Most Marriages are Pretty Good

Young people are hearing the worst things about marriage online--and most of them aren't true.

Photo by Dare Artworks on Unsplash

One piece of news has hit Gender Discourse this week: according to a Pew survey, twelfth-grade girls are less likely than boys to want to get married, compared to being more interested in marriage than boys thirty years ago.

People weren’t concerned about teen boys wanting marriage less than teen girls thirty years ago—it was assumed marriage sucked for men, and only through a slog of nagging could men be convinced into matrimony. Perhaps it’s the declining birth rate that’s making people care now. Or perhaps people are just more bothered by women opting out than by men (although to be clear—these are seventeen-year-olds, and your views on marriage at seventeen could very well change.)

But if you were an alien from outer space and your only access to modern life on Earth was through the Internet, you might quickly assume that marriage was some kind of draft system that hoovered up poor, unfortunate children of Omelas and forced them into decades of torture against their will.

For women, marriage is apparently so unpleasant that having sex with their husbands is now considered a “full time job,” along with five other full time jobs with which modern husbands are all completely uninvolved, and this lack of involvement is forcing everyone to stop having children. Women will stop wanting to have sex with their husbands—which is fine, apparently—but the husbands will nag and pressure them into constant, backbreaking porn-star sex all while forgetting their birthdays and cheating on them.

For men: it’s either marriage or a nonstop pussy parade of college girls, and some dumb chumps inexplicably choose marriage. If you do make this ill-fated choice, your wife will never have sex with you again, for no reason other than the fact that she wants to emasculate you. She will, seemingly for sport, attempt to gain as much weight as possible, nag you constantly, and resent you for no reason. Men are told that only losers would even want marriage in the first place, because a man with enough money would vastly prefer the aforementioned rotating harem. Marriage is also something that only a rich man (who apparently wouldn’t want it) could achieve anyway, as men are told that women want absolutely nothing to do with men under 30 who haven’t yet acquired “resources.”

We are told that we are living in an age of unprecedented debauchery, and that infidelity is everywhere, even though infidelity is actually less common than it used to be.

We are also told, repeatedly, that marriage is hard work, staying faithful is hard work, and that the “divorce rate is skyrocketing,” despite the fact that this is just patently untrue. Even keeping in mind the declining marriage rate and limiting your sample only to married people, a married couple in 2019 was significantly less likely to get divorced than a married couple in 1980.

Between self-indulgent divorce memoirs, op-eds in major publications (especially The Cut), embittered manosphere podcasts, and anonymous confessionals, we have been led to believe that your average modern-day marriage is horribly unpleasant, or at least boring and unfulfilling. And as I’ve written about before, it’s far more entertaining to read about people’s bad marriages than people’s good marriages, let alone people’s “we have our problems, but things are generally fine” marriages.

I find myself walking this messaging tight rope pretty often, because I write about my marriage, probably a lot more than I intended when I first started writing. Generally, I portray the positive sides of marriage, to the point that I’ve gotten criticism for being out of touch with what marriage is like for your average person. Then, occasionally I touch on the less flattering parts of my marriage, like how insane my husband is about sharing food in restaurants, or the fact that my husband put me on a PIP for being so terrible at cleaning, and people tell me that both of us sound insufferable.

The thing is, I don’t believe my marriage is that unique in either direction. Overall, I’d say my marriage is great, with a couple hiccups along the way like anyone else. But, hot take: I think your average marriage in 2025 is also pretty good.