Give Young Men Something Worth Coming Back To

If we want to strengthen the family, we’re going to have to look, without flinching, at how we have treated boys and men.

I wrote “Wow” and hit repost.

In 2000, there were 20.7 million unmarried men in America between the ages of 20 and 39. Today there are 30.4 million. Married men in the same age group have fallen from 18.1 million to 15.4 million. Unmarried young men now outnumber married ones by nearly two to one.

The data was from Brad Wilcox at Institute for Family Studies, and the numbers were blunt enough to stop my scrolling.

I added a simple question: “This chart is alarming… thoughts?”

Thousands of responses came in. They were not subtle.

“Why would we want to get married when everything is stacked against us?”

“Why choose to lose everything you have in the end in divorce?”

“Women today are the problem!”

Most of the culture would look at that chart, skim those replies, and reach for the familiar verdict: young men are the problem. They are commitment-phobic. They are addicted to screens. They refuse to grow up. They are emotionally unavailable. They will not “step up.”

I don’t buy that. While not a representative sample, I take their concerns seriously, and something is clearly broken. But it’s not as simple as a generation of boys who suddenly stopped wanting a wife and children.

The data tells a different story. Young men today still aspire to marriage and family more than young women do. Pew has found that 12th-grade boys are now more likely than 12th-grade girls to say they want to get married someday: 74 percent of boys, compared with 61 percent of girls. Thirty years ago it was the reverse. Girls’ desire for marriage dropped by more than 20 points! Boys barely moved.

Among young adults without children, men are more likely than women to say they want to be parents. An Institute for Family Studies survey of men 18 to 29 found that 68 percent of the unmarried ones want to marry someday. Only about one in ten say no.

So the chart isn’t a portrait of men who have abandoned the family or hate women. It’s a portrait of a disconnect. Young men want to get married. They also feel that the odds are stacked against them in terms of dating and settling down with someone they can trust. We need to ask why young men are so demoralized, and how we can move them towards the married life they say they want.

That’s the question we should be asking, not the one that flatters our existing beliefs and solely casts blame onto the guys. When young men see headline after headline like “The Good-Man Shortage Has Gotten Exponentially Worse”—recently from New York Magazine—do you think that makes them feel good about themselves?

For decades we told men to step aside. We treated fatherhood as optional and masculinity as a problem to be fixed. We ignored boys falling behind in school, mental health, work, and hope for the future. We gave them almost no public encouragement and a great deal of shaming.

We let technology go to work on their vulnerabilities—cheap dopamine, easy access to porn and gambling, frictionless comparison, a dating market that can make ordinary men feel invisible. After all of that, we look at a generation of unmarried prime age men and scold them with headlines about being duds.

I can’t get over how unfair this is. I will go further: there’s something cruel in it. You can’t spend years relentlessly telling men they are the obstacle and then act shocked when men react with backlash.

They worry about easy divorce in a world where divorce can mean the loss of a house and the destruction of family life. They worry they will never be “enough” on paper: not rich enough, not tall enough, not credentialed enough, not emotionally fluent in the exact way the current moment demands. They worry that the culture that demands they provide but refuses to honor them accordingly.

Yes, some of these sentiments are self-pity and suggest a victimization complex. But some of it is pattern recognition. Adults who care about families should be able to tell the difference.

Many young women want marriage, children, and a partner who will stay. Plenty of young men need to become more employable, more present, and less online. None of that cancels the other. Men and women are not rivals. We are on the same team.

A culture that can only speak about one sex’s grievances will keep producing the loneliness it claims to care about. We can’t be excessively critical of young men and take the opposite approach to young women.

There are people trying to change the weather. A new site from the Institute for Family Studies, gogetmarried.org, starts from a premise that shouldn’t sound radical: wanting to get married is good! It offers research, tools, and a Marriage Map that shows, county by county, where young adults are actually forming families. In a culture that has spent decades calling marriage optional, a trap, or a career hazard, even that much honesty is a correction.

If we want to strengthen the family, we’re going to have to look, without flinching, at how we have treated boys and young men. That means schools that do not treat boyish energy as a disorder. It means fathers who are honored instead of mocked as the lazy, fat guy on the couch.

It means family courts and cultural narratives that assume a father’s bond with his children is real. It means telling the truth about what marriage gives both sexes like stability, meaning, and a shot at raising children who know they are wanted.

Young women having standards is good, but contempt is a poor matchmaker. If the public conversation offers young men only scorn, they will keep answering with withdrawal and rage. If it offers them dignity, a fair shot, and a stable family life, more of them will walk toward it.

The data showing the decline in men getting married is alarming. It’s the kind of trend that should worry us all. The online sentiment is raw and unflinching; tapping into the demoralization young men feel.

But the desire for marriage is still there. If we want young men to get married, we need to encourage them along the way, and give them something worth coming back to.