Staff Reports
America is breaking at the most basic unit of society — the family — and too many Americans are still pretending it isn’t a crisis. Recent reporting shows a growing number of American women are choosing singlehood over marriage, not because marriage has lost its value, but because the institutions and incentives that once supported stable families have been hollowed out by bad policy and toxic cultural narratives.
Polling makes the problem plain: while many Americans still say they want marriage in principle, the importance of marriage has dropped and the share who say they do not want to marry has inched upward, even as overall marriage rates decline. That gap between attitude and action isn’t abstract — it reflects real shifts in behavior that will shape our nation’s future unless we act.
Dig a little deeper and you find familiar, avoidable drivers: many never-married adults report they haven’t found the right person, while a large share cite financial instability and uncertainty as key reasons they’re postponing or rejecting marriage. This isn’t just about feelings; it’s about the economic and social calculation young people now make when they weigh a lifetime commitment.
Education and economic sorting have made the marriage market brutal for working-class men and the women who rightly refuse to settle. The data show a widening education gap in marital status: college-educated adults are far more likely to marry and stay married, while less-educated Americans — especially men — are increasingly left out of marriage altogether. That mismatch fuels resentment and a breakdown in social cohesion that neither party in Washington has fixed.
The consequences go beyond two people not showing up at a courthouse. Declining marriage correlates with lower birth rates, weaker family formation, and long-term fiscal strain for communities that used to rely on stable households to anchor civic life. A healthy nation needs families; when marriages fall, the social safety net is forced to pick up costs that used to be shared inside the home.
Conservatives should stop treating this as merely an academic debate and start sounding the alarm with solutions that actually restore incentives for commitment. That means reforming family law and child support systems that perversely punish men, expanding pro-marriage tax and childcare policies that don’t penalize two-parent households, and promoting workforce and apprenticeship programs so men can be providers again.
Finally, this is also a cultural fight. Media and academia have normalized the idea that independence equals fulfillment while denigrating the institutions that cultivate responsibility. If we want to rescue marriage we must celebrate it again — through churches, schools, local communities, and policy — and refuse to let a generation be taught that the free market and identity politics are better parents than a loving, committed mom and dad.
