The late James Q. Wilson, professor of government at Harvard University, wrote in his book, The Marriage Problem, back in 2002, “It is not money, but the family that is the foundation of public life. As it has become weaker, every structure built upon that foundation has become weaker.”
Over the past 50-plus years, we have heard a constant stream of rhetoric from secular elites that “you can have it all” — career, money, marriage, and family. The result has been sadly the opposite. You cannot “have it all,” and two of these eventually trump the other two in taking up our time and energy. Increasingly, for many Americans, it has been money and career, and our society, and we as individuals, are suffering the consequences.
While lower-income Americans have experienced the greatest breakdown in marriage, even those who are well-off and college-educated are getting married at later ages. The average age of those entering marriage now is 30 for men and 28 for women. And those who marry are having fewer children or no children because of career considerations that push back the age of childbearing.
The bottom line is that even if people are getting married, they are not having children or as many children. Meanwhile, the number of never-marrieds continues to rise.
The growing trend of people never getting married is resulting in greater societal isolation and unhappiness. Twelve years ago, the Pew Research Center reported that one in five adults 25 and older had never been
