Is it insulting to say marriage civilizes men? More importantly, is it true? 

A thoughtful review of our book I…Do? Why Marriage Still Matters asks us to go deeper, specifically about marriage and purported benefits for men. 

We argue in our book that marriage is a public good. It is not to be relegated to the dustbin of alternative lifestyles but rather is foundational to the good life for most of us, whether or not we wed. 

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So what does marriage offer men? It shapes men, which is a good thing, or, as Peter Jon Mitchell and I  write:“in older parlance, … we might say it civilizes men,” just as marriage also protects women, an equally if not more controversial notion for many women today. Of note, in a world that tends toward viewing men and women as interchangeable, marriage offers different attributes to men and women, because while we are both humans and equally disposed toward sin, we are in fact different. 

The civilizing effects of marriage for men come not because men are brutish and uncivilized without it, but rather because men have, in history, needed to be drawn into family life. Supporting and protecting a wife and children changes and directs a man’s outlook and priorities. Research shows married men are more likely to be present in their children’s lives. Love is not enough to bind a triad of man, woman and child together for the long haul. Neither is having a child always enough to bind a couple together. Absent marriage, the link of fathers to their children is more tenuous. 

Marriage is (or should be) the glue binding families together for all of us, but particularly for men. Mothers do abandon their children, but historically this has been more of an aberration, for biological reasons, among others. Fathers specifically experience a reduction in testosterone, which may account in part for men without children behaving more aggressively. 

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This speaks to the power of fathering, but again it is marriage that results in active fathers more often. In places like China and India that have eradicated girls through a combination of son preference and access to ultrasounds and abortion, the concern is that young men become a threat precisely because they can never find wives with whom to settle down. 

The question to me is not whether marriage helps men become more contributing members of society, but why this pathway to marriage is not open to as many men anymore. 

The answer to that is, in part, because a certain type of feminist has pitted men and women against  one another in a zero sum game. A feminism rooted in Marxism engenders the idea of struggle—either between classes, or in this case, between sexes. Modern feminists have been profoundly successful in teaching young women that marriage and family are a hindrance to the good life. Feminism has falsely conveyed that sex can be consequence free in a race to the bottom. Marriage puts sexual activity in its proper context for both sexes, and is protective, but debatably more so for the sex that can get pregnant and bear children. 

The sexual revolution and various waves of feminism have demonstrably altered the tenor and tone of male-female relationships, diminishing the power, importance and beauty of raising a family for both sexes. The suffering that is the outcome is evident all around us. Men do indeed face increasing social isolation, growing rates of drug use, and suicide in part as a consequence of the demise of stable families, but so too are women living lonely lives without children they wished to have or with children they cannot fully support. Poverty and social illnesses abound in both men and women, even if recent data show women are doing better than men in many categories.  

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It’s never so cut and dried as to suggest that if a boy grows to become a man without any positive social influences, without religion or without stable parents himself, that getting married alone would drastically improve his prospects. Today’s version of marriage is thinner and less durable than it once was. Even so, it does, data show, improve our lives as men and women. 

On scales measuring happiness alone, married women with children are happiest, for example. But with all these caveats, in order to return to a robust and durable institution, cultural norms must once again allow for both men and women to be changed for the better through marriage. It is in this spirit that we write that marriage does indeed civilize men.