EXCLUSIVE — Despite popular cultural messaging to the contrary, getting married and having a family are the keys to amassing wealth and finding happiness in life, according to sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox.
The divorce revolution, contemporary feminism, and left-wing messaging against marriage have all contributed to an “individualistic” approach to how married couples handle their money, but Wilcox, a University of Virginia sociology professor, said neither wealth nor happiness is positively affected by going at it alone.
In an interview with the Washington Examiner, Wilcox, director of UVA’s National Marriage Project, claimed more traditional money-sharing norms in a marriage not only produce positive economic outcomes but also build a sense of family unity and trust between spouses.
“It’s not just that marriage matters for your financial success, it’s that spouses and couples who fully invest in the marriage – kind of have this family first approach to marriage and sort of all-in mindset – are more likely to be very happily married and then to end up in a better financial position than people who are kind of not fully trusting their spouse, not fully investing practically and financially in their marriages,” he said.
“There is a recent current in American life that is profoundly individualistic,” Wilcox, who recently authored the book Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization, said, adding that the mindset of some people is focused on “maximizing your choices and keeping your options open, while not fully investing yourself in an institution like marriage.”
According to his book, couples who kept separate money were more than 20% more likely to separate or divorce compared to couples who pooled at least some of their money. Couples who pooled their money were also found to be 13% more likely to say they were “very happy” in their marriages.
Wilcox argued against many common left-wing cultural narratives about marriage and family, citing the example of a Bloomberg story titled “Women Who Stay Single and Don’t Have Kids Are Getting Richer,” which claimed that “foregoing marriage and parenthood has a bigger payoff for American women than men.”
But Wilcox said evidence does not support that narrative.
“Financially there’s just no question that not only are people who are married more likely to be flourishing financially, but people who really embrace classic norms around commitment, and this sort of we-before-me mindset rather than a me-first approach to marriage and money in particular … are much more likely to be successful than hedging your bets,” he said.
For example, research from his book shows that neither single men nor women are better off than their married counterparts. Even when controlling for factors such as education and employment, women are 80% less likely to be impoverished when they are married, he explained.
Wilcox cited a barrage of other data points on financial and life satisfaction success that he said illustrated the benefits of marriage.
The median family income of married mothers ages 18-55 was $108,000 in 2020, more than twice the $41,000 median income of single women with no children in the same age bracket.
“These married mothers head into retirement in their fifties, they’ve accumulated $322,000 in median assets, compared to $100,000 for their single, childless peers,” Wilcox wrote in the book, adding that retiring married men have 10 times more assets than divorced or never-married males.
Sixty percent of married mothers between the ages of 18 and 55 also said they found meaning in their life “most” or “all of the time,” compared to 36% of their single, childless counterparts in 2021, according to Wilcox’s research for the book. Similarly, in 2022, 75% of the same age cohort of married mothers said they were “completely” or “somewhat” satisfied with their lives, where only 54% of their single, childless peers agreed.
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A growing message to men, particularly from some right-wing influencers, is that “most marriages end in divorce, women are going to try to take advantage of you financially, and given that, you should not invest in love, you should not definitely get married – and if you do get married, you’re going to [end in] divorce and they’re gonna take a substantial share of your income and assets in the wake of a divorce through child support and some kind of legal settlement, and for that reason, it’d be better for you just to have a prenup, and avoid all the trauma and drama associated with a divorce,” Wilcox said.
He said both the left-wing and right-wing perspectives have created a “mutual suspicion between the sexes: Less love and less marriage creates more hostility and more political polarization.”
