all those efforts to stay married is also incredibly important in terms of securing your financial stability as you move forward through midlife and later life.
Marriage and Class: Why Is There a Divide?
Matt
Brad, one of the things that I find most concerning is how marriage has become divided by class. Why is it that you think this has happened? I’m thinking especially of Charles Murray’s work in Coming Apart — that college-educated and well-to-do folks still marry and stay married at higher rates. And yet, based on some of what we’ve talked about so far, one of the best things that working-class or poor people could do to improve their financial standing would be to get and stay married. So how do we have a conversation that helps people outside of elite circles think differently about — and act differently about — marriage?
Brad
So yeah, it is striking that when you look at the trends in marriage, a clear majority of college-educated Americans are married and will be stably married, and only a minority of less-educated Americans are currently married and will be stably married in their lifetimes. In terms of understanding why there is this divide, I would make a couple of points.
The first thing I’d say is that marriage has become a much more voluntary institution. It’s become much less supported by society at large — in terms of a whole series of norms and customs that would have traditionally channeled people into marriage, related to dating, sex, and expectations about the life course. And so if you are highly agentic, if you are forward-thinking, if you have a high measure of self-control, if you have a decent income and a good job, it’s a lot easier in today’s world to move into marriage and to stay married, to not be exposed to some of the financial stresses that can be hard for all couples, or to the poor decisions that can derail a relationship.
By contrast, if you don’t have a steady job and you are more likely to make mistakes — whether related to smoking marijuana on a regular basis, drinking too much, or other short-term-oriented mistakes — you’re more likely to struggle in terms of forging a good relationship, getting married, and having a strong family. So I think part of the story here is a behavioral and cultural divide, which Charles Murray touches on — where, for instance, working-class men are more likely to not be employed full time compared to college-educated men, partly because they’re less likely to show up on time and be consistently at work compared to their better-educated male peers.
And I’m not saying that to shame working-class people. I think it’s important to understand that the normative context we’re living in today has really changed — we don’t really expect and demand as much, as a society, in terms of embracing classic norms around the importance of work. The normative shifts we’ve seen unfold in the U.S. since the 1960s — around work, sex, marriage, family, drug use — all kinds of vices have just exploded in the contemporary context. And I think that explosion had an especially deleterious effect on working-class couples, relationships, and families.
But there are also two other things playing out here. One is that the economy has changed in ways that make it harder for men who are not college graduates to do physical work that speaks to their talents and gifts. It’s harder for them to find appealing jobs, which means they’re less likely to be flourishing as men and as providers. That’s part of the story — the economic shift away from manufacturing toward a more information- and service-based economy.
And then the final thing I’d say is that when it comes to two other core institutions that affect people — religion and the state — we are now seeing, surprisingly, that college-educated Americans are more likely to be regular churchgoers than working-class Americans. That’s a switch; it wasn’t always this way. It means that working-class Americans are less likely to get the benefit of church, and they’re also now more dependent upon government. The government is often penalizing marriage — when people are on Medicaid, for instance, they have an incentive to just cohabit and not marry, so as to qualify for benefits like Medicaid, food stamps, and the Earned Income Tax Credit. So the government is unintentionally discouraging marriage through the organization of its means-tested programs.
So there’s just a range of cultural, behavioral, economic, religious, and governmental factors that have unintentionally coalesced to make the relationships of working-class people broadly defined weaker, and to make marriage less financially advantageous to working-class Americans — particularly to working-class women.
Matt
Yeah, I think you see all that played out in culture. I don’t remember the title, but Charles Murray has a great book where he writes about the change in government programs specifically there. And yet — I don’t think we have an answer for this on today’s show, maybe you do — we see this great income and wealth premium associated with marriage on the one hand, and then people utilize these government programs that may discourage marriage. I would love to find a way to help solve that puzzle.
Brad
We do see ideas about what could be done. One response would be to set thresholds that are twice as high for working-class families when it comes to Medicaid compared to single moms, which would allow us to address that penalty. There are some fixes available, but they do cost money, at least in the short term, and that’s the challenge.
It is striking that Congress has, in recent decades, addressed many of the marriage penalties embedded in the tax code that affect upper-middle and upper-income Americans, but has not devoted a similar effort to addressing the marriage penalties embedded in our means-tested programs like Medicaid. That’s tragic, because we’re not seeing any major move away from marriage among more affluent Americans — we’re seeing it among working-class Americans, especially in recent decades. It’s tragic that Congress has focused its fire on tackling marriage penalties in the tax system rather than in these means-tested programs.
Luxury Beliefs and Elite Hypocrisy on Marriage
Matt
I think that’s a great policy comment. I appreciate it. A couple of things were catalysts for me in wanting to have this particular conversation with you. One was an experience I had: I was at a lunch with a group of men from my church — eight of us around the table, self-selection going on here no doubt — and all of us had wives who stayed home with our children, and all of us were probably top 10- to 2-percent earners. Obviously the one makes the other easier, but I continue to think there’s something going on there too, where men think, “Well, I better go figure out how to pay for this family the way that I want to have it.”
One of the ideas that came together with this for me was Rob Henderson and his book Troubled. We’re here to talk about Brad Wilcox’s work today, but if you haven’t read it, it’s just a great story — and I know Brad has read it because he quotes it. He talks about luxury beliefs, where the affluent — like my friends and me sitting around that lunch table — have taken one course with our marriage and family life, but many people who are in a position to actually talk about culture, societal norms, or even morality have failed to talk up this thing that works pretty well, and instead say, “Well, you should do whatever you want” — while, as members of the elite, quietly maintaining a very traditional, stable, normal-looking home. I just wonder if you could talk about how those who have some kind of position in culture can help simply by talking about this issue.
Brad
Yeah, we have seen, I think, on this issue of the value of marriage, a kind of paradox where a lot of our elites talk left in public and walk right in private. I do a quiz in my sociology family class — a large class at UVA, anonymous. I’ll begin by asking: “What share of you think that having a child outside of wedlock is wrong?” — framing it as an issue of public morality. About 65% of the students in my big family class at UVA will say it’s not wrong. And then I’ll ask them how their parents would respond if they came home for Thanksgiving and announced that they were pregnant — or that their girlfriend was pregnant. When I ask that question, about 97 to 99% of the class say their parents would freak out.
And then I ask them if they’ve embraced the success sequence for their own personal plans — that is, getting at least a high school degree first, working full time in their 20s, and then getting married before having children. About 97% of my UVA students are intending to follow the success sequence. So it’s just a good illustration of how — and this is a pretty elite university, with a lot of kids from advantaged backgrounds — there’s just this tendency to personally prioritize marriage and family for oneself, but not to support it as a public norm in the broader society.
Another example I give is the co-founder of Netflix, Reed Hastings. Here’s a guy who acknowledges that early on in his marriage, his wife was pretty upset with him for all of his travel, and they went to a counselor and worked through it. They’ve been married more than 30 years, they’ve got two kids, and they’re sharing a couple of billion dollars together as a couple. And yet when you look at what Netflix is offering, there’s a lot of content that’s not particularly marriage-friendly — not particularly conducive to forging the kind of strong, stable marriage like Reed Hastings has.
One example I point to in Netflix’s offerings is the film Marriage Story, which chronicles an upper-middle-class couple in New York having — I think — pretty average difficulties in their marriage, rather than working them through the way Reed Hastings actually did in real life. They go through a very messy divorce, a move to California, and so on. What was frustrating to me about Marriage Story was that it told a false story about marriage — because most college-educated, upper-middle-class Americans now manage to make it. They figure it out. They work through their difficulties. And yet the image being presented on Netflix suggested that divorce was sort of the natural way to resolve the kinds of challenges that I think are pretty typical in most married households.
Reed Hastings was, in a sense, talking left through his media company and the public role it was playing as a cultural leader, and yet in the private world — in his comfortable California home — managing to forge a strong and stable marriage. So this is a challenge: so many of our leaders and rising leaders in the media, in public life, in the university are living exemplary family lives in private — often exemplary spouses and parents. And yet when it comes to exercising any kind of public authority — as a college president, a professor, a journalist, a media executive, the head of Netflix — they don’t make any real effort to more broadly reinforce the kinds of values and virtues that allow people to build strong marriages. That’s my frustration: we haven’t seen a real effort on the part of many left-leaning people to embrace marriage and the virtues and values that sustain it.
Matt
Well, I regret that my platform is not as substantial as Netflix, but Work Pants Finance is really happy to be having this conversation with you today. And Miner Wealth Management is going to go talk to the Darden MBAs after this about marriage and family finances — so that’s my small contribution to trying to right the ship here.
I was reading something published by someone generally in your field — a social worker or sociologist — who said that if you find a neighborhood where 80% of the children are born outside of wedlock, she wanted to talk to the 20% of people who did marry before they had kids and who kind of followed this success sequence we’ve been talking about. And I just wonder — in Get Married, your book, you highlight groups that succeed in marriage: specifically Asian Americans, religious conservatives, political conservatives, and strivers. I thought, “Okay, I can check three of these four boxes. Maybe I still need to work at my marriage, but I should be all right.” But you highlight these groups as having remarkably stable marriages. Is there anything you see, as you look beyond those groups, that helps people be successful?
Who Is Flourishing? The Role of Church and Community
Brad
That’s a great question. Another way to frame it, I guess, Matt, is to think about who is flourishing outside of those groups — people who aren’t Asian American, conservative, or college-educated. We’ve actually been having a lot of public discussion in the last week and a half, with some progressives and center intellectuals saying, “There’s really no problem in college-educated circles when it comes to marriage and family. The problem is all those working-class folks, especially working-class men — they’re horrible.” It’s been quite a discourse. And I think the challenge is there’s some truth to it, but people aren’t necessarily appreciating — from my perspective as a sociologist — that we have to ask why so many working-class young men are floundering. They’re not just born this way. There are reasons why people end up in relationships and life trajectories that are problematic. The right didn’t really realize that, maybe 20 or 30 years ago. Now the left is pointing the finger at working-class guys and saying, “You’re horrible — that’s why marriage is fragile in working-class communities.”
When I look at working-class Americans who are flourishing — working maybe as an HVAC technician, for instance, with no college degree — the honest response to your question is that they’re not likely to be flourishing unless they’re part of a church community. That’s just sort of the way I see it. I’m a churchgoing Catholic and I’m glad that people connected to a church are more likely to flourish, but I do wish we lived in a society where almost anyone would have a chance of making it. Because the broader norms and values in our society are not conducive to the kinds of virtues you need to embrace to be a successful husband, wife, father, and mother today. Absent being part of a religious community, I think it’s very hard for many working-class Americans to make it on the family front.
Yes, there are working-class couples who are not religious, not Asian, not conservative, who are doing great in marriage — but they’re a much smaller group than would have been the case 50 years ago.
Matt
That’s interesting. I was sort of hoping for a different answer, but I guess if you had one, you would have published it. I think about church as one of the rare spaces in modern America where — if the church is functioning correctly — you will see people across a variety of social and income groups. Obviously, geographic segregation enters in, but you really hope that you do.
And I also think back — part of my history was working in a John Deere dealership, where people like tractor technicians make kind of what the HVAC techs you talk about make. I think of some of those specific individuals I know, and those who were generally part of a church community were managing to have a successful marriage in a working-class situation. And honestly, as I think of everyone else making the exact same income, they were either unmarried — or if they had followed the marriage norm at some point, had either become divorced or were divorcing. I’m not doom and gloom on anything, but as I reflect on your comment, it mirrors my own specific experience in Tractor World.
Brad
Yeah, although I think for a long time in my life I had a sort of implicit view — not fully articulated in my mind — that history unfolds in a linear fashion and everything was kind of getting worse. I don’t hold to that anymore, either explicitly or implicitly. I do think that we can see major shifts for better and for worse in history. It’s quite possible that things could get much worse than they currently are — or that we could see a dramatic turn toward, for instance, embracing marriage and the values and virtues that sustain it, where that broader cultural embrace would unfold for many more working-class Americans than we’re currently seeing. But it does require a large-scale cultural shift.
Matt
Are you aware of a historical example where marriage norms collapsed and were revived?
Brad
We certainly have seen shifts. The one I’m most inclined to recall is Victorian England. Heading into the Victorian era, there was relatively more drinking, drug use, and out-of-wedlock childbearing. Then, because of the work of the Queen to some extent and her associates — the work of the Clapham Group, an evangelical group working for moral reform in England — we did see a shift away from excessive drinking and drug use and nonmarital childbearing. So I think this is an example where the work that civic and religious actors do on behalf of something like the family can bear fruit.
Matt
So you’d be describing there a shift in tone among the cultural and religious elites having a good effect in that way. I would argue you see it maybe in the Reformation in certain places as well.
Brad
Yeah, that’s a fair point. I think it’s a shift on the part of elites, but I think it’s also important that there be greater congruence between elites and ordinary people. This is where — as you mentioned the church before — it is true that there are churches with substantial numbers of working-class Americans, but we do see in many church communities today a substantial measure of class segregation. To give you a concrete example: I think most Catholic and evangelical young adult organizations are targeting kids like the ones here at UVA — we’re sitting here at UVA right now — and they ignore the kids over at Piedmont Community College, not to mention the kids who aren’t going to any kind of college and are working as young adults at Starbucks or Panera or what have you. So I think our religious institutions need to do a better job of extending their circle of concern beyond just the most advantaged young adults — who are also, let’s be honest, often the easiest kids to work with — and thinking about how we can work with young adults who are struggling on a number of fronts. That’s also part of the story.
In terms of these historical examples, it’s not just that the elites’ messaging is changing — it’s also their ability to engage across class lines. There are people who really were diving into the challenges and concerns of the less fortunate.
Practical Advice for Young Professionals and MBAs
Matt
Brad, most of the audience of this show are MBAs, professionals, and entrepreneurs — basically UVA undergrads five to 30 years on — who are trying to build a stable financial life and a stable family life. Based on everything you’ve studied, what advice would you give to someone in their 20s or early 30s who hopes to build both of those things?
Brad
One thing that’s important to understand and appreciate is that there’s obviously a lot of flexibility that people are experiencing in terms of gender and work in their 20s — probably less so in their 30s for your audience. When it comes to organizing work and family, the data are very clear when it comes to a wife’s work and a man’s work. A wife’s work doesn’t seem to be associated much with the stability or quality of the marriage — there’s some flexibility now that we see kick in. But when it comes to men and work, men who are not working full time are much more likely to land in divorce court and they’re more likely to have wives who are unhappy — especially when there are kids in the household.
So I think we sometimes underplay the importance of male breadwinning in the 21st century. No matter what you’re hearing from the culture at large, families are more likely to flourish when men have their lives grounded in a stable, full-time job. That means wives and husbands need to be more intentional about making sure the husband is employed full-time — to give families a secure foundation, but also to secure his role in the household as a provider.
Another thing I’d say is to be very careful about spending and debt. It’s just very easy nowadays to accumulate lots of debt with credit cards, refinancing, and the like. And with social media, there’s a temptation to think you have to go on this trip, belong to this club, your kids have to do this travel sport. Before you know it, you’re swimming in debt, and that’s a real drag on married life and family life more generally. So trying to be clear about the importance of steering clear of debt and excessive consumption would be an important point for this kind of group.
And the final thing I’d say is that when it comes to gender — and we’ve been talking about the importance of male providership — when you think about that classic idea of providing and protecting, what I see in the research I’ve done is that women actually rate their husband’s protective role as more important for their marital happiness than his success as a provider. I think many of us husbands can lose sight of that. And protection is understood by women not just in the sense of physical protection, but in being more gentlemanly or chivalrous.
In my own social circle, I have this one husband I know — a former military officer, just incredibly chivalrous. When his wife enters a room, he stands. He’s always making sure his wife is well situated, pulling out her chair, clearly making a real effort to protect her in a variety of ways. He’s also a physically imposing guy, but he’s the classic strong gentleman. I think it behooves us as husbands — especially in this age when chivalry is not very fashionable — to be more intentional about trying to be chivalrous. If you do that, your marriage and your family will thrive. Your kids will notice that dad is really attentive to mom and making sure she always feels comfortable — whether you’re at a party, a church social, a restaurant, or out on a family vacation — and that she feels her kids are protected as well. So just encouraging the guys listening to your podcast to be more attentive to their role as protectors.
Advice for Young Women: Second Chances and Signaling
Matt
Thanks, Brad. I really appreciate that insight. I’m going to count that as your advice for young men. Reflected in a 2024 interview with Kevin DeYoung, you mentioned you’d prefer that women give advice to women about marriage. As a follow-up, are there any voices you’d recommend that young women listen to for that kind of guidance? And do you have any marriage advice for young women since 2024?
Brad
Yeah, I mean, I think obviously having a conservative Catholic giving women advice about how to date, marry, or raise kids can be a little bit dicey. I think there are a number of voices out there offering young women helpful wisdom. Emma Waters is certainly one — she’s just put out a new book on marriage, family, and work that’s helpful. [Note: book title unclear in transcript.] It’s also the case that we’re seeing some new writing on dating that is helpful too. There’s a woman named Debra Soh who has a book called Extinction, talking about how sex and dating are in decline. One of the serious points she makes is that, because of the dramatic decline we’re seeing right now in dating, women should be just much more clear with themselves — and if they’re interested in someone, they should signal that. She talks about the evolutionary value of a clear and powerful smile directed toward a man as a way of signaling interest.
Beyond that, I would encourage women to give men in their circle second and third chances. The literary example I’d be thinking of is Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen clearly gives us a model where Elizabeth Bennet first thinks of Mr. Darcy as prideful and boorish, a man of low character — and then, as she gets to know him, comes to see that in fact he’s a man of high character. On balance, he’s a great man. And so she ends up getting engaged to and marrying Mr. Darcy.
So I would just encourage women who are in social circles to be attentive to the way their views about a man might change as they get to know him better. And also — if they’re asked on a date and there’s even a remote possibility that it might work, even if they’re a little bit skeptical or even a lot skeptical — in a world that’s just much more difficult to find a spouse, women should be more inclined to give guys second and third chances, especially if they seem to be young men who are faithful and of good character.
Matt
Those are great comments. My wife was having an exchange with a young woman at our church talking about young men at her college. And Charity, my wife, was talking about how you have to be aware of which part of this is that he’s a person of good character who’s just not yet fully baked, versus a person of poor character for whom you should beware. I think there’s all this neuroscience research about how brains mature at different rates — young men more slowly than women — and young men can tend to be impulsive and bring a lot of life to a room, but also can seem stupid and off the wall. I think your comments are helpful in that regard.
Natural Law, Common Grace, and the Universality of Marriage
Matt
Brad, my last formal question is a philosophical one. The Roman Catholic tradition talks about natural law and my Presbyterian tradition talks about common grace. I think these concepts have a lot of overlap. In your sociological research, where do you see evidence that the structure of marriage reflects something deeper in human nature as created — something that shows up across cultures, even in our modern culture, whether people understand that or not?
Brad
What’s striking about the research I’ve both conducted and read is how much it tends to conform to ideas about the importance of marriage that you would find in the Protestant tradition — vis-à-vis common grace — and in the Catholic tradition — vis-à-vis natural law. The way in which marriage ends up being a common feature of complex civilizations is remarkable. This is based in part on work that Joseph Henrich has done at Harvard — he’s an evolutionary anthropologist there — and as he surveys the anthropological literature, he talks about how both marriage and monogamy serve real human goods: providing order to human sexual relationships, connecting men to their children, and providing a pathway into living a meaningful and ordered life for both women and especially men.
The point I’m getting at is that you can see these features of social life — as they intersect with things like sex and family — ending up corresponding to what we’d expect from a common grace-based perspective or a natural law-based perspective. When you look at the research on family, you do see a correspondence between what natural law would expect, or what common grace would expect, about the importance of monogamy and marriage, and how human flourishing is more likely to take place when these core institutions in the family arena are being acknowledged, honored, and followed.
The Institute for Family Studies and the Family Table Initiative
Matt
I really appreciate that. Brad, you’ve been so generous with your time and thoughts. This interview has been an absolute pleasure — I was looking forward to it for weeks. I just appreciate you taking the time. Since we planned this recording, I learned about your Family Table initiative at the Institute for Family Studies. I’ve joined there as a supporter. I wonder if you could tell us about that initiative, your vision for IFS and the Family Table, how people can support it, and anything else you’d like to share by way of conclusion.
Brad
Yeah, thanks, Matt. So IFS — the Institute for Family Studies — is really dedicated to doing two things. One is to use research based on the most contemporary trends to help people understand how much marriage and family more broadly matter for human flourishing. The second is to help people find their way into marriage if they’re not married and want to be — and then forge strong and stable families once they are married. We do that both by offering advice about how to build a good marriage and by pointing to policies that make it easier to get married, stay married, and have the kids you would like to have.
We also have kind of this new tagline: the futurist family. And our view is that the family is not just important, but it’s more important than ever — because we’re living in a world that’s economically more unequal, more technologically distracted, and more atomistic. People are more isolated and lonely, and there are fewer common norms to govern and guide our lives. So it’s in this newer social context, Matt, that the family becomes even more important for the future that’s before us.
For Americans who are able to find their way into marriage and family life and stay married, we are seeing that the happiness premium associated with marriage has more than doubled since 2000. What I mean by that is that the gap in the share of folks in the “not too happy” category between those who are unmarried and those who are married has doubled in the General Social Survey from 2000 to the present. So our view at IFS is that the family matters more than ever, and we’re trying to point that out through a variety of research, writing, and other initiatives — including working with groups like Communio, which works with Catholic and Protestant churches across America.
The new Family Table Initiative is helping some of our supporters have the opportunity to spend more time with IFS scholars and to participate in events — primarily here in Charlottesville, but in the future around the country as well — giving people a more intimate view into what we’re up to in terms of our research, writing, and thinking about both the importance of the family today and the steps we can take to make it easier for Americans across the country to get married, stay married, and raise kids in flourishing families.
Matt
Brad, thank you so much for joining me today. I loved our conversation. Marriage and family are not side issues to success — they’re at the heart of both. They shape wealth, stability, children, meaning, and the society our children will inhabit.
Listeners, if today’s episode challenged you, encouraged you, or made you think differently, send it to someone you care about. These are conversations worth having in public. And now run — don’t walk — to Amazon or Audible and buy Brad’s book, Get Married.
If you want to go deeper, check out the Institute for Family Studies and join me there as a supporter of the Family Table Initiative. If you value serious research paired with practical wisdom and important stories, you’ll find a lot to like at the Institute for Family Studies.
And if Work Pants Finance has earned a place in your rotation, please subscribe, leave a review, and share the show. It helps a lot.
I’m Matt Miner. Now go on home and give your wife a kiss.
Disclosures
Matt Miner is a fee-only fiduciary financial advisor and founder and CEO of Miner Wealth Management, a North Carolina registered investment advisor, where Matt provides personalized, uncomplicated advice to clients for a fee. Matt is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ professional and holds a Series 65 securities license. He earned his bachelor’s degree in finance from Arizona State University and his MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.
Work Pants Finance is Matt’s financial media business where he talks about work, entrepreneurship, kids, money, taxes, investing, and other personal finance topics. Workpantsfinance.com exists to share wisdom and provide general financial information. It is not financial, tax, or legal advice. You are an individual and probably need personal advice for your specific situation. You should consider building relationships with helpful, caring, and competent professionals who understand your unique context and can provide advice that is tailored to your needs.