The psychologist John Gottman famously spent decades watching couples fight in his Love Lab at the University of Washington. He’d wire them up with physiological monitors, point a camera at them, and ask them to argue about some real issue in their marriage while he and his team looked on.

After observing thousands of couples, Gottman and his team identified four specific communication behaviors that reliably predicted — with 94% accuracy — whether a marriage would survive.

The topic of the argument didn’t matter. A couple could be arguing about sex, money, chores, kids, or in-laws. The content of the argument didn’t make a difference in how likely a couple was to still be married over the following years.

What did matter was the extent to which four communication patterns showed up.

Gottman called them the Four Horsemen of the Marriage Apocalypse.

Here’s what they are and what to do about them.

1. Criticism

A lot of arguments in a marriage are about things that one person in the relationship isn’t happy about. Maybe the wife spends too much money at Costco or maybe the husband leaves the toilet seat up.

Gottman and his team noticed two ways couples approach these relationship frictions: complaint or criticism. Complaints are healthy. Criticisms aren’t.

A complaint targets a specific behavior: “You didn’t call when you said you would.”

A criticism targets the person: “You never think about anyone but yourself.” “You always do this.” “You are so inconsiderate.” Globalizing language — “always,” “never” “you are”— is what tips a complaint into criticism. It takes one incident and turns it into a generalized assessment of character.

When a conversation veers into criticism, the issue that started it tends to disappear. When you call your wife a reckless, thoughtless overspender, she won’t be thinking about her overspending. She’ll be defending her worth as a human being, which means the overspending problem isn’t going to get solved. You’ll be too busy arguing about her character. She’ll likely get defensive (more on that below) and start dredging up some negative character assessments of you.

Gottman’s antidote is what he calls a “Gentle Start-Up.” Say what your problem is, how it’s upsetting you, and what you’d like your spouse to do to resolve the issue.

“I start feeling stressed about our finances when I see how much you’re spending on Amazon. Can we take a look at our bank statements together and see if there’s a place you can cut back?”

Works a lot better than: “You’re a selfish spendthrift who doesn’t care about our family’s financial future.” That just kicks off a fight.

2. Contempt

Gottman identifies contempt as the single strongest predictor of divorce in his research, and it’s different from the other horsemen because it isn’t really about what your spouse did. Rather, it’s a stance you take towards her.

Contempt shows up as sarcasm, eye-rolling, mockery, and hostile humor. When you argue with contempt, you’re not arguing with an equal; you’re treating your wife as someone beneath you. No one likes to be treated as less-than.

Contempt often accumulates from resentments in a relationship that never get addressed. Basically, you’ve got a beef with your wife, you haven’t told her, and the more you stew on it, the more your negative feelings toward her deepen.

Contempt is also fed by a perception problem that Gottman’s research turned up: unhappily married couples undercount their partner’s positive behaviors by roughly 50%. Your spouse can be doing plenty of things right, but you simply don’t register them. You start to spin a negative narrative about her lack of caring and investment that doesn’t match reality.

In either case, your problem with your spouse can spread from being about a specific issue, to becoming what you feel is an indictment of their overall character. You start to have a lower and lower opinion of them. You begin to lose respect for them. A bit of disdain creeps into how you view them, and comes out in your interactions, especially your arguments.

So how do you stop contempt?

First, if you’ve got a problem with your spouse, instead of stewing on it and not telling her, and thus building up your feelings of contempt, address it. Don’t let things fester! As communications expert Joseph Grenny said on the podcast: you can “tell the health of any relationship by looking at one simple thing: the lag time between when people see [an issue] and when they say it, between when they feel it and when they discuss it, between when it’s a concern and when it’s a conversation.”

Gottman also suggests creating a culture of appreciation in your marriage. Actively work to notice what your spouse does right and express your gratitude for it. Tell her thanks for picking up the slack with the kids while you were sick or that you appreciated how she defended you in front of her mother. Deliberately look for the qualities in her that you respect; a healthy marriage is ultimately a mutual admiration society.

3. Defensiveness

Defensiveness is what happens when your spouse brings up an issue and it triggers your self-protection instinct. Instead of engaging with what they actually said, you deflect. The complaint doesn’t get addressed; instead, you’re managing a perceived attack on your character.

Defensiveness shows up in a few recognizable forms.

The most common is counter-complaining: your spouse brings up one issue, and you immediately bring up a grievance of your own.

“You never text me when you’re running late” gets met with “Well, you never tell me when your plans change.”

Now there are two unresolved complaints on the table instead of one, and you’re both more frustrated than when the conversation started.

Another version is what Gottman calls “yes-butting.” You appear to agree with your spouse’s point before immediately negating it.

“You’re right, but if you hadn’t scheduled three things on the same night, this wouldn’t have happened.”

The “yes” is a feint. What follows the “but” is the real message, which is that this is actually your wife’s fault.

A third version is a claim to innocent victimhood — the “I can’t believe you’re treating me like this!” posture that shifts the focus from the original complaint to the injustice of being complained about at all.

All of these maneuvers feel justified from the inside. That’s what makes defensiveness so hard to catch when you’re doing it. Maybe your spouse does share some culpability, and maybe her complaint was delivered too harshly. But while you’re busy making that case, the original issue doesn’t move toward resolution, and your wife comes away feeling like you didn’t hear a word she said — more alone than before she brought it up.

The antidote is taking responsibility for your piece of the problem, even if it’s small. If you genuinely think you’re 90% not at fault, even acknowledging the 10% you do own can stop the conversation from turning into a tit-for-tat exchange of recriminations.

“You’re right, I should have texted when I realized I was running late” doesn’t mean you’re conceding the whole argument or agreeing that your wife handled it perfectly. It means you actually heard her — which, more often than not, is all she wanted.

4. Stonewalling

Stonewalling is when one spouse shuts down entirely during an argument or discussion — goes quiet, looks away, leaves the room, gives one-word answers, or just starts scrolling on their phone. From the outside, it reads as indifference or contempt: I don’t care enough about you or this conversation to even engage.

Gottman’s research found that’s usually not what’s happening at all.

The stonewaller is, in a way, too engaged — they’re overwhelmed. Gottman calls it flooding, or Diffuse Physiological Arousal. When your heart rate climbs past around 100 BPM during an argument, your sympathetic nervous system — the same one that kicks in when you’re being chased — takes over. In that state, you genuinely cannot process what your spouse is saying clearly or respond to it without making things worse. If you’ve ever been in a heated argument where you felt like you literally couldn’t think straight, that’s flooding. The body has essentially gone into survival mode, which isn’t a good mode for working through marital conflict.

Men tend to flood faster and stay flooded longer than women, which is why around 85% of stonewallers are men. Worth knowing so you can watch for it in yourself. Because from your spouse’s perspective, the stonewalling looks like you’ve checked out, which typically causes her to pursue the issue more aggressively to get some kind of response, which floods you further, which makes you withdraw more. It’s the whole “my wife is nagging me” dynamic — except what she’s actually doing is trying to get a human response from someone who has gone completely offline. The cycle tends to end with both people feeling awful and nothing resolved.

The antidote is to take a timeout from the argument. Literally say “I need to take a timeout for a few minutes so I can think about what you said/get my emotions under control.” Then go do something else. Take a walk or do a chore. Just something to let your nervous system settle. Once you’ve calmed down, come back and actually talk things through

It’s advisable to tell your spouse you’ll need to use this technique from time to time during a calm, copacetic moment, rather than in the middle of an argument; just let her know, “I have a hard time responding well when things get heated, so when we’re in an argument, I might need to step aside for a little bit to process things.” This disclosure will likely be met with appreciative respect. But if you decide to leave an argument in the thick of it, without having given this heads up, your spouse may feel like it’s just another act of uncaring avoidance, which will make them angrier.

What Happens Between the Arguments Is More Important

The Four Horsemen show up during conflict. Now that you know what to look for, you’ll be able to rein them in when you see them pop up in your next marital spat.

But the even better news is that you don’t need to be perfect about eliminating these negative communication patterns altogether. Gottman’s research shows that what happens in between arguments — even the most heated ones — has an even more profound mitigating effect on the damage they cause.

When a marriage has at least five positive interactions for every negative one — giving the couple a surplus of positivity in their “relationship bank account” — it can absorb occasional blowups without it affecting the relationship’s happiness and strength. But when a marriage runs a relational “deficit,” every argument can feel fraught, like it’s a referendum on the sustainability of the relationship, bringing it closer to dissolution and creating lingering cracks of alienation.

So spend less time focusing on your communication style, and more time making continual deposits in your relationship bank account (here’s a list of specific ways to do that). Prioritize daily connection — plan good times, have fun together, and offer plenty of affirmation. And start doing a weekly marriage meeting — it will help you check off much of the above advice, from discussing issues promptly to sharing regular appreciation.  

Keep your relationship bank account flush, and the next time you and your spouse fight, even if the Four Horsemen do show up, they’ll quickly gallop away.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Valentine’s Day has a way of pressuring couples into impersonal, default choices: an overpriced (and crowded) dinner, a last-minute card from Walgreens, a box of chocolates grabbed on the way home. There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of that, but if you want the day to actually mean something, it helps to be a little more intentional.

Over the years, we’ve published a wide range of posts on dating, gift-giving, and building strong relationships. Below, we’ve rounded up some of our best Valentine’s-related and adjacent guides, from creative date ideas and thoughtful gifts to deeper relationship check-ins. With a little bit of forethought, you can break through the shallow, commercial nature of the holiday and plan a day (or even just a conversation) that feels personal, memorable, and genuinely worthwhile.

Date Ideas

Going out to a nice restaurant is standard protocol for a Valentine’s Day date, but it isn’t very original and dining out on such a busy night isn’t always that enjoyable, anyway. Why not mix it up by planning an out-of-the-box date — a novel activity out on the town or in the intimate atmosphere of your own home? Whatever you end up doing, make sure you dress nicer than usual to make the occasion feel special!

• Cheap Date Ideas She’ll Actually Love
• 15 Creative Date Ideas
• At-Home Date Night Ideas
• How to Create the Ultimate At-Home Fondue Date
• Take Her Around the World for Valentine’s Day . . . Without Leaving the Kitchen
• The Perfect Valentine’s Day Menu 
• A Man’s Guide to Smart Casual Dress

Gifts & Gestures

While a woman will often say she doesn’t want anything for Valentine’s Day, what she often means is that she doesn’t need anything expensive and elaborate. But, she’s probably still hoping for a love note and/or flowers at the least. You can’t go wrong with giving her both, and we’ve got some tips for making these gestures more meaningful below. If you want to also give a gift, that will likely be appreciated, too. Extra points if it’s homemade.

• How to Write a Love Letter
• How to Give Flowers Like a Victorian Gentleman
• 7 Romantic, Non-Lame DIY Valentine’s Day Gift Ideas
• How to Give a Gift to a Woman
• Huckberry’s “Gifts for Her” shop 

Relationship Check-In

The approach of Valentine’s Day is a good time to assess the status of your relationship. Are there things you can do to improve it? Should you even still be dating this person?

• How Do You Know When She’s the One?
• Podcast: How to Keep a Happy Relationship Happy
• The Yearly Marriage Checkup
• 10 Ways to Be a Better Husband Today
• Look Before You Leap: Questions to Ask to Avoid Falling in Love With the Wrong Person
• Podcast: How to Avoid Falling in Love With the Wrong Person
• 14 Red Flags to Look Out for in a Relationship

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

When we think about what shaped our life trajectory, we often focus on the way our parents raised us. But what about our siblings? What role do they play in who we become?

My guest today makes the case that siblings may be just as influential as parents in impacting how we turn out.

Her name is Susan Dominus, and she’s a journalist and the author of The Family Dynamic: A Journey into the Mystery of Sibling Success. Susan and I start our conversation by unpacking the broader question of what drives human development more — nature or nurture. We then dig into how siblings shape us, from the impact of birth order to how rivalry can raise our ambitions and alter our life paths. Along the way, we also explore the influence parents do have on their kids — and why it may not be as strong as we often think.

Connect With Susan Dominus

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

If you own a car, you know the importance of regular maintenance. Rather than waiting for your vehicle to break down and paying for costly repairs, you take it in for oil changes, tire rotations, and filter swaps. Sure, this upkeep requires time and money, but it keeps your car running smoothly, extends its lifespan, and helps you avoid breakdowns before they happen.

If we’re willing to maintain our cars, why not give the same kind of preventative attention to something even more important, like, say, our marriage?

A growing body of research shows that even happy couples benefit from proactive care, and clinical psychologist James Cordova has developed a once-a-year “Marriage Checkup” that helps couples stay connected and resilient. It’s been shown to improve marriage satisfaction, increasing intimacy, fostering emotional acceptance, and reducing relationship distress — with benefits lasting up to two years. Unlike traditional therapy where the focus is on fixing a broken marriage, the Marriage Checkup is designed to celebrate wins and look for ways to improve a marriage before it goes off the rails.

Cordova takes readers through this relationship review in his book The Marriage Checkup: A Scientific Program for Sustaining and Strengthening Marital Health. The book is aimed primarily at practitioners, but couples can get a lot out of it. I highly recommend picking up a copy. It contains a ton of good, actionable information and is one of the best marriage books I’ve read. 

Here’s how to prepare for and carry out a Marriage Checkup inspired by Cordova’s recommendations. 

The Check-In Before the Checkup

Schedule it and make it special. Choose a consistent month to do your marriage checkup. It could be on (or right before) your anniversary or every January. You might go someplace special for the checkup, like a bed and breakfast or a local hotel. If time or money are tight, simply block off two uninterrupted hours at home.

Agree on communication ground rules. To keep the checkup productive and positive, agree on some ground rules that you’ll uphold during your discussion. Only one person speaks at a time. No interrupting. Speak for yourself, and don’t assume or judge your spouse’s thoughts or intentions. If you’re the listener, just listen. Don’t argue or rebut. Ask clarifying questions if needed. Avoid John Gottman’s Four Horsemen of the relational apocalypse: criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling. If these interpersonal saboteurs make an appearance, agree ahead of time to take a two-minute break.

The Marriage Checkup

Cordova created a thorough, pages-long survey that he has couples fill out before they meet with him for the Marriage Checkup that he facilitates. I think a lot of couples might find this too clinical or customer-service-y to do, though.

For an average couple doing a Marriage Checkup on their own, I think you can get away with informally discussing the areas of the relationship that Cordova highlights in his detailed survey.

Below are conversation-starting questions, based on Cordova’s survey, that cover each area explored in his Marriage Checkup. You don’t have to ask all of them and feel free to come up with your own. It’s just about prompting a discussion about where you’re at and want to go relationally.

Big Picture

• How do you think our marriage is going overall?
• What were our biggest marriage successes this past year?
• What were our biggest challenges?

Communication

• Do we express our emotions in healthy ways with each other?
• How’s our fighting? Anything we can do to make disagreements more productive? Do we get defensive with each other?
• Do we feel comfortable bringing up things that are bothering each other?
• Do we feel like we listen and understand each other?
• Do we engage in enough chit-chat and conversation that’s not just about kids and running the house?

Time Together

• Are we spending enough time together where it’s just us and not the kids?
• Do we need to do more date nights? Husband and wife only vacations?
• What are the small rituals that help us feel connected? What’s stopping us from doing them more regularly?
• Do our screens/devices ever get in the way of being present with each other?
• Are we doing things together that feel fun, or mostly just things we have to do?

Money

• Are we on the same page financially?
• Are there any money-related topics we tend to avoid?
• What financial goals matter most to you right now?
• What’s stressing you out about money right now?
• Do we ever feel guilt or resentment about how we each spend money?
• Do you feel like we have equal say and responsibility when it comes to money?

Sex

• Are you happy with our sex life overall?
• Are you happy with the frequency of sex?  
• Anything you’d change about our sex life?

Parenting

• How do you think we’re doing as parents lately? What are we doing well? Poorly?
• Are there things about being a dad/mom that you’re struggling with but haven’t brought up?
• Do we back each other up when one of us has had to enforce rules or boundaries?
• What kinds of character traits or values are we actively trying to pass on to our kids?
• Do you feel like we’re on the same team when it comes to parenting? Where do we align? Where do we clash?
• What’s one parenting practice we admire in others that we could try out?

Household Management

• Is there anything about how we divide chores or responsibilities that’s feeling unfair or unbalanced right now?
• How often do you feel like we’re reacting to chaos vs. planning proactively?
• Are there any systems or rhythms we’ve outgrown — and need to rethink?
• What’s one routine or habit in our house that’s become a stressor instead of a help?
• What’s one thing that would make our home life run more smoothly?
• Do you feel like we have a good system for staying on top of things — like bills, schedules, errands, etc.?
• What could we each do to show a little more appreciation for the respective efforts we put in to running our home?

Intimacy

• Do you feel like I know and understand you?
• Were there moments during the past year when you felt like I did a good job of trying to understand you? Any moments when you felt misunderstood?
• Do you feel like we’re still continuing to turn toward each other or are we slowly drifting into parallel lives?
• When we’re together, do you feel like I’m fully present with you — or often distracted or elsewhere?
• What’s something I used to do — like listening, affirming, noticing — that you miss?
• What are small things we could do to help us feel closer?

Spirituality

• What’s our telos as a family? What do you think we’re ultimately here for — and how can we help each other live that out?
• What kind of spiritual legacy do you want to leave for our kids or community?
• What does spirituality mean to you right now — and has that changed over the years?
• How do our beliefs show up (or not show up) in our everyday decisions — like parenting, money, or time?
• Do you think we live according to our values? What helps us stay aligned — and what throws us off?
• Are there any spiritual practices — like prayer, meditation, or Sabbath rest — that we could do together more regularly?
• What’s been hardest for you spiritually this past year?
• Is there anything you’re wrestling with that you wish we talked about more openly?

Friendship

• What’s something we’ve done together recently that made you laugh or feel joy?
• Are there hobbies or activities we used to enjoy that we’ve let go of?
• What’s one new thing we could try together just for fun?
• Do you feel like I take an interest in the things that matter to you — even if they’re not my thing?
• How good are we at cheering each other on when one of us has a win or a big day?
• What do you genuinely admire about me — not as a spouse, but just as a person?
• What’s one memory that makes you smile when you think about us as friends?

Make a Simple Action Plan

Hopefully, these questions prompted some productive conversation and drew you and your wife closer together.

Based on your conversation, list out the following as you wrap up your Marriage Checkup:

• 3 wins to keep doing. Celebrate your strengths.
• 3 things you’re going to do to improve a weak point. Come up with some concrete steps to take/habits to adopt.

Schedule a 30-day check-in to see if you’re following through on your plan. If you’re doing a weekly marriage meeting, this is something you can talk about then.

Consider establishing a yearly tradition where you revisit your checkup notes before your anniversary to see how you’ve grown.

We maintain the things we value. Our homes, our cars, our teeth. Why not our marriage? A yearly Marriage Checkup can be a tool for keeping your relationship strong and fixing vulnerabilities before they become big problems. Remember, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

A lot of people go into marriage with a 50/50 mindset. Everything in the relationship — from tangible things like childcare and chores to intangible things like the effort and energy needed to keep the partnership going — is supposed to be divided equally.

The 50/50 approach to relationships is all about fairness. And that seems sensible and rational.

But, my guest says, it actually sabotages relational happiness.

Nate Klemp is a former philosophy professor and the co-author, along with his wife, of The 80/80 Marriage: A New Model for a Happier, Stronger Relationship. Today on the show, Nate shares how cognitive biases skew our perception of our contributions to a relationship, what happens when couples get stuck in the 50/50 mindset of domestic scorekeeping, and how shifting to an 80/80 model of “radical generosity” can create an upward spiral of connection and appreciation. And we discuss practical ways to divide household responsibilities, decide how much time to spend with each spouse’s respective parents, and establish values that will guide your partnership as you navigate life changes and work towards a spirit of shared success.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM article and podcast on how to hold a weekly marriage meeting
• AoM Article: Towards a Philosophy of Household Management
• AoM Article: Beware the Tit for Tat Trap

Connect With Nate Klemp

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

When we imagine the love lives of previous generations, we tend to hypothesize along two lines.

We think that things were more idyllic in the past, that people were more moral, took the vows of marriage more seriously, and were happier and more faithful as a result.

Or, we tend to take a more cynical view, positing that the people of yesteryear didn’t live up to the standards that were culturally espoused, were more likely to be trapped in unsatisfying relationships, and weren’t as fulfilled as we are in our modern, evolved, liberated time.

Actual historical data belies either neat narrative.

In the 1920s, the psychiatrist Gilbert Van Tassel Hamilton began one of the earliest studies of sex and marriage. At the time, research on the subject, even of the scientific variety, was still considered taboo, and university academics were limited in the things they could examine and publish.

Hamilton set out to conduct a pioneering methodological study that gathered data on what was actually happening in America’s homes and bedrooms by extensively interviewing 100 married men and 100 married women. Their ages ranged from twenty-two to sixty-two, but most were in their thirties and forties. A quarter were childless, while half had two or more children.

In order to avoid any interference from the examiner, the participants were given a stack of notecards upon which 400 questions, designed “to explore every aspect of the married relationship in a systematic way,” had been typewritten. Participants picked up the cards one at a time, read off the question, and then answered it as the examiner transcribed their responses. These sessions lasted for hours and even days, and generated 80,000 dutifully recorded reactions in all.

Hamilton did not choose the study’s participants at random. Because much of what was then theorized about sex and marriage was based on what psychologists and psychiatrists saw in their practices, and the patients most likely to visit a doctor were those already experiencing mental and marital difficulties, Hamilton wanted to study people he considered “normal” rather than “neurotic” — the “well” rather than the “sick.”

Because he needed participants who were able to reflect on complex inner and intimate matters and analyze and articulate their feelings and thoughts in a precise and thorough way, Hamilton further selected for those who were intelligent and better educated. 90% of the men and 73% of the women had at least some college education; 78% of the men and 46% of the women had obtained their degrees. All of the men and 45% of the women held personal professions, and they worked in a variety of fields; the group included doctors, lawyers, teachers, artists, pastors, editors, architects, and more.

Hamilton wasn’t seeking a cross-section of humanity and acknowledged that the responses of his middle-to-upper-class participants were not necessarily reflective of the state of marriage across broader society. His findings are further limited by the small sample size, and the fact that the veracity of the data rests on the truthfulness of the participants. Yet, on that latter score, Hamilton believed the participants were, by and large, very truthful. The length and breadth of the interviews developed a great deal of comfort between the examiner and the participant, and Hamilton actually found the participants to be quite eager to unburden themselves of the private details of their lives; they treated the interviews like free therapy sessions. As Hamilton notes, “Most of us like nothing better than to talk about ourselves—intimately and at great length—if we can do it under conditions that make it a safe and dignified thing.”

All in all, though Hamilton’s study does not offer a general picture of marriage in the 1920s, it does give us a look at what proportions of people within a certain class dealt with various issues and opens a fascinating window into another time. The study was hailed as “the best approach and the most objective approach we have so far to the study of marriage,” and as Hamilton noted, while the findings “are not typical, they are extremely significant and suggestive.”

Hamilton published the results of his study as an academic book, A Research in Marriage, in 1929. The following year, he and his co-author, Kenneth MacGowan, published select findings in a book aimed at a popular audience, What Is Wrong With Marriage. Below, we share some of the most interesting facts and figures from Hamilton’s work.

Sexual Experience Before Marriage

Having fewer romantic (sexual or non-sexual) relationships before marriage was correlated with a higher chance of a happy marriage.

46% of men and 65% of women were virgins at marriage.

76% of men and 86% of women had only had a single sex partner — their spouse. 30% of men and 21% of women had sex with their spouse-to-be, before they walked down the aisle, but had had no other sex partners. When these proportions are added to those who were virgins at marriage, only 14% of married women and 24% of married men had had sex with someone other than their spouse.

The men and women who were virgins at marriage were more likely to have happy marriages. 57% of virgin men were happily married compared to the 51% average for marital happiness for men. 49% of virgin women were happy compared to the 45% average for martial happiness for women.

Both those who had had sex before marriage with the partner they later married, and those who had had sex with others besides the person they later married, were below the average of married happiness.

Every participant in the study had used birth control at some time except for those who knew they were sterile. This statistic is noteworthy because the sale and distribution of birth control was heavily restricted at the time. Because of censorship issues, Hamilton did not detail the kinds of contraceptives the participants had used, but noted that “Only half of them felt that the contraceptives they used were safe. Less than a third of the women and less than a quarter of the men had found satisfactory contraceptives.” 

21% of the women had had an abortion. “Two more had used drugs that may or may not have discontinued suspected pregnancies.” The percentage of women who had had an abortion was about the same as it is today.

Sex During Marriage

46% of women had never experienced an orgasm through sexual intercourse. All of the men had reached climax in sexual intercourse. (Hamilton never defines “sexual intercourse,” but it was presumably vaginal intercourse). As to the low number of women who had climaxed from intercourse, he comments: “Science is peculiarly ignorant on this subject. It has been very little studied—possibly because the majority of researchers in sex are men—and there is practically no material of value relating to either the physiological or the psychological aspects.”

Modern statistics vary on this subject: 15% to 25% of modern women report being able to orgasm consistently from vaginal intercourse alone, without any other stimulation; 50% to 70% of women say they need clitoral stimulation, either during or in addition to intercourse, to reach orgasm; 10% to 20% of women report rarely or never having orgasms from intercourse; 10-15% of women have never had an orgasm whether from intercourse or otherwise. A recent study done with both straight and gay singles asked, “When having sexual intercourse in general [‘sexual intercourse’ was not further defined], what percentage of the time do you usually have an orgasm?” Male participants put their percentage at 70-85%; female participants at 46-58%.

About the same proportion of women who married virginal versus sexually experienced men had an orgasm in the first year of marriage. However, a higher percentage of women who had never had an orgasm in the years-long history of their marriage had married virginal versus experienced men.

A capacity for reaching orgasm through intercourse can be developed by the woman/the couple over time. 18 women who did not experience orgasms from sex in the first year of marriage were able to do so later on.

Investment in foreplay was not correlated with a woman’s chance of orgasm in intercourse. “Our figures show that for the whole two hundred men and women the amount of attention paid to erotic preparation and variety of sexual play had no bearing on the matter. Those who learned to take a great deal of preliminary trouble over the act and those who did not turned in the same proportion of climaxes.”

Women who had climaxed through sex with their husbands were more likely to say they loved their husbands. “68% percent of those who declared they loved their husbands had reached climax, against 53% of those who did not love them. Almost half the women who did not love their husbands never had found the full satisfaction of the climax, against only 32 percent of those who did love their husbands.”

Women whose parents were open and comfortable talking about sex when they were growing up were more likely to experience orgasm during sex. Of the women whose childhood questions about sex were “met with encouragement” by her parents, 73% had climaxed during sex. Of the women who had had her childhood questions about sex met with “embarrassment and evasion,” only 42% had experienced an orgasm during sex.

Only one of the 18 women who did not experience orgasm until after the first year of marriage “had met with encouragement when she asked her parents questions about sex.”

74% of women had masturbated, but female masturbation was not correlated with a higher chance of being able to orgasm through sexual intercourse. Among the three-quarters of women who had masturbated, 51% had climaxed through sex; among the 26% who had never masturbated, 62% had climaxed from sex.

The ability to achieve orgasm through sex was not strongly correlated with a woman’s marital happiness. “The happily married women were only 7% more climatic than the unhappy and “42% of the happy marriages were happy despite the woman not having climatic sex.”

Less than a quarter of men and women said the desire for sex was always mutual. 23% of men and 21% of women said so. 39% of men and 27% of women said that the desire for sex was “usually mutual” but that “the wife occasionally submits.” 11 men and 29 women said that the wife usually or always “submitted” to the husband’s desire.

7 men and 3 women said that the husband sometimes “submits” to the wife’s desire for sex. The submissive men were all over thirty-seven years old.

When asked, “Is your spouse willing to have the physical relation with you as frequently as you wish to have it?” 64% of men and 60% of women said  “Yes” or Yes, usually.”

35% of men had experienced “some degree of impotence” while having sex with their wives.

85% of men still found their wives sexually attractive. “Six of these said they had increased in attractiveness.” Two men had never found their wives sexually attractive.

66% of women still found their husbands sexually attractive. Five women had never found their husbands sexually attractive.

28% of men and 24% of women had had an extramarital affair. Only 29% of the men and 17% of the women who had an affair were in happy marriages.

An additional 17 women and one man admitted to extramarital affairs/attachments that were emotional rather than physical.

The number of affairs markedly increased around the time the participants turned 40, particularly amongst women.

Almost two-thirds of the women who had affairs had been unable to orgasm from intercourse with their husbands. While the lack of climax in sex wasn’t strongly correlated with women’s marital happiness, it was with affairs. Hamilton theorizes that “This void in their lives appeared to drive them to other men in search of a fuller experience.” However, almost none of the women who were unable to climax with their husbands were able to climax with their extramarital partner.

Happiness in Marriage

Around 50% of participants were happily or relatively happily married. One-quarter of participants described their marriage as having no serious dissatisfactions or discontents. Another quarter of the participants found some elements of dissatisfaction with their spouses, but regarded them as “overbalanced by the satisfactory features.” Another 13-14% of couples had persistent problems but nonetheless high attachment. The rest, nearly 40%, were in “intolerably bad marriages.”

Men were more happily married than women. 29% of the men and 21% of the women were unequivocally happily married; 22% of the men and 24% of the women were happily married with the qualifications mentioned above. So that overall, 51% of the men and 45% of the women reported being unequivocally happy or relatively happy in their marriage.

Despite only around half of participants being in successful marriages, when asked other questions, they showed a greater attachment to the marriage than that statistic might suggest:

• When asked, “Do you wish to go on living with your spouse . . . because you love him/her?” 78% of men said “Yes.” 75% of women said the same.
• When asked, “If by some miracle you could press a button and find that you had never been married to your spouse, would you press that button?” 66% of men and 64% of women gave a definite “No.” The rest said “Yes” or were uncertain.

More women than men classified their marriages as “failures.” 53% to 37%.

Men grew dissatisfied with their marriage earlier than women. A little over a third “found themselves seriously dissatisfied with their wives before the first year of marriage had passed.” 15% said they had begun to be “seriously dissatisfied with any lack or shortcoming” in their wife when they were still engaged or “from the beginning.” Only 26% of women found dissatisfaction in the first year of marriage, and only one woman had doubts during the engagement period. From the second to sixth year, however, “three times as many women as men began to be unhappy, and it was not until after the sixth year that the men began to catch up.”

The chance for married happiness increased with the age at marriage, up to age thirty-five. Participants who had married before age twenty-five had the lowest percentage of happy marriages. The happiness of participants then increased the later they had gotten married, up to age thirty-five, at which point the rate of married happiness declined. Though almost half of the women had married before age twenty-five (more than in any other five-year period), they were “far and away the unhappiest group”; only 28% were happily married compared to 63% of women who had married between 30 and 34.

Men whose wives were better educated than they were were more happily married. 78% of men whose wives had a superior education were happily married (versus the 51% average). But the women who were better educated than their husbands were less happily married (32% versus the 45% average). Wives whose husbands had a superior education were about average for marital happiness, while husbands who were better educated than their wives were less happily married (39%). “Superior education made those men and women unhappy whose mates did not have it.”

In marriages where the wife was a wage-earner, the husbands were less happily married, and so were the wives. 61% of husbands with non-working wives were happy, versus 44% of men with working wives. 63% of “dependent” wives had happy marriages, while only 25% of the wage-earning women were satisfied with theirs.

Fewer women than men believed that a married couple should tolerate an unsatisfying marriage for the sake of the children. 53% to 62%.

Conflict in Marriage

Women were more critical of their husbands than husbands were of their wives. When asked to name their dissatisfactions with their spouse, 39% of men had no serious complaints to offer about their wives, while only 25% of women said the same of their husbands. “61 men and 75 women found something ‘especially unsatisfactory’ in their spouse.”

When asked what changes, if any, they would make to their wives’ mental and behavioral habits, 21% of men answered “Nothing” on the first score, and 45% wanted nothing changed on the second. Only 14% and 36% of women didn’t want to change anything about the respective behavioral and mental habits of their husbands.

When asked to describe their spouses’ disposition as well as they could, 29% of the men and 17% of the women made “no allusion to an undesirable trait.” And while each man mentioned an average of one negative trait when describing his wife, each woman mentioned an average of three negative traits when describing her husband.

However, women not only named more negative traits in their husbands, they also named more positive ones as well; the wives brought up 3X as many positive traits in describing their husbands as husbands did in describing their wives.

Hamilton notes: “Thus the women betrayed an ability to particularize which repeated itself all through the research.”

The men were only more critical of their wives than the wives were of their husbands in terms of physical appearance. When asked what physical changes, if any, they would make to their spouse, 45% of women said “Nothing,” versus 38% of men who said the same.

When asked about the sources of dissatisfaction in their marriage, both men and women were more likely to cite temperamental than sexual difficulties. Temperamental dissatisfactions were complained of by 37% of women and 49% of men; sexual dissatisfactions were complained of by 30% of women and 39% of men.

More on common complaints:

• The third most commonly cited source of marital dissatisfaction was “domestic slavery/lack of freedom,” which was a complaint registered by 18 women and 10 men.
• “Economic troubles” was only the fourth most commonly cited source of marital dissatisfaction, brought up by just 16 women and 8 men. While financial issues are often thought of as a main source of marital tension, Hamilton’s analysis of the participants’ autobiographies “strongly suggested that friction over money is usually a symptom of something else wrong with the marriage,” rather than “the cause of the trouble.”
• When asked to name the sources of dissatisfaction in the marriage, 10 women said, “Everything is wrong.” Only 2 men gave the same answer.

The personal quality men most wished to change in their wives was their temper. When asked which changes, if any, they would make to their wife’s qualities, the most common answer, given by 28% of men, was that they wished their wives had a better temper. (The word “temper” back then included not only a tendency toward anger, but a person’s overall mood and disposition.) The other most common changes men wished for in their wives were:

• More intelligence: 27%
• More passion/physical desire: 25%
• Less scolding: 24%

The personal quality women most wished to change in their husbands was also temper. 36 women wanted to change their husbands’ temper; while 29 women wanted their husbands to be more even-keeled, 7 wished they were more fiery and less placid and submissive. The other most common changes women wished for in their husbands were:

• Less selfish: 34% (“A number cite moroseness and sullenness as evidence of selfishness” and included within selfishness “pretty nearly every other vice”)
• More talkative: 30%
• More affectionate: 26%

Final Notes

It’s impossible to directly compare these statistics to modern ones, as research data on these topics varies greatly according to the questions asked and the population studied (remember, again, that Hamilton’s participants were not representative of broader society).

For example, on the question of general marital happiness, the percentage of people who report being happily married today typically falls between 40% and 60%, depending on the study. Gallup Polls often find that about 56% of married individuals in the U.S. report being “very happy” with their marriage. But then it must be considered that divorces were much more difficult to obtain in the 1920s, resulting in a 10-15% divorce rate, whereas today the divorce rate is around 40% for first marriages. The rate of happiness in modern marriages will therefore be influenced by the fact that more people who would have remained in unhappy marriages a century ago have already split.

Thus, it is left to the reader to draw their own conclusions as to what has, or hasn’t, changed about sex and marriage in the last 100 years.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

In a famous study done a couple of decades ago, researchers wanted to see whether the “proximity and salience of a food” influenced how much of it was consumed. Jars were filled with candy and placed in an office. Some of them were put directly on workers’ desks; others were placed six feet away from them. Some of the containers were opaque; others were transparent. When the study’s results were tallied, it was found that people reached into the jars more often when the candy was visible, and especially when the jars were close at hand.

It seems as though the more often you’re presented with an option, the more you think about it, and the more you think about an option, the more likely you are to exercise it.

This dynamic likely extends beyond food consumption. Maybe even to marriage.

When the sociologist Brad Wilcox came on the podcast to talk about the extensive research he’s done on marriage, he discussed some of the habits and qualities shared by the happiest and most thriving couples. One of them, he said, is a strong commitment that manifests itself in “not putting the D word in a conversation when you’re having an argument or there’s some problem in your marriage.” Thriving couples don’t think of divorce as an option.

In his book Get Married, Wilcox notes that “In the State of Our Unions Survey, husbands and wives who reported that ‘marriage is for life—unless there is abuse or adultery’ were more likely to say that they were significantly satisfied (‘very happy’) in their marriages, compared to those husbands and wives who said that ‘Marriage is for as long as you feel fulfilled.’”

Wilcox notes that these results may be correlative rather than causal, “given that men and women in happier marriages may be more likely to embrace an ethic of martial permanence due to the higher quality of their marriages.” But he cites other research that has found similar results when couples are not only asked about the state of their marriage at the moment but are tracked over time.

When a couple’s expectation is that marriage is forever, it influences how they interact, especially when inevitable tensions arise. As Wilcox noted on the podcast, “Most couples have problems at some point in their marriage, and I think couples who just keep divorce out of the picture are more readily able to handle those challenges and overcome them.”

The more often the option of divorce is raised during arguments, the more salient it becomes, increasing the likelihood that the option may one day be exercised. And raising the specter of divorce simply makes the interaction more fraught. It prompts questions like: “Are we incompatible?” “Is this unraveling?” “Can we go on?” If there’s an escape hatch lurking in the background, a feeling that this whole thing could potentially be temporary, then there’s less of an impulse to dig in and solve the problem at hand.

If, on the other hand, a couple never puts the divorce option on the table, while their arguments may get heated, there are no stakes; the couple may grapple in intense ways, but the fight doesn’t feel existentially threatening. Because each spouse knows that they’re committed to making the marriage last, it creates a sense of security and prompts the partners towards a problem-solving approach. They think, “Ok, this is hard, but we’re going to have to figure it out.”

Couples sometimes say that their irreconcilable differences made divorce the only option. But their differences may have become irreconcilable because divorce was made an option.

There isn’t something magical or superstitious in making divorce “the thing that shall not be named,” as in the idiom, “Speak of the wolf and he is at your door.” Not raising divorce as an option won’t guarantee an enduring and happy marriage. But when the practice is indicative of one’s underlying stance towards the relationship, a rock-solid commitment to making your marriage last, it’s something that helps give you the best possible shot at doing just that.

For more insights on the qualities of thriving marriages, listen to this podcast episode with Brad Wilcox:

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Your relationship with your mother is likely the first and most foundational connection in your life. At its best, this bond can be a source of comfort, strength, and love that lasts a lifetime and changes in healthy, appropriate, and adaptive ways as you mature into adulthood.

But sometimes, the attachment between a mother and her son can become unhealthy, resulting in a phenomenon called mother-son enmeshment, in which a man can become a kind of surrogate husband to his mom.

Here to unpack this complex issue is Dr. Kenneth Adams. Ken is a clinical psychologist who has spent much of his career working with what he calls “mother-enmeshed men” and is the author of When He’s Married to Mom. Today on the show, Ken unpacks the characteristics of mother-enmeshed men and how to know if you are one, and he explains what can happen in childhood that would cause a mother to enmesh with her son. We discuss the problems enmeshment can create in men’s relationships and other areas of life and how it can lead to things like compulsive porn use. And we unpack what it means for a man to become independent and emancipate from his mother, how it’s different from cutting her off, and what it looks like to have a healthy relationship with your mom.

Connect With Ken Adams

• Overcoming Enmeshment website 

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Download this episode.

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Your relationship with your mother is likely the first and most foundational connection in your life. At its best, this bond can be a source of comfort, strength, and love that lasts a lifetime and changes in healthy, appropriate, and adaptive ways as you mature into adulthood. But sometimes, the attachment between a mother and her son can become unhealthy, resulting in a phenomenon called mother-son enmeshment, in which a man can become a kind of surrogate husband to his mom. Here to unpack this complex issue is Dr. Kenneth Adams. Ken is a clinical psychologist who has spent much of his career working with what he calls mother-enmeshed men, and is the author of When He’s Married to Mom.

Today on the show, Ken unpacks the characteristics of mother-enmeshed men and how to know if you are one. And he explains what can happen in childhood that would cause a mother to enmesh with her son. We discuss the problems enmeshment can create in men’s relationships and other areas of life, and how it can lead to things like compulsive porn use. And we unpack what it means for a man to become independent and emancipate from his mother, how it’s different from cutting her off, and what it looks like to have a healthy relationship with your mom. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/marriedtomom.

All right. Ken Adams, welcome to the show.

Dr. Ken Adams: Thank you. Nice to be here, Brett.

Brett McKay: So you’re a therapist, and for your career, you’ve spent a lot of time working with men who you call them mother-enmeshed men. And you wrote a book about this called When He’s Married to Mom. Give us a thumbnail sketch, and we’ll get into this deeper in our conversation. But what is a mother-enmeshed man?

Dr. Ken Adams: So enmeshment is a word people use to describe too much entanglement between what is called, in this case, mother and son, although it could be between daughter and mother and father and daughter and so forth. Too much entanglement where the needs of the parent or the needs of one individual supersedes the other, and that there’s a demand for loyalty based on guilty obligation that is used to leverage.

Love is transactional, so the enmeshed individual organizes their self around the parent and absorbs their feelings and needs as if it’s their own. And then when they try to get off into adulthood, particularly romance, they’re having a lot of trouble. So enmeshment refers as too much dependency, too much involvement, too much shared brain. I mean, certainly we all have dependencies, right? Emotional dependency is not pathological, but too much of it at the cost of your own autonomy and your own emancipation is very costly. These individuals struggle immensely in romance.

And I get emails all the time, daily from spouses and partners of these guys who say, you know, I can’t take it anymore. I’ve been in the backseat of this marriage or this relationship. I’ve had enough. He’s over at his mother’s house every day, or he blames me for everything and protects his family and so on and so forth. So the evidence that these enmeshment dynamics impact romance is just overwhelming.

Brett McKay: When did you first start noticing enmeshed men in your practice?

Dr. Ken Adams: Well, you know, so let me take you back a little further. I was working, when I first started my professional practice, I was working with kids and I was doing a lot of family system therapy and the family system therapists talk about enmeshment. And what they noticed is that a lot of these kids who had psychosomatic disorders and other issues really were symptomatic of the family enmeshed system.

And so, you know, I began to take a look at that when I was working at a Children’s Hospital in Detroit. We were seeing school-phobic kids. And I said to my supervisor, these kids aren’t afraid of school. They can’t leave their mothers. He goes, how did you know that? I said, well, that’s a whole story there. So I really began to notice it early in my career with children and families. And then I moved into working with adults who were raised in alcoholic families, adult children of alcoholics.

And I began to see adults who were over-involved with their mothers, adult men who were also sexually compulsive. And so I remember working with a man who was sexually compulsive, picking up sex workers. And he would do this when he was living, he would live with his mother part time during the week and then other part of the week, due to employment reasons, he was at his own place. And so he said, well, what should I do to stop the compulsive sexual behavior? And so I instinctively said, well, move out from your mother’s home. I sort of, just sort of intuitively knew that was the move. And sure enough, he did that.

And to my surprise, his sexual compulsivity dramatically decreased. So I began to put together at that time, the link between enmeshment and sexuality, which was missing in the literature on family systems. So you don’t need to be sexually, physically violated to have your sexuality hijacked. So if you’ve got a parent who has dominated you, say mother over son, and has turned you into her boyfriend, surrogate husband, caretaker, you’re in trouble because your sexuality can’t unfold naturally and purely. So that’s when I first began to notice it. I first began to notice the link between enmeshment and sexual compulsivity. I wrote my first professional article at that time based on that case, and everything went from there. So that was the beginning. And that was in 1991 or earlier when I first published that article. So I’ve been working with adult men who have been enmeshed ever since then.

Brett McKay: What’s interesting, I think there might be a tendency for people to think that this mother enmeshment is a modern phenomenon. But something I’ve noticed, I’ve read a lot of biographies from my work of famous great men from history, a lot of them had unhealthy relationships with their mothers. Three of them come to mind. Lou Gehrig had an incredibly super close relationship with his mom during spring training. Most players brought their girlfriends or wives. He’d bring his mom and then she would criticize and sabotage his relationships with women. He didn’t get married until he was 30, which was pretty late for that time.

Dr. Ken Adams: That age, that time, yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And then even after he got married, there’s just a ton of tension between his mother and his wife because Lou Gehrig just felt this intense attachment to his mother.

Dr. Ken Adams: And loyalty, no doubt.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Houdini was another one. He let his mother pick out his clothes. Even as an adult man, he would rest his head on her bosom to hear her heartbeat because he found it soothing. And then when his mother died, he wanted to die too. And he actually started trying to contact her through seances. And then another one was General MacArthur, another guy unusually close to his mother. When he was at West Point, his mother moved into a hotel near West Point so she could be by him. So those are some examples. But I was always surprised to see these men you think would have independence, but they had this often weird, kind of unhealthy relationship with their mom.

Dr. Ken Adams: Yeah. It’s fascinating. I didn’t know about all three of those, but I think we’d find the evidence of the pathology in their romances if we interviewed their partners. They’d have a lot to say about the competition with mother and her unwillingness to let go and his unwillingness and their unwillingness to let go of mother. That’s something that we’ve learned over the years is that we used to assume it was the parent holding on and we had to help the men eradicate themselves from the trap, and find a new way to communicate. But then we realized some of these guys don’t want to leave that golden boy position.

It’s been an elevated position. Sometimes the mother will use the son in competition against the father. The father’s a brute or an alcoholic. I’ll love my son more than you. I’ll elevate him to boyfriend status and I’ll show you a thing or two. I’ll neuter the old man with my son. But in doing so, neuters both the men in terms of their ineffectiveness. And so we definitely see some competitiveness there when the mother turns the son into the boyfriend or the husband.

Brett McKay: How do you know if you’re a mother-enmeshed man? What are some of the characteristics? Overall, it’s sort of an unhealthy closeness with a mother, but what are some other characteristics?

Dr. Ken Adams: Well, I think that you find yourself feeling tethered. That’s entrapped and unable to have any separateness and driven by guilt and worry and having to be on call for your mother’s woes to the point where you find yourself angry, frustrated. You’re preoccupied with your mother’s needs.

You likely reject, distance yourself, detach, disengage from your romantic partner and/or project onto her or him, you know, anger that really belongs to the mother. So ultimately, it’s a set of characteristics in which I feel guilty, obligated, angry, frustrated, trapped around having to caretake. She’s the only person I have or have had, and my wife just needs to understand. And she’s the problem, not my mother. So that’s the core identifier that we see in, you know, probably eight out of 10 referrals that come into our workshop often come in under that umbrella. The other sort of set of characteristics we see is that because these boys have been elevated by their mothers into the golden boy status, that comes with a certain degree of confidence, right? Almost omnipotence in the way they think of themselves.

So they can develop some success in their lives. So the guys you just mentioned, all of them had degrees of high success. So in the effort to please mother, I can become very successful. So I’ve had lots of guys with tremendous success who endlessly try to please their family and their mother, in the meantime, not having much of a romantic life. So the other place that we see the sort of identifier is they really don’t live a life of passion and purpose around what they really want in spite of their success. In other words, particularly in terms of relationships and romance, life seems to organize around me. They may pick the wrong, they may pick somebody like their mother to marry, right?

Because they’re not really free to choose and pick someone like their mother in the wrong way where the partner may have negative characteristics. So they seem to have a passivity, a disempowerment. Sometimes we even go so far as to say feeling neutered when it comes to romance, which is a strong word, but we use it descriptively rather than judgmentally. You can’t be your mother’s good boy and a man, you’ve got to choose. And so they live in sort of an ambivalent state, you know? And so oftentimes they can’t make up their minds which restaurant to go to. Where do you want to go? I don’t care. Where do you want to go, right? The relationship to needs, feelings has been interfered with by having to organize around the first love affair I’ve had. I mean, you know, parents love their children, children fall in love with their parents. It’s a wonderful thing. But the parent must let go. It is their assignment to let go.

It is not the adult child’s responsibility to cushion the blow of the emancipation. And ultimately, these men will compromise. We call it troublesome compromising in the workshop. They’ll put one foot in and try to placate mother, try to placate the wife, try to placate the kids, try to placate friends. In the meantime, nobody’s happy, most importantly themselves. So placating, ambivalence, difficulty with commitment, living in this dark space of I don’t know what I want, so I’m just going to keep working at what I know I can do, whether it’s being a magician or a ball player, right? I can do that, but I can’t really figure anything else out like what restaurant to go to.

So I’d be curious about these guys if you were to have them take the screening we have on our website, whether they pick things that would indicate that they don’t do well with identifying their own personal needs. So that’s a big issue. And living in guilt and projecting a lot of guilt onto other relationships. So they pick up the dinner tab more times than they should of their families. They, feel obligated and guilty to caretake and take care of other people as well. So transferring that sort of guilty, loyal subjugation to others also is a telltale sign.

Brett McKay: So they can carry that over, that guilt from their mother to other relationships as well. Could be their employer.

Dr. Ken Adams: Oh, it’s inevitable. It’s inevitable. So we’ll get guys who their mothers have passed away, and they’ll join the workshop. And what you’ll find is they have transferred the whole dynamic to their partner. And they can’t figure out how to stand up for themselves or whether what they’re doing is giving in. And they wind up being in extremes.

They either subjugate themselves to their partner’s needs, or they get angry and rejecting. They don’t have a way to discern how to be in relationship because their mother has taught them, you’re obligated to me. I want you to absorb my feelings, my needs. So there’s a lot of conflict when it comes to intimacy for these men. So having to learn to differentiate their inner sanctum where their mother still lives is really the key.

Brett McKay: Is this related to this idea you talk about in the book, the disloyalty bind?

Dr. Ken Adams: Exactly. Exactly. If I give to my wife, then I’m being disloyal to my mother. Yes. So I’m torn between that I tend to organize the way I think about things in these dimensions of loyalty, where someone else might just say, well, that’s not a big deal.

I don’t have to gauge my decision based on emotional loyalties. It’s just a decision to be made. And sometimes people will be disappointed. So yeah, the disloyalty bind is that I really can’t move in my own direction because I’ll leave my mother behind. One of the things that we have learned and we have been teaching in the workshops is that what we’ve noticed is that the men don’t want to disappoint anybody. They want to figure out a way to get mom to co-sign their emancipation. So they’re, I’m chuckling.

It’s not funny. I’m not making fun of these men, but it’s just so ironic. So they’ll arrange a therapy session with mother and they’ll try to sort of say, look, mom, I need to be my own man. I need you to understand and not call me five times a day. And what happens is, is that therapy session turns into a marital counseling session. And these men have worse problems afterwards because they’re seeking their mother’s co-assignment. The truth is, is that emancipation always means someone’s disappointed.

There’s no way around that. My son is 22. He’s moving across the country. He’s in New York now. We’re in Michigan. He’s moving to LA. I’m going to miss him. You know, it’s my job to make the adjustment. It’s not his job to disrupt his unfolding. So in emancipation, somebody always is getting disappointed. And the parents’ last, I’ve always said this, parents’ last spiritual assignment in parenting, which is really hard to do, I’m doing it right now, is they have to take the loss. It’s their job to take the loss. It’s not the adult child’s job to cushion the blow. Now, we hope your adult children return, but here’s the irony.

And if you look at the family’s therapy system literature, the more you let go of your children, the more they want to circle back around. The more you hold on, the less they want to be with you. So we try to remind the adult enmeshed man that he has to be willing to disappoint. Otherwise, he’s going to live in that disloyalty bind and try to balance out his loyalties to everybody, which never is successful, frankly.

Brett McKay: So in the book, you provide some questions that people can ask themselves to figure out if they’re mother enmeshed or not. So yeah, if you feel obligated or guilty about taking care of your mom’s problems, if you feel like your mother is perfect or is a martyr, but it goes beyond that. If you put other people’s needs above yours all the time, if you feel guilty when pursuing your own wants or needs, that might be a sign that you are mother enmeshed because you’re taking that relationship you had with your parent as a child and projecting it on your other relationships.

Dr. Ken Adams: Exactly.

Brett McKay: You mentioned earlier that sometimes you’ve seen patients or clients you’ve worked with, their enmeshment can display itself in passivity. I think it’s probably the more common one. You’re just a doormat because you’re just ambivalent about your decisions because you don’t really have a sense of self. So you’re just like, whatever you want to do. But then also you talk about how it can manifest itself in hyper-aggressiveness. Have you seen what causes a mother-enmeshed man to tip towards passivity or hyper-aggressiveness?

Dr. Ken Adams: Yeah. So let’s start with the latter. The sort of hyper-aggressiveness we might want to sort of put under the umbrella of a more self-centered, narcissistic, what we might say is a counter phobic response. I don’t want to risk ever getting caught up in anybody else’s needs. So the hell with you. I’ll just focus on myself. Right? And so what we see in those backgrounds, not uncommonly is that one of the parents, it could be the mother, is also in addition to being dependent on her son, she’s very self-centered and narcissistic. She needs him to be an extension of her. So that sort of precedes his own aggressive narcissism where then he gets involved with a romantic partner and it’s all about him because he can’t tolerate the risk that he’s going to get subjugated underneath another dependency. So usually there’s a little mix or a lot of mix of narcissism from the parent that will drive that. We see that in over-sexualization, these sort of counter phobic, I’ll just have a lot of women, right?

I’ll have sex with a lot of women, prove that nobody can control my sexuality when in fact mother has been controlling it. The more passive response is more typical, although you might see a mix. And often there, the child has been very burdened with responsibilities and caretaking. So the caretaking dynamic.

My mother’s depression. My brother and sisters, I had to take care of them. My father was an alcoholic. I had to fight with him. So usually the more passive enmeshed man has had a burden, excessive responsibility. So by the time he gets into his youth, young adulthood, as you said, there’s no self. My self is strictly organized around how I can take care of you. So when I search out a romantic partner, I search out somebody who has problems who I can take care of. So, nobody’s home inside of those men, sadly. Which is a little dramatic to say, but that’s just a way to say it. I mean, they have some sense of self, but many of them feel very neutered, very passive, disempowered, because I’ve been so weighted down by the problems of my mother and family that I don’t even have it in me to protest for myself. So best just to just give in. Right? It becomes its own trauma response, it becomes its own coping reaction just to say yes when I mean no. I don’t even know how I can say no so I’ll just say yes and agree with you and let’s get this over with.

Brett McKay: And you talk about, like, sometimes it can be a mixture of both the passive and aggressive.

Dr. Ken Adams: Yes.

Brett McKay: So, sometimes you’ve had clients and patients who are like, I’m just gonna be passive. I’ll just do whatever my wife says, whatever my mother says. But then I might have like a secret porn addiction or something.

Dr. Ken Adams: Exactly. Precisely. Yeah. So, it is not uncommon. Probably I’d say 60% of the guys coming into… So I’ve had this workshop going, oh, since 2013. So 11 years now. See close to about a thousand men and women from all across the globe. So it’s been an interesting journey to watch them. And so they have kind of what you’re saying here for sure.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And it could also manifest itself, I think you talked about this in the book. It could be like a gambling addiction, like a secret gambling. It’s like, I got this one area of my life where no one tells me what to do.

Dr. Ken Adams: Absolutely. It could be food too.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Dr. Ken Adams: Sex is, I meant to say that sex is common about 60% because sexuality is in the erotic template, if you will. And when I say erotic, I don’t just mean sexual, I mean romantic, falling in love. The whole gamut of what drives our pursuit of partners, right? Is that it’s burdened. I have to take along my mother or my caretaking feelings or my guilt. So I’m not really free. But if I go over here and gamble or use porn or pick up sex workers or have an affair or overeat, no one’s gonna tell me. ‘Cause it’s, I’m not emotionally obligated to them. So I’m free sexually. So sometimes we see this splitting, we call it, sexually, where I begin to shut down with my committed partner, because my committed partner begins to feel too much like my mother. And through no fault of the partner, oftentimes it has more to do with the projection from the man. So what’s the best offense against an intrusive mother who wants to turn you into her husband or boyfriend? Is shut yourself down sexually. So sexuality gets shut down, but then it goes out the back door.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Okay. So a man who is a pleaser, who otherwise doesn’t feel like he can act for himself, he might get into something like porn or gambling to feel like he’s rebelling, to feel like, yeah, I’m my own man. I can do what I want, even though he is not able to break free. We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

And now back to the show. So this whole enmeshment it happens in childhood. So what goes on in childhood that a mother would want to enmesh with her son?

Dr. Ken Adams: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s… In most cases it’s a more innocent unfolding where frankly the parent is also trapped. They’re not unfolding their true selves. All of a sudden their needs become completely dependent upon their son. In most cases, although we do have some parents, some adult children who report their parents as cruel or deliberate, but in many cases it’s really more unconscious in which maybe there’s an unhappiness with the marriage or the relationship, or there’s maybe single parenting. Although most of the people we see come from families in which aren’t single parents. As a parent, you probably know this. I mean, your kids adore you, right? Until they get to be adolescents and they have problems with you. But they adore you and it’s a love that has no match. And so it’s easy for a needy parent who’s beginning to feel empty or lonely in her marital bond or her friendship community, to begin to overuse that adoration from her child and begin to depend on it. And so you might have slowly over time increased dependency in which now what do you mean you’re going to a dance? No, you shouldn’t. Pretty soon he’s talking about having a crush at somebody at school and she’s all of a sudden shaming him for something that he’s just feeling innocent about.

So she may find herself in the trap of dependency of enmeshment through no conscious decision to do so, but kind of a slow holding onto that which can’t be matched. Again, children love their parents in ways that just can’t be matched. I think that’s just normal. So I think that’s what happens mostly. But we also have a percentage, I don’t really have a number for you that I’ve heard over time. I mean, it’s more than 5%. It’s probably not 50%. So I’m placing between, probably close to 25% of the parents we hear reported about who are deliberate, they particularly get more deliberate over time. Although you’ll see some of it in childhood. No, I don’t want you playing football. No, I want you here at home. Be careful out there.

So there’s an excessive hold and carefulness that begin to wrap around the child we see in early, which is why I saw these kids, these school phobic kids at 5 and 6 years of age, right? Is they had already been caught in the web of their mother’s worry and they couldn’t leave. Most of the time, the children who are most prone to getting caught in this are the kids who have the highest degree of empathy and sensitivity. So it’s not gonna be the kid in the family who is more able to say, buzz off, I don’t wanna deal with that. Right? They have a little more feistiness in their temperament.

These are typically the kids who are nice boys, nice girls, sweet boys, sweet girls, loving, caring. The parent’s job is not to over solicit that. So what happens is, is that if you’re dealing with a marital bond that’s problematic and your partner is not being particularly solicitous about how you’re doing, and you’ve got this wonderful sensitive boy who says, mommy, I’ll never leave you. I mean, she just latches onto that, right? So the easy-tempered, sensitive sweet boy is often targeted. And so it’s this increased bonding over time that begins this mutual dependency that is, by the time we see these guys, it’s really hard to unravel although it’s possible.

Brett McKay: As I was reading your book, this idea of enmeshment and it’s caused by maybe the mother having a bad relationship with her husband. So she’s trying to create a, like a pseudo husband relationship with her son. It reminded me of from Bowen Family Systems theory, the idea of triangulation.

Dr. Ken Adams: Right.

Brett McKay: Right. So it’s like, there’s a tension in between a dyad between the husband and wife. And so to alleviate that tension, mother looks to son to sort of dissipate that.

Dr. Ken Adams: And may use him, using that language of triangulation, may use him as, weaponize him against the father. And then you have two attachment failures for the son. He’s got an involvement with the mother that feeds the mother, but not him. And then he has a distant, competitive, if not angry relationship with the father. The father begins to feel jealousy towards the boy. And so then he gets some hate and the mother wins in that battle. Which is really sad to watch.

Brett McKay: Oh, yeah. You can see like mom turns son against dad. She tells her son…

Dr. Ken Adams: Exactly.

Brett McKay: Your dad isn’t this, and he doesn’t do that. And the son starts thinking, yeah, my dad is a bum.

Dr. Ken Adams: Exactly. I remember a story I heard once, you may be familiar with the now passed poet Robert Bly, who did a lot of men’s work over the years, and which is where I first got a little bit of my introduction to looking at men’s issues a little differently than what I had learned in graduate school and so forth. And so I remember him telling a story about, and this was a secondhand story, so I don’t know the real details, but he told the story of a man who surprised his father, flew across the country, surprised his father with a visit, knocked on his father’s door and said to him, I no longer accept my mother’s version of you. I no longer accept my mother’s version of you. I might be angry with you, I might have issues with you, but they’re not my mother’s.

Oftentimes we see these adult men who have been enmeshed with their mothers carry a layer of rejection and anger towards the father that’s not theirs. And that’s another piece of differentiating. Is to say, No, I’m not carrying my mother’s anger. That’s her job. Which might be as straightforward as having a boundary when she calls and says, Your father once again fell asleep in front of the tv rather than going out on our date or going to bed with me. He’s gotta say, Look, I don’t want to hear that anymore. We’re done with that. There has to be a clear, fairly rigid boundary around that kind of stuff.

Brett McKay: So we’ve kind of mentioned some of the problems that these mother-enmeshed men can experience in their adult life. I guess the primary one you see, it affects the relationship with their romantic partners. It could be their girlfriend or wives. What have you seen are the most common complaints in the relationships of mother-enmeshed men?

Dr. Ken Adams: From the men themselves or from their partners?

Brett McKay: Either, it could be both.

Dr. Ken Adams: Well, the… Let’s start with the men. Well, no, let’s go reverse. So the pro… Most of the time when we get complaints from the partners and what the men will report is that their partners are frustrated with their less than co-equal status in the marital bond or the relationship bond. And so that the mother has taken priority all… Where the son will call the mother and discuss vacation plans or financial plans or have a secret bank account. I mean, I can’t tell you the stories I’ve heard. They just kind of… It still kind of blows my mind when I really see it. And then I realize, oh, we’re really talking about a specific issue here that needs clarifying. So the women, mostly the women and or we’ve had some gay men who have had similar, very similar dynamics of partners, the same. They’ll complain about not having a voice, not having a vote, and having to live with losses over the course of their relationship.

Sometimes the parents, the grandparents will then usurp the spouse and become the parental figure to the children, criticizing the man’s wife or partner. So usually the spouses have had enough, I’m tired of this, I can’t live with this anymore. So that’s a common complaint of… And where they have felt overt hostility sometimes from the competitive mother-in-law. The man will initially complain that his wife doesn’t understand. It’ll be his initial complaint.

I’m laughing ’cause it’s not funny, but it’s always, it’s fascinating to me to see how frequently that occurs. She just won’t understand. I just, I’m not being disloyal to her, but I have to take care of my mother. My mother didn’t have anybody growing up. My father left when I was 10. So I’m the whole world to my mother. She just has to understand. So the first complaint by the man is that he wants his wife to accept more loss, but he’s not calling it that way. He wants his wife “to understand.” So he’ll report initially a conflict with his partner. Following that will be a fair degree of frustration with the mother and that he finds himself shutting down with his partner, with his romantic partner, and a sexual complaint. So sexuality is, again, in about 60% of the cases, a problematic issue. So the men will also report not being able to feel sexual, be sexual and/or I’m excessively acting out or acting out outside of my marital or relationship contract with other sexual partners or porn. So that’ll be a common report of complaint too. So sometimes the couple will be fighting about mother and the betrayal by the mother or what the partner will talk about. And then they’ll also, right along with that, be talking about the betrayal by their sexual behavior. So when you get both of those, it’s really an intense conflict.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And then you’ve also, you encounter men who haven’t been able to get into a romantic relationship or a long-term one because mom always gets in the way.

Dr. Ken Adams: Yeah, yeah. So, it means we’ve got men. Not that being married is the representation of relational health, but we’ll use it as an example. So, some men haven’t made any commitments, they’ve had short, they’ve had transactional relationships and they’ve not been able to really open up their hearts to intimacy with a romantic partner because it feels too engulfing, too confining. And so I’ve learned to live my life alone. And while there might be advantages to that, it’s a very lonely experience. So we’ve definitely seen that.

And we’ve seen too, interestingly enough, as these men emancipate from their mothers and families, and when we say emancipation, we don’t mean cutting off a family. We mean, look, I’m a man and I need you to treat me as that. And if you don’t, it’s gonna be hard for me to circle back and visit with you. So I need to operate differently with you and I need a different response from you. The more the man can do that, the more available he is to his romantic partner in his own sexuality. As these men embody themselves and say, No, no, I’m gonna put a stake in the ground. It’s just as my space. Nobody gets in without my permission. And most importantly, you mother. As he does that without raging or grabbing the mother by the lapels, you don’t need to confront your mother or your family to do this. It’s an internal shift. I now become more available erotically, romantically to my partner.

Brett McKay: Something you mentioned earlier is that enmeshed men can get into relationship with someone who’s like their mother. Is that common and do they tend to repeat the relationship patterns that they had with their moms with their romantic partner?

Dr. Ken Adams: Well, so there’s a acronym called three Ps, pick, project or provoke, meaning we recreate the past through picking someone just like our parent, we provoke them or we project onto them. I’m not sure I can give you the percentages, but yes, sometimes we see that a mother-enmeshed man will pick a partner who is over controlling, over dominant, over intrusive, and there can be a familiarity in that the man gets caught up in a bond with a woman who is like the mother. And unfortunately, he may have to divorce both of them if there’s no changes. Divorce in the sort of differently, I’m using divorce in sort of a general sense here, but separate out, I don’t know what that would mean with the woman. Sometimes the man will project onto the woman feelings of engulfment that aren’t there. Then she’ll say, what are you talking about? I didn’t need you to do that. You don’t need to keep pleasing me. I just wanted to know what dinner you wanted to go to, right? So sometimes it’s a projection and his job is to pull that back so that he can be in relationship with the woman that’s independent of the ghost of the mother. And then other times the man will provoke the woman to be like the mother.

So I’ll betray you sexually, I’ll have an affair and then you’ll become controlling. See, you’re just like my mother, but I’m responsible for that. So I would urge the men to look at the three Ps, pick, provoke and project, and figure out where the line is. It’s not easy to do. All three could be operative in the same relationship.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And then we’ve also talked about this mother enmeshment can affect your career too, ’cause you project that desire, need, unhealthy need to please onto your employer. So it might cause you to stick with a job that’s just awful. ‘Cause you’re like, Well, I gotta be loyal to my boss, or I just, I gotta do this just sort of out of obligation.

Dr. Ken Adams: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Or I find myself sort of even at a deeper level in a career or a job or a path in which my mother wanted me in, but I never wanted. And so now I’m struggling. And we’ve had guys change horses in the middle of the stream as part of their emancipation, change careers, fascinatingly enough.

Brett McKay: And so yeah, the response to this, so let’s say if you are a mother-enmeshed man, the idea is you have to unmesh and you’ve been calling it emancipation. And I’ve seen a lot of articles lately about children cutting off parents. My parents are toxic, I need to cut them off completely. And cutting off is different from emancipation, so what’s the difference and why do you think this whole cutoff idea, it could be healthy in some situations, but maybe it’s not the most healthy thing to do either?

Dr. Ken Adams: Yeah. Yeah. Well, let’s acknowledge that certainly there are people that we shouldn’t have in our lives because they’re abusive to us. Right?

Brett McKay: Right.

Dr. Ken Adams: And one of the strategies, and often if the person can’t change, the strategy is to get away from them. Right? And being a family member doesn’t permit you to be abusive. You don’t get a license to do that. So there is a percentage of people who need to look at, look, I can’t have you in my life if you keep doing this, but let’s set that group aside. I just wanna acknowledge that that can happen. But most of the guys coming into our workshop, and sometimes the spouse will try to demand it. Look, I want you to cut off your mother, but that’s not a solution. And because it’s really a phobic response. In other words, I’m so afraid that if I talk to my mother, I’ll get swallowed up by her worries. I’m just gonna cut her off. There’s nothing particularly empowering about that. It’s really phobic. So the man never really emancipates, he just stiff-arms the family, cuts ’em off and it gives him a pseudo sense of power. But then he is over here subjugating himself to his friend who wants to borrow a thousand dollars that he doesn’t have. And he says yes when he really can’t do it. He hasn’t really emancipated. So emancipation really is, look, I might need some separate time. I have new boundaries. No, you can’t talk about your loneliness with dad anymore. I’m out of that. You wanna talk about the weather or sports? We’re good. We’ll skip politics too these days.

But we’ll, we are not talking about your loneliness with dad, mom. And you say you love me, and so I need you to respect me. So we begin to have adult conversations because we are no longer held hostage by the fear of disappointing mommy, I’m now willing to be a disappointment to her. So emancipation is changing the role assignment that you’ve been burdened with. And it might have periods where you have more separateness, but it might be, We’re not coming to the holidays this year, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, whatever. We’re gonna be in Hawaii and your mother’s disappointed. And you saying, you know what? We’ll probably visit with you next year. You’re able to tolerate that disappointment. You don’t need to stiff-arm her and you don’t need to subjugate her.

Emancipation is, I’m my own man. My commitment is to myself, to my partner, to my kids, to my unfolding, and now you mother and father. Notice they’ve come down the list, so that’s really emancipation. So cutting somebody off, stiff-arming somebody is a temporary pseudo freedom in my experience. Although as I said, there are a certain population, and I’ll leave that to people to sort out where obviously not having contact if the parent’s cruel and sadistic, it’s trouble. You might need to have a more rigid boundary. So emancipation may have boundaries on a continuum, cutting off your family is a one trick pony, right?

It’s just stiff-arming. And what we see, I… So here’s what we see. We begun to see this with reporting from the adult. This is all reporting from the adult-enmeshed man. So we’re not getting the direct report from the parents. So it’s a little bit secondhand, of course. But what they’re reporting is initially the parents will resist, mom won’t be happy, but if she’s got any moxie of self to her, she will understand that she doesn’t wanna lose her son or her daughter. So she’ll, she or the father will learn to keep quiet. So there’s a resignation. My kid wants his own space, I don’t like it. I’ll shut my mouth. We hope they get at least that. It’s not ideal.

The second phase is that in time, parents begin to accept, Okay, I see now my son doesn’t want to cut me off, he just wants some space. I get it. I’m gonna go out and join a bridge club. I’m gonna get a better marriage going with my husband here, so I’ll do my own life. So ideally, we like to see parents move into acceptance. I don’t know how often that occurs. And then finally, the stage that we really look for, which we don’t get a lot of reports of, is that parents really come to terms with and celebrate and bless their children’s departure. And we say to the adult-enmeshed man, the adult man emancipating, Look, emancipation is not a negotiation.

You do not need your parents’ approval. Don’t seek it. It’s not necessary. In fact, it’s counterproductive. You deserve their blessing, but you might not get it and you don’t need it. You deserve it, but you may not get it. Don’t wait around for it. So that really is an emancipated man. I’m my own man.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, it sounds like… This reminds me of, going back to family systems theory, this idea of differentiation. It’s being a self while still maintaining relationships with people.

Dr. Ken Adams: Exactly. Yeah. Differentiation is really the sort of the inner piece of the process. The first is boundaries, I can’t talk to you about dad anymore. The last stage is emancipating, I’m my own man. But the middle part, which is most difficult is this differentiation. Wait a minute, why am I picking up the bill all the time for 10 people?

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Dr. Ken Adams: I don’t have to do that.

Brett McKay: So what does a healthy relationship look like with your mother? We’ve talked about like when an unhealthy relationship, like what would a good relationship with your mother look like as an adult?

Dr. Ken Adams: Well, I think it shifts from sort of you’re my little boy is now you’re my adult man, son. And I have to sort of regard you as an adult. And so we have to renegotiate how we talk, what we talk about, how we visit. So we have more of a consulting friendship, and a love relationship, but not, You’re my little boy and I need you to do what I want. So we see a shift in the way both the parent and the adult child deal with each other where there’s a greater respect and tolerance for separateness. My son, he’s visiting this weekend, he was gonna show up the other day. He didn’t, he came a day late and he’s moving across the country, so we wanna get as much time as possible. So, both of my… I’m not a perfect parent. He’ll remind me of that. But, so both my wife’s response was, Great, we’ll see you when you get here. Right? As was mine. Versus, why can’t you make it here?

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Dr. Ken Adams: Just move that appointment aside. Laying on the guilt. So again, we’re not perfect parents. He reminds us of that. But that’s the difference. Is the adult parent now begins to disengage from a dependency that was once there. And they’re both agents, the mother and the son are free to move in and out of the connection lovingly without feeling guilt for their times of separateness. And they can circle back out of choice. And sure, there might be disappointment or missing, Oh, I miss you, I haven’t seen you in a while. Can we put something on the books? Versus, Don’t you think about me anymore? You’ve been spending too much time with your wife. So there’s the difference is that both the adult man and the mother are separate agents in the relationship and they come and go out of love and out of choice. Not out of guilt, demand or inappropriate loyalty.

Brett McKay: Anything dads can do to help their sons develop a healthy relationship with their mother and not get enmeshed?

Dr. Ken Adams: Well, one is, is to get in there and have a relationship with your son, independent of the mother so that he can learn to turn to you and the mother can witness that she doesn’t get to be top dog. Right? And you’re not doing it competitively. You’re just doing it lovingly. And I think too, to be solicitous of your partner and say, Let’s go out on dates and reconnect, rekindle the love affair that was there before you had kids, which most of us know is tough to do, but with the help of good marital therapists and counselors, you can do that. So you begin to put your energy towards your partner and you build a relationship with your son, independent of the mother. And if necessary, you create some challenges to your wife and say, Look, you can’t keep doing that. You’re gonna lose him. So you have to be a voice of reason there.

Brett McKay: Well, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work?

Dr. Ken Adams: Yeah, so you could go to the website overcomingenmeshment.com, all one word, overcomingenmeshment.com. I have lots of podcasts on there. Hopefully I’ll get yours on there if you’ll send me a link. It’s been great talking to you. We’ve got workshops, educational workshops for men. We have ’em for women who are enmeshed. What’s interesting is we did some interviewing for qualitative research, we interviewed men and women, and I did some of the interviewing with the women. I was shocked. The women were just like the men. They’ll report things like when they’re enmeshed with their mothers and fathers, my boyfriend wants too much of me, I’m gonna run the other way and start a new relationship. I thought, Oh my God, I’m talking to the, just like the men. We also have workshops for the partners and the spouses of these individuals who need help sort of getting their head back on straight and feeling valid and so forth. So the website will walk you through all that.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Ken Adams, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Dr. Ken Adams: Yeah, likewise, Brett. I appreciate your working with me and talking. It’s been a great conversation and I hope to get a link so I can upload it on my website too.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Dr. Kenneth Adams. He’s the author of the book, When He’s Married to Mom. It’s available on amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website, overcomingenmeshment.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/marriedtomom. You can find links to resources and we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website artofmanliness.com, where you find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing this show with a friend or family member who you think might get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Till next time, this is Brett McKay. Reminding you to not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

To countenance the statistics on divorce is to recognize that happy, lasting marriages do not happen by default.

In strong marriages, each spouse, rather than sinking into indifference and complacency, makes an effort to do things that leave their partner enamored and appreciative.

To find out what kinds of things tend to have this effect when coming from the man in the marriage, I talked to Kate and some other married women about what husbands do on a day-to-day basis that make them swoon. Below, I’ll share what I learned from them and from the many relationship experts I’ve interviewed on the AoM podcast.

If you’ve already got a good relationship with your wife, these suggestions can help strengthen that bond and further boost its happiness.

If your marriage has been struggling, then engaging in these behaviors might help change the course of its trajectory. There can sometimes be a tendency in these situations for someone to think, “Why should I make an effort if she isn’t?” But often all it takes to get a relationship back on track is for one person to take the initiative in acting in a different way. Once one person starts sowing positive behavioral seeds, the other person becomes less defensive and instinctively starts acting in kind. A stalemate is broken and a virtuous cycle begins that turns the relationship around. If your wife doesn’t reciprocate by leveling up her own relational game, then, yes, that probably means your marriage needs a more serious/professional intervention.

But why not try the simple behaviors below first?

10 Ways to Be Better Husband Today

1. Be an interesting conversationalist.

Marriage is essentially one long conversation, and when the quality of the conversation between spouses sags, so does the quality of the relationship.

When you come home from work and your wife asks how your day was, don’t just say, “Fine,” and leave it at that. Even if not much happened, dig up a detail or two to share.

Intentionally collect conversational fodder during the day to share when you and your spouse catch up. Remember some interesting tidbit of office gossip you heard around the watercooler at work. Read interesting articles that catch your eye and file away some details you can talk about later. Be mulling over ideas you’ve heard so that if your wife asks, “What have you been thinking about lately?” you’ll have something to say.

While one of the privileges of a close, long-standing relationship is the ability to comfortably sit in silence, in the healthiest relationships, you enjoy conversing so much that you rarely want to.

2. Leave love notes.

Through years of watching marriages fall apart, divorce lawyer James Sexton has learned a thing or two about how to reverse engineer things and keep a relationship together. As he shared on the AoM podcast (his episode is such a good one; be sure to listen to it), his strongest suggestion for avoiding ever having to see him in his office is to simply “leave your wife a note every morning for a couple of weeks”:

just leave her a note, just a little, ‘Hey, Babe, thanks for last night on the couch watching TV. It was so nice, like the smell of you just makes me so happy. I fell asleep with it on me.’ Or ‘you looked so pretty when I woke up this morning and I’m so glad to have such a wonderful woman in my life. I love you.’ And that takes you 30 seconds, and I’m telling you that little tiny investment of time and effort will pay dividends like you wouldn’t believe.

If you want to really challenge yourself, leave your wife a love note every week for a year, like this guy did.

3. Be a man with a plan.

One woman I spoke to said she really appreciates it when her husband comes up with a plan for a date night or family outing and then executes it without her having to worry about anything.

“Plans really turn me on!” she declared.

Don’t wait around for your wife to plan your next date or family microadventure. Come up with an idea for a good time and then carry it out.

4. Perform small acts of service.

Years ago, AoM had something called the “Library of Random Man Knowledge” where readers could submit and browse through, well, random man knowledge (stay tuned, we’re working on bringing it back!). One reader submission said: “Bless your wife. Fill up her car’s tank with gas.”

For some reason, this really made Kate and I chuckle, and it’s become a running schtick in our marriage; if Kate gets in the car and the gas tank is on E, she’ll text me, “Hey, how come you didn’t bless me by filling up on gas?!”

But our joking aside, it’s actually good advice! Filling up the gas tank, and doing other little acts of service, is something your wife will really appreciate.

The women I spoke with mentioned this idea a lot. They said they really appreciate it when their husbands notice things they need and just take care of them (naturally without being a martyr about it, wanting a lot of credit, or using it as a way to keep score). It’s funny; a lot of the things they appreciated their husbands taking care of were car-related: Getting the oil changed. Filling up the tires with air. Getting the car washed. Chicks dig husbands who take care of their vehicles.

Pay attention to what your wife needs and values. If you’re not sure what sorts of things you could do to help her out, just ask.

5. Be the rock.

The women I spoke to all said they appreciate it when their husbands act as a rock when they’re stressed out. Here’s what one gal had to say:

I really appreciate my husband’s ability to maintain and create calm in chaotic/intense situations. He takes a difficult problem and breaks it down into manageable tasks and calmly organizes things to get it done. He really shines when he sees me getting stressed out and takes control.

We’ve written about how to be the rock in a relationship. The key is to not catch your wife’s anxiety when she’s stressed and instead be an oasis of calm stability. While most couples today want an egalitarian relationship, there are still times, especially when things get crazy, that most women would like a man to take charge and stand between her and a real or perceived threat.

6. Be the researcher and offer a solution.

It’s a common trope that women just want to be listened to when venting a problem and get annoyed when men try to offer a solution. There are certainly times this is true, but usually there’s also a point where she’d welcome some specific suggestions.

Sometimes that problem-solving can take the form that my friend mentioned above, where you help break down an issue into action steps.

Other times, you can be the person who looks into an answer to a question your wife has or some issue she’s worried about.

Matthew Dicks thinks people can be categorized as either eagles or mice; mice are very attentive to small details, while eagles take an overarching, birds-eye view of things. Both approaches can have their strengths. Anecdotally, it seems like men, on average, tend to be eagles, while women are often mice.

Kate and I would say that’s the case in our relationship. She’ll tell you that she tends to get lost in the weeds and overwhelmed by details, and for that reason, when she has an issue or is having trouble deciding between options, she really appreciates when I’ll research it for her, as she knows I’m better at plowing through a ton of scientific studies, product reviews, or travel sites, synthesizing the information, and offering a suggestion; “I think you should take X supplement.” I’m like her personal ChatGPT (as the technology improves, I’ll probably be replaced by ChatGPT).

7. Exercise competence. 

Napoleon Dynamite famously said, “Chicks dig guys with skills.” And it’s true! Research suggests that women find competency (combined with warmth) incredibly attractive in a guy. The women I spoke to all said it makes them swoon when their husbands know how to handle a variety of situations and get stuff done.

One woman I spoke to shared this example of how her husband displayed this trait:

We went on a bike outing with our extended family, and all the bikes available were in disrepair. Their brakes needed to be repaired or gears realigned, etc. My husband spent hours cheerfully tuning them all up and teaching the kids about their bikes. He also tended to several medical situations—a cut hand, a rash, etc. I love to see him confidently and competently handle those situations. He takes care of the people I love and that makes me love him even more.

Have skills (knowing all 100 of these is a good goal) and put them to use.

 8. Offer frequent non-sexual affection.

Sex is awesome. Research suggests that’s how guys connect emotionally with their wives.

Women like sex, too. But they also like non-sexual affection like hugs and kisses. It’s one of the ways they connect emotionally with you.

So offer your wife frequent gestures of physical affection that aren’t deliberately designed to initiate sex.

9. Be generous with your appreciation.

One thing I hear again and again from the leadership and relationship experts I’ve interviewed on the podcast is that people want to be recognized for the contributions they make.

When you’re married, it’s easy to take for granted all the stuff your spouse does for you and the household. Clean laundry magically appears in your drawers. Your fridge is refilled each week. Dinners show up on the table.

Besides taking for granted the stuff your wife does, it’s easy to stop recognizing all the amazing qualities she has that attracted you to her in the first place. You become habituated to the stuff that used to make your heart swell with gratitude at the beginning of your relationship.

Take time and effort to remove the blinders time has accumulated over your eyes and notice the little things you love and appreciate about your spouse afresh. Then, voice your appreciation for those things — even for the routine stuff she does every day. It’s all still a gift that helps make your life.

Always offer appreciation at the time your wife does things for you or soon after if you’re not together. But also just randomly shoot her a text during the day to express your gratitude for something she did or who she is.

It can also be helpful to have a set time each week where you and your spouse appreciate each other, which brings us to:

10. Have a weekly marriage meeting.

AoM readers/listeners are probably tired of me mentioning this suggestion, because I do it a lot in our articles and on the podcast. But having a weekly marriage meeting is one of the most helpful habits Kate and I have adopted.

Having a once-a-week marriage meeting will help your relationship run more smoothly and stay strong. It lasts about 20 minutes and has four parts: expressing appreciation, going over chores/to-dos, planning for good times, and discussing big issues. Here’s exactly why and how to execute it.

It’s All About the Small Stuff

As you look over the list above, you’ll see a common thread in these suggestions: they’re all small behaviors and practices.

It’s easy to think that keeping a marriage together is about the big stuff — the date nights and romantic getaways. But it’s really about the small things you do day to day to stay connected.

It’s about continuing to do the little niceties you did for each other when you were first dating.

It’s about how you and your spouse show up for each other on a Tuesday morning. 

A story divorce lawyer James Sexton shared on the podcast has stuck with me ever since and couldn’t be a better way to end this piece:

[There was a] young woman I was divorcing who had two children, and we’d been a lot of miles, and I said to her, “Was there a moment where you knew that your marriage was over?” And she said that there was a granola that she liked to eat that she used to put in her yogurt, and her husband used to always notice when she was running low on it, and he would always get a new bag of it for her. I guess it was only sold at a particular health food store or something. And she’s like, “I never told him that that meant so much to me, but it was just such a sweet thing that he would just notice that I was running out of my granola; he didn’t need it, but he would notice I was running out of my granola, and there’d just be this new bag. And he didn’t come to me and say like, ‘Oh look, I got granola for you.’ He didn’t want credit for it; it’s just something he did. It was this small gesture that I’m paying attention, that I see this detail, and that I love you, and I want to just extend this kindness, this courtesy to you.”

And she said that one day, she ran out of granola, and she thought, “Oh well, maybe he’s busy and he didn’t notice or whatever.” So she left the empty bag in there, and after a week or two, he still hadn’t replaced it, and she thought, “Okay, this is over.”

And she said it became apparent in the weeks that followed that this distance was coming between the two of them.

And I thought to myself, “What if that is it? If it’s just granola, it’s just these little tiny gestures of, ‘Oh, they use this milk, so let me put it on the table,’ or ‘Oh, they don’t like the sound of the garbage disposal, it jars them when it’s loud, so I go, ‘Hey, babe I’m gonna turn on the garbage disposal real quick. Don’t be afraid when I turn it on.’” Like the small considerations. You know them about your wife; I don’t. Your wife knows them about you; I don’t. And those, to me, those intimacies, those little things, the things you love, the things you’re afraid of, the things that get on your nerves, your partner theoretically has the ringside seat to those, and they can leverage them in the most beautiful ways.

I see it when they weaponize them, so by the time you get to my office, you go, “Okay, I’m angry at this person, and here’s where their soft spots are. So here’s where we can stab them.”

But I really think that if you can identify those things while you’re happily married, you can use them without a massive amount of effort — just small little efforts to build this abundance of happiness and goodwill between the two of you and maintain it.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

The marriage rate has come down 65% since 1970. There are multiple factors behind this decrease, but one of them is what we might call the poor branding that surrounds marriage in the modern day. From all corners of our culture and from both ends of the ideological spectrum come messages that marriage is an outdated institution, that it hinders financial success and personal fulfillment, and that it’s even unimportant when it comes to raising kids.

My guest would say that these ideas about marriage are very wrong, and he doesn’t come at it from an emotionally-driven perspective, but from what’s born out by the data. Dr. Brad Wilcox is a sociologist who heads the nonpartisan National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, which studies marriage and family life. He’s also the author of Get Married. Today on the show, Brad discusses the latest research on marriage and how it belies the common narratives around the institution. We dig into the popular myths around marriage, and how it not only boosts your finances, but predicts happiness in life better than any other factor. Brad also shares the five pillars of marriage that happy couples embrace.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Brad’s previous appearance on the AoM Podcast: Episode #278 — The Surprising Benefits of Marriage for Men
• The National Marriage Project at UVA
• AoM Article: The Case for Marriage
• Piece in the NYT by Brad: “To Be Happy, Marriage Matters More Than Career”
• Piece in the Atlantic by Brad: “The Awfulness of Elite Hypocrisy on Marriage”
• Piece in the Atlantic co-authored by Brad: “Now Political Polarization Comes for Marriage Prospects”
• Brad’s articles at the Institute for Family Studies 
• AoM Podcast #946: Counterintuitive Ideas About Marriage, Family, and Kids

Connect With Brad Wilcox

• Brad’s faculty page
• Brad on X
• Brad on LinkedIn

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast.

The marriage rate has come down 65% since 1970. There are multiple factors behind this decrease, but one of them is what we might call the poor branding that surrounds marriage in the modern day. From all corners of our culture, and from both ends of the ideological spectrum, come messages that marriage is an outdated institution, that it hinders financial success and personal fulfillment, that it’s even unimportant when it comes to raising kids.

My guest would say that these ideas about marriage are very wrong, and he doesn’t come at it from an emotionally-driven perspective, but from what’s borne out by the data. Dr. Brad Wilcox is a sociologist who heads the non-partisan National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, which studies marriage and family life. He’s also the author of Get Married. Today on the show, Brad discusses the latest research on marriage and how it belies the common narratives around the institution. We dig into the popular myths around marriage and how it not only boosts your finances, but predicts happiness in life better than any other factor. Brad also shares the five pillars of marriage that happy couples embrace. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/marriage.

Alright. Brad Wilcox, welcome back to the show.

Brad Wilcox: Brett, it’s great to be here.

Brett McKay: So you are a sociologist who spends a lot of time researching and writing about marriage, particularly the benefits of marriage and family life. You got a new book out called Get Married, and you start off the book saying that the impetus behind this book is to counter what you see as an anti-marriage narrative in popular culture. What are some examples of this narrative that you’re seeing?

Brad Wilcox: Yeah, Brett, it’s actually funny, when I was finishing up the last-minute touches on the book, one article came across my Twitter screen. It was trending on Twitter. It was an article in Bloomberg that said women who stay single and don’t have kids are getting richer. And so the headline was giving the impression that steering clear of marriage and motherhood was the way to go for women financially, but also gave us lots of stories of single women who are childless, living their best life. And so I think both the financial story told in this story in Bloomberg and the emotional story being told were encouraging them to steer clear of marriage and motherhood, for a bunch of reasons. We’ve seen articles like The Case Against Marriage published in The Atlantic, articles like Divorce Can Be an Act of Radical Self-Love published recently in The New York Times.

So these are just some of the examples that we see in the media, for instance, that give us what I would call a profoundly anti-nuptial or anti-marriage message. You think about the pop culture more generally and mainstream television shows and movies, I think what you often see in everything from that show Friends back in the day, to a lot of the Chicago series on NBC, is a kind of message that your 20s are your years to have fun and focus on career. And then maybe as you approach 30 or 35, you would begin to think about settling down and getting married and having kids. But there’s an implicit message, too, I think, in the pop culture and certain precincts in the elite culture that are encouraging young adults to just postpone marriage or forego marriage and focus instead on career and having fun in your free time. So that’s also, I think, part and parcel of what I’m worried about in terms of giving people the wrong idea.

Brett McKay: Well, you mentioned some of these articles in these magazines, they focused on women staying single and the benefits of that. But you’re also seeing the same sort of thing about men. Men shouldn’t get married.

Brad Wilcox: Yeah, so what’s striking here, I think, is when I began this project, I was thinking about being in conversation primarily with more elite voices on the left that tend to dominate a lot of mainstream media and academia and pop culture to some extent. But now, we’re getting this from the online right as well. And Pearl Davis is one figure that’s got a big following online. She has said that marriage is a death sentence for men. And then you have, of course, Andrew Tate is a very big voice in the manosphere who’s also arguing that marriage has no ROI, no return on investment, for men. He says, “The problem is, there is zero advantage to marriage in the Western world for a man.” And then he goes on to say, “It’s very common that women divorce their husbands.” So what the left has been telling us is that, really, marriage and motherhood can be a bad deal for women. We’re now hearing, though, from the opposite end of the ideological spectrum that marriage is a bad deal for guys. And of course, the common takeaway, sadly, I would say, for young adults is that, “Maybe I should just steer clear of opening my heart to love, to marriage, and family.”

Brett McKay: Yeah, and as a sociologist, you actually research what happens when people get married. We’re gonna talk about… Actually, there’s a lot of benefits when you get married and settle down. But one thing you talk about, what both of these strains of thought have in common, these anti-marriage, anti-family life, strains of thought, whether it’s coming from the left or the right, is that they both have what you call a Midas view of life. What do you mean by the Midas view of life?

Brad Wilcox: So Brett, I gotta give all credit to my wife. I was asking her, “How can I think about some kind of fable or story that would convey the way in which people can become too attached to work or money or whatever else?”, and she said, “What about the King Midas story?” And of course, it’s a great example. I’ve updated the Midas story for a public lecture on the book. But the idea here is that people are thinking that they should be searching for gold and trying to build their own brand. It’s about education, money, and above all, career. We’ve got a lot of data from Pew, especially, telling us that Americans, even parents, Brett, unfortunately are prioritizing for their children, education and career over marriage down the road. It’s just very short-sighted. I think they’re gonna be really regretting that emphasis when they’re 75 years old and there are no grandkids on the horizon.

So, we see that, but again, a lot of data from Pew that Americans think that money and education, especially work, are the way to go. So ax recent Pew study found that 71% of Americans thought that having a job or a career they can enjoy is the path to fulfillment. Only 23% said that being married was the way to go. So it just gives you a sense of this Midas mindset, where all the action is in work and money and building your own brand, and the sort of idea is that investing in marriage and family is the wrong path, and you should instead kind of be free. Free of all the encumbrances that come from settling down, putting a ring on it.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So the idea out there, both in the culture and in the media, is that marriage will hurt your financial life. That’s the message that’s out there. But that actually isn’t the case.

Brad Wilcox: Yeah, so that Bloomberg headline was just completely bananas and was [chuckle] so wrong. I mean, they were relying upon data of just… Taken from singles, they’ve had a study on singles, and somehow they got to this conclusion that summed up that marriage is a bad thing for women. What we actually see is that women who are married, and men, of course, too, are more likely to be flourishing financially. In fact, in their 50s, both women and men have about 10 times the assets heading towards retirement compared to their single peers. So, ironically, both Andrew Tate and Bloomberg should be discounted for folks who are worrying about financial security or prosperity. Because for the average American, the path to prosperity tends to run through marriage and not away from it. But my point, of course, is that there’s a lot more to life than money, and so what we see is that marriage, again, more than career, is a much stronger predictor of American’s happiness in ways that I think that a lot of people would be surprised by.

Brett McKay: So what’s the state of marriage today in America? Are people marrying less?

Brad Wilcox: So, yeah, so, I’ve got bad news in the report and good news. And the good news is kind of what I was just hinting at is that when it comes to loneliness, when it comes to meaning, when it comes to happiness, Americans who are married, both men and women, are markedly happier. They’re less lonely, they report more meaningful lives, especially if they have children in the picture when it comes to meaning. That’s part of the good news. But the bad news, Brett, is that we’ve seen the marriage rate come down by about 65% since 1970. And what that means practically for young adults today, like in their 20s, is we’re projecting that about one in three of them will never marry. And we’ve never been in this territory where so many Americans will be permanent bachelors and permanent bachelorettes. And that’s cause for concern for me, just because, again, what we see is that for ordinary Americans, typically, they’re just more likely to be thriving if they have a co-pilot to travel through life with.

Brett McKay: So one thing you talk about in the book is that while there’s been a big decrease in marriage overall, and for a lot of people, marriage isn’t thriving, your research has found that there are four groups where marriage is still thriving. What are those four groups?

Brad Wilcox: Yeah, in terms of again, the good news, we do kind of see some groups in America today who are, generally speaking, flourishing in their marriages, who are more likely to get married, stay married often, and be happily married. And those four groups are Asian-Americans, religious Americans, I call them the faithful in the book, college-educated Americans, I call them strivers in the book, folks who kind of have more of that focus long-term, work, profession, career, et cetera. And then the fourth group is conservatives. And to be frank, Brett, I didn’t anticipate having conservatives as a separate category. I thought as we crunched numbers, I’d find that being Asian-American, being religious, being college-educated, that these three groups in their own ways would be kind of more likely to be married in America today, among other things. But I found, in crunching the numbers, that when you included ideology in the statistics, you still found that there’s a net effect, a unique effect, of being conservative, ideologically speaking, that boosted your odds of being married and also being happily married, even controlling for factors like religion.

So, that’s why I have four groups in the book. And each of those four groups, Brett, a majority of them, if you compare them to the alternative groups, are married. So for instance, a majority of college-educated Americans, 18 to 55, are married. Only a minority today of less-educated working-class and poor Americans are married. A majority of conservatives are married. Only a minority of moderates and liberals are married. Asian-Americans and the likes are typically majority married. And then Black and Hispanic Americans, only a minority of them are married.

Brett McKay: Okay. And then for the ideology aspect, how do you define what is conservative?

Brad Wilcox: So there’s just… On social surveys, like the general social survey, which we use a lot for this book project, people are just asked, “Are you very liberal? Liberal? Moderate? Conservative? Very conservative?” And we also had a question like that in a YouGov survey that we did for the book of up to about 2000 husbands and wives, where we just categorized people as liberal or conservative.

Brett McKay: Gotcha.

Brad Wilcox: And we found that conservatives are more likely, again, to be married and to be happily married compared to moderates and liberals. Now, what’s interesting about the ideology story there is it’s a little bit complicated. So, it turns out that very liberal Americans, and I did a piece in the New York Times on this a little while ago, are relatively happier, looking at women. So very liberal women are relatively happier than sort of ordinary wives in America, sort of in the liberal to moderate category. But conservative and very conservative women are even happier. So, what I call a J-curve in marital happiness when it comes to women’s marital happiness, and where, again, the very liberal women are a little bit happier than the norm, and then the conservative, American conservative women, are even happier. We see a similar trend, actually it’s fascinating, looking at new Gallup study that we published in Family Studies a few months ago, when it comes to teens reports of the quality of their parent-child relationship. So, teens in variable households are a little bit happier than the norm, And then teens in conservative, especially very conservative, homes, are even happier.

And it’s just kind of surprising. And this Gallup study suggests that maybe the story there is that conservative parents tend to be a bit more authoritative, have clear roles and expectations and consequences for their kids, and that actually teens are more likely to thrive in a context where maybe there’s a clear curfew, maybe there are clearer consequences for getting your chores done or your homework done in conservative homes, and actually, those kinds of boundaries, as long as they’re coupled with an affectionate and engaged style, tend to work out well for kids.

Brett McKay: Can these demographics cross over? So for example, imagine you’re a college-educated or highly-educated, tend to be, I don’t know if the survey says or the research shows this, tend to be more liberal. Is that true?

Brad Wilcox: So yeah, there are cross-cutting… Yeah, that’s a great question. There are cross-cutting pressures here and then they’re overlapping. So I talked to a conservative, religious, Indian-American, well-educated guy for the book. So he would be checking all the boxes, and he and his wife are doing well, and they’ve got three kids who’ve done really well as well. So, there are examples like that. And then we also see a lot of the discussion around marriage is focused on sort of class and education. The assumption has been that college-educated Americans are more likely to be killing it when it comes to marriage. And my friend and colleague, Richard Reeves, he’s been at Brookings, he’s got a new group focusing on boys and men.

He’s kind of made the argument that college-educated Americans have these marriage-minded sort of norms and ideas, but they’re also more progressive on gender. And so that, for him, is the sweet spot. But what I actually find in my own research is that when you separate out the college-educated Americans who are conservative from those who are moderate and liberal, it’s the ones who are conservative who are most likely to be stably married and happily married. So it kind of calls into question some of Richard’s ideas about how this is all playing out. So, the bottom line is it’s sort of the most educated, most religious, and most conservative couples in America are the ones who are most likely to be stably married and happily married.

Brett McKay: Well, it’s similar to what Richard Reeves was saying. An argument that I’ve heard about marriage is that it all comes down to class and money, right? So, if you have lots of money and you’re upper to middle-class, you’re going to do fine. If you’re poor, you’re not going to do fine. What does your research show?

Brad Wilcox: Yeah. So, I’m saying there’s both a cultural story and a class story. And so, I think like Richard and I would tell very similar stories, but kind of the general class story, and there’s just having more education and more money is one big reason why we are seeing that more educated Americans are much more likely to be getting married and staying married and to be reasonably happily married. But I think where my story diverges from the one that Richard Reeves would tell us is that culturally, what we’re seeing is that more religious and more conservative couples, Asian-American couples, are more likely to be getting married and staying married oftentimes and are happily married. And so I think what they have is oftentimes a deeper sense of commitment to marriage as an institution and to the norms of marriage, norms like fidelity and not using the D word when things are tough in your marriage, obviously, divorce.

And they’re also more likely to be surrounded by peers who value marriage as well. And we know that that’s a big predictor of succeeding in marriage, too. If you’re surrounded by people who value marriage and are living more what I call family-first lifestyles, that’s going to, other things being equal, increase your odds of success. So, again, the bottom line here is that both culture and class are important in understanding marriage today, and so folks who have both more income, more education, but also an appreciation for a lot of those classic norms and values around marriage are also more likely to be succeeding at marriage today.

Brett McKay: So yeah, you spend a lot of time in the book countering what you think are some of the myths that are keeping young people from marrying or not investing enough in their marriage. And one myth is what you call the “flying solo” myth. What is the flying solo myth?

Brad Wilcox: So there’s just kind of this idea that, again, being free of entanglements, encumbrances, family obligations, is the path to happiness. That we want to keep our options open, keep our choices before us. We want to focus on our 20s on just having a good time and really investing in our career. And I talked to a number of women and men for the book who were in their mid-30s basically, and regretting the fact that they had spent their 20s focusing more on just career and fun, and now, they’re unmarried. And these two women in the Rocky Mountain West and a man in the DC far suburbs are really unmoored in some important ways. They’re kind of struggling with loneliness and a sense of meaninglessness and just wishing that they had made different choices in their 20s. And I should say, okay, well, so what I found, I found two people in America who conform to my priors. Well, the important point to make here, actually, is that we’re seeing a decline in happiness in America. And this decline is concentrated among unmarried Americans. And the biggest factor driving the drop in happiness in America, according to a recent study from the University of Chicago, is the declining rate of marriage in America.

So, a simple way to say this is like less marriage equals more unhappiness for the country at large. And I think our younger adults should just be a lot more skeptical of the messages they’re getting about the importance of freedom and choice and building your own brand and steering clear of entanglements with the opposite sex, because the people that are able to actually get married and build decent marriages are just flourishing on so many more dimensions than their peers who are not.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And a point you make in the book is that the flying solo idea, it could be great if you have lots of money and you can travel the world. But for average Americans, probably not. You’re not going to be able to do all these things ’cause you don’t have access to money. So if you really want flourishing and happiness, your best bet would be to get married.

Brad Wilcox: Correct. Right, and I profiled a professional from, I think, New York city who was kind of like living the life as a single, 30-something, high-flying guy. And he was perfectly happy. But as you were saying, there are a lot of Americans who are not traveling the world, not making a lot of money, and not killing it at work. And without the benefit of a spouse and family, life can be pretty hard. But again, what’s interesting, too, about the guy that I profiled in the suburbs of Washington, DC is that he has graduate training. He has a good job. He owns his own home. He’s making six figures. And he basically says to me as I interviewed him, he says, “I’ve got degrees in my wall. I’ve got accomplishments and certificates, but it doesn’t mean anything in the end. I have to get up every day and look in the mirror and realize I’m alone. I have nobody.” Okay? So for this guy, the Midas mindset has not worked out. He’s in his mid-30s and he is not happy. He’s not a happy camper. Now, again, I know plenty of single folks who are doing great. But I’m just saying on average, single Americans are more likely to be struggling, and married Americans are more likely to be flourishing. And that average story, unfortunately, Brett, is not being told enough in the media and certainly on social media as well.

Brett McKay: So we mentioned earlier, kind of referenced it. Your research that you’ve done has shown that married people tend to have more money, they’re happier, they’re more fulfilled. Is this a matter of causation, or correlation? Does marriage make you happier, or do happier people or people who have those attributes that can lead to a flourishing life tend to get married more often?

Brad Wilcox: That’s, I think, really the killer question, right? And so, yeah, the smart critics of the kind of argument that I’m making in the academy and in the media would talk about what we call “selection effect,” where the kinds of people who are selecting into marriage are just different. They’re more educated, they’re more affluent, they’re more… They have better social skills. And so they would say, “Brad is confusing correlation with causation here.” Yes, many people are happier, they’re more affluent, that’s because they’re already happier and more affluent to begin with. So like Matt Brunick, for instance, a progressive, says married people are less impoverished, because people who are not impoverished are more likely to get married. He says with marriage, you have an institution that attracts and retains more economically secure and stable people, not an institution that creates them. So this is a great summary of the sort of selection perspective.

But what Matt is missing, though, is just there’s still a ton of research on the way in which marriage is institution that tends to transform our lives. It doesn’t just vacuum up the elites and just put them together. Now, there’s some of that obviously happening now, but we know, for instance, of a study in Minnesota looking at identical twins and paternal twins, guys, and the twins who got married earned about 26% more than their twins who did not get married. So giving us a clear sense, it’s probably something about marriage per se that is helping to make men, and we see other evidence in the score, too, when it comes to men and marriage and work, married men work harder, they work longer hours, they’re more strategic in their job search, they’re less likely to be fired. So these are all the kinds of things that would help us to understand why marriage per se can be transformational.

And then on the happiness front, there’s work done by the economist Sean Grover and John Holliwell and the control for happiness prior to marriage, and then tracked happiness after people got married and after other people did not get married, comparing them over time. And they still found, “A causal effect on happiness at all stages of the marriage from prenuptial bliss to marriages of long duration.” And they found the biggest happiness premium was in midlife, when people in the late 40s and 50s, and we often see adult happiness at its nadir. And again, why is it that marriage is happiness-inducing? I think the point is that we are, as Aristotle said, social animals. And so, money [0:23:12.5] ____ end up being less important for us than our friendships and our family relationships, which give us opportunities to connect with others, to be with and for others. And I think important enough, to really to care for others.

And for both women and men, I think it’s important not just to be cared for, but to have opportunities to care for others. It gives our lives… Certainly, I’ll speak personally for a second. Caring for my wife and children is the most meaningful thing that I get to do. So, I just think people are not factoring in the ways that marriage and family can be so generative on so many fronts for ordinary women and men.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Well, couldn’t you get the same benefits just by cohabitating, like companionship?

Brad Wilcox: Yeah, great question. So I think if you do like just an immediate look at like people’s happiness, cohabiting and married, often not a big difference, right? But the problem is that cohabitation is much less committed. And so, what that means in practice is that couples who are cohabiting just don’t go the distance nearly as much as those who are married. So you have situations, like a former neighbor of mine, where she invested five years of her life, just like 28 to 33 and her cohabiting partner, and then he just… She kind of made it clear she wanted to get married and have kids. And he’s like, “Well, I’m not ready for that,” And so, he was gone. And [chuckle] that was pretty traumatic, because they hadn’t established that kind of joint level of commitment heading into the relationship. And so her happiness that she’d enjoyed for probably substantial share of that relationship disappeared and turned out to be fairly traumatic. And of course, divorce can happen, too, but I’m just saying that, on average, marriage is markedly more stable than cohabitation, and that’s one reason why I talk about getting married rather than getting together.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So just getting married, it adds more stakes to the relationship, I guess. You take it more serious.

Brad Wilcox: So when I’m talking about this to my students, ’cause I think the cohabitation piece is the most surprising thing that we talked about in my class at the University of Virginia, how marriage and cohabitation are different. I’m just thinking about the terms of entry, or how couples enter into these two different relationship states. When it comes to cohabitation, what you see is oftentimes, couples can’t even agree on the day when they begin cohabiting. Like you have one partner will kind of bring some things over for the weekend, maybe leave some clothes, a toothbrush, whatever. And then some more stuff like a week later, and then move in all their stuff a month later or whatever, two months later. But it’s never been… There wasn’t a discrete moment, where obviously, with a wedding, it’s pretty clear when it happens.

But more importantly, just imagine the social context that these two things are taking place in. So with cohabitation, you have… There’s no assembled multitude of friends and family in that apartment hallway. There’s no music playing in the background. There are no vows being exchanged. You bring your gear into your partner’s apartment for the first time or whatever, for the second or third time. By contrast with the wedding, obviously, everything is kind of scripted, it’s a ceremony, it’s ritualized. And human beings, we’re actually really… We tend to endow things with more meaning when we do them in a ritualized, communal context, and especially when we make public vows in a communal context. So, that just gives you some sense of how marriage and cohabitation are really different things.

Brett McKay: Okay, so flying solo, for most people, getting married is probably your best bet for happiness, fulfillment, and even economic stability. Another myth you explore that might be preventing people from investing too much in their marriage is the myth of family diversity. What do you mean by that?

Brad Wilcox: Yeah. So, particularly in my academic world, there are a lot of folks who would argue that the family isn’t any way getting weaker or marriage isn’t declining; it’s just the family is changing, and that we should embrace family diversity, a wide range of family structures, and family approaches. And that marriage per se doesn’t really matter; what really matters for kids, when it comes to flourishing, is love, and also money. Basically, families have enough love in the household and who have decent income supply are gonna be doing just perfectly. For instance, there was an article in The Atlantic where there was a professor saying that, “All of our research points to the fact that it’s the quality of the relationship that matters and the handling of communication and conflict. And the number of people in the household is not really the key.” Or Philip Cohen, a professor at Maryland, said, “If people grow up with single mothers who have adequate income, they do fine on average. What we find is they do have a lot of challenges from the lack of resources, but family structure per se is not as big a factor.” So again, the idea here is that money matters, love matter, but marriage doesn’t matter per se.

And what these, I think, perspectives don’t really acknowledge is that yes, love matters, yes, money matters, but kids in intact married households are much more likely to be flourishing on any number of fronts. They’re about twice as likely to graduate from college compared to kids from non-intact families. Boys are about twice as likely to end up in prison or in jail compared to their peers from intact families, if they’re in a non-intact family. Girls and boys in non-intact families are 50% more likely to be sad as eighth graders.

So, that’s what the facts are, and I think one of the most striking things that I discovered in looking at this data with my colleague, Dr. Wendy Wang, is that young men today are more likely to go to prison or jail than they ought to graduate from college, if they’re raised in a non-intact family. By contrast, what we see is that for boys who were raised in intact families, only 9% of them end up in prison or jail, and 38% of them are graduating from college. So, that was, for me, when it comes to kids, that was the like, “Wow.” For boys who don’t have the benefit of their unmarried parents, more likely to end up incarcerated, whereas for boys who are benefiting from both their married parents in the household, much more likely to attend and graduate from college.

Brett McKay: So you’re saying there’s a myth that’s out there that, well, it doesn’t really matter if we get married, or if we get divorced, or if there’s just a single parent in the picture. It’s not a big deal, kids will be fine. And what you’re saying is, well, maybe not.

Brad Wilcox: So yeah. And two things to be clear about. One is that I was raised by a single mom, and obviously, many kids go on to do just perfectly fine without the benefit of married parents. I can think of prominent examples like Barack Obama and Jeff Bezos, who, at least obviously professionally, have done extremely well. So I’m not saying that coming from a non-intact household is a death sentence. I’m just sort of saying that on average, kids are more likely to flourish when they have the benefit of their unmarried parents. And the other interesting piece about this is that the proponents of family diversity states about really what matters for kids is love and money. What they do not acknowledge, though, Brett, is that on average, kids who are being raised by intact married parents have access to more attention and affection from their married parents, and they have access to a heck of a lot more money than kids in other family situations. So, even on the love and money front, what we’re seeing is on average, of course, we know that there are dysfunctional intact married families out there, but on average, kids are more likely to get the love and money they need to flourish when they’re being raised by their own married parents.

Brett McKay: Well, in a point you make in the book, you point out there’s a hypocrisy you see. There’s people out there in academia and the media that say, “Well, it doesn’t matter what your family looks like, you just get divorced, whatever, the kids are gonna be fine, you’re gonna be fine.” But then you look at how those people are living their lives. They’re typically… They’re married and they’re living in an intact family.

Brad Wilcox: Yeah. I’ve got a piece coming out in The Atlantic soon talking about how our elites often talk left and walk right. And the story there basically is that I think it’s become kind of fashionable in a variety of ways to articulate your support for family diversity and to discount the importance of marriage, or even to attack it, in certain circles in academia and the media and other precincts of our culture. But it’s also, I think, a fact that prudentially, it makes sense to get married and stay married. And so, that ends up being the path that a lot of elites take, ’cause they recognize, on some level, that it’s the best thing for them and for their kids.

Brett McKay: So another thing that seems to be holding people back from getting married… This is a new one. So before, people weren’t getting married, they’d say, “Well, I’ll miss out on opportunities for my career, I need to make money, I wanna enjoy myself,” whatever. The one thing you’re seeing now, I’ve been seeing more reports of, is political polarization. What’s going on there?

Brad Wilcox: So, my colleague, Lyman Stone and I did a piece for The Atlantic talking about the growing number of young women who are moving left and the growing number of young men are moving right. Although there’s more women moving left than men moving right, but it’s creating a situation where there are many more liberal women than there are liberal men, and a bit more conservative men than there are conservative women. And that’s leading to a gap, where we would estimate about one in five young adults can’t marry someone or can’t date someone who is on the same page with them ideologically. So that’s a problem, because as I’m arguing in the book, marriage is generally a good thing for young adults and for the society at large. It’s this political polarization is one more factor making it harder for young adults to marry.

Brett McKay: Anything we can do about that?

Brad Wilcox: Well, I think one thing to do is just to recognize that what matters here for, I think, marital success is being on the same page, either religiously or in terms of some core commitments, including how you wanna do family and work. So if you meet someone who’s not on the same page as you politically but who shares basically either your faith or your broader worldview in terms of how you wanna do work and family, then I would say consider moving forward. But on the other hand, if you’re kind of not just politically at odds with one another but also have pretty different views on things like religion or on how you wanna… If you wanna have kids, how you wanna raise them, all that kind of stuff, those are really big warning signs. So I think you have distinguish between politics proper and then other things that would really bear on the warp and woof of organizing a family. And unfortunately, I have seen friends in my 20s who grew ideologically apart and then got divorced. So I’ve seen that play out in my own social circle.

Brett McKay: So something else you do in this book is you look at what families or couples that are having thriving marriages, thriving family life, do on a day-to-day basis to make them thriving. And you talk about, you mentioned earlier, they typically have a family-first approach to marriage. What does that look like on a day-to-day basis?

Brad Wilcox: Yeah, so I argue that one of the challenges facing all of us, I think, in this culture today is that sometimes we can think about marriage as kind of like the soulmate thing. It’s like, “I’m gonna find this perfect match, we’re gonna have this intense romantic and maybe sexual connection, we’re gonna fit like this perfect… We’ll have a perfect fit. And she’s gonna understand me, I’m gonna understand her perfectly. And there’s gonna be very little friction and a lot of passion and fulfillment and happiness pretty much all the time.” That’s sort of like the soulmate idea, just in a nutshell. And yet, obviously, once you’re married and in relationship with someone, you discover that she’s not perfect and you’re not perfect. And it’s often extremely difficult to get along in some days or some weeks, some months, whatever.

And by contrast, I think people recognize, realize that marriage is about more than just an emotional connection, more than just a feeling. It’s about establishing a life together, a family together, having kids, if you can, raising kids together, being there for your kin, for your parents, your wife’s parents, doing things together as a family, going trips, going to the park, going to the basketball game, whatever it is that your family does, going hunting for some, going to the beach for others. All these kind of family things end up being also important. Financial security is also part and parcel of a family-first approach to marriage. And so people kind of have a richer view of the many different goods that marriage tends to facilitate or foster are kind of pursuing what I would call a more family-first or more institutional approach to marriage.

And that, of course, is more stable than just kind of one that based on feelings, the soulmate approach. And I think what people don’t realize is it’s often happier as well, because you’re able to appreciate that your spouse and your marriage and your family are about a number of different goods, not just an intense romantic connection. And so even if you’re not necessarily firing all cylinders on the romantic side, but at some point, in your marriage, you recognize, “Oh, my husband’s a great father,” or “Oh, my wife’s a great mother,” for instance, and that is a source of satisfaction for you and for your relationship. So what I find is there’s a slight edge to that the folks have this more family-first model enjoy in marital quality, and then also, they’re less likely to be thinking about divorce compared to folks who have more of a feelings-based, soulmate approach to married life.

Brett McKay: And you get nitty-gritty with this stuff, like how these couples navigate sex, parented responsibilities, chores. What does that look like?

Brad Wilcox: So, what I’m also arguing, too, is that the what I call the “masters of marriage” tend to be more likely to embrace what I call the five pillars of marriage. And these are five C’s. One is communion, a sense of communion, in their marriage. One is proper appreciation of the role of children in marriage, if they have kids. Third C is commitment. The fourth C is cash. The fifth C is community. And so, just to take for instance, the communion piece, what I find is the couples who have regular date nights, to try to maintain that sense of romance and that emotional connection, are more likely to be flourishing both in terms of marital happiness, but also in terms of sexual satisfaction. And not surprisingly, if you’d like to have a healthy sexual life, it’s important to keep the romance alive in your marriage, and so doing fun and different and regular date nights, which can be challenging when you’ve got kids, as my wife and I do, still is important. Try to figure out that piece, I would say.

But also, in terms of community, I talked to you about a way before-me approach to life, rather than a me-first approach. And one example I give is couples who have shared checking accounts are doing better both in terms of stability but also marital quality compared to couples who have separate accounts and more of that me-first approach to money. So that’s communion. Commitment is, among other things, prioritizing the well-being of your spouse and your family, and then also concretely being attentive to the importance of fidelity. So that means steering clear of attractive alternatives, both in the real world and now today in the virtual world, who might obviously distract your attention and your affections away from your spouse. And when it comes to divorce, not putting the D word in a conversation when you’re having an argument or there’s some problem in your marriage. Most couples have problems at some point in their marriage, and I think couples who just keep divorce off out of the picture are more readily able to handle those challenges and overcome them.

And then the community piece, basically, again, if you are surrounding yourself with people who are… Whether you’re secular or religious, but people who are like intentional about being good spouses and being good parents, you’re more likely to thrive. And yet, I do find that folks who are religious are more likely to be succeeding on that front. ‘Cause you find that couples who are going to church, especially together or temple or synagogue, whatever, are more likely to be spending time with their kids, to be capable of forgiving their spouse, to be maintaining surprisingly, I think, to some extent, a more vibrant sexual life than couples who are not part of a religious community.

Brett McKay: You do your research with the eye of suggesting public policy, and you have some public policy recommendations at the end of your book. But then I think it was a recent article or it might’ve been a tweet, you talked about how there’s research showing, and even in these Nordic countries that have very pro-family public policy, people still aren’t getting married and having kids. So, basically, public policy isn’t enough. You have to change the culture about marriage and family life. So how do you do that? That’s a tough hill to climb.

Brad Wilcox: So, I want to be clear here. I do think public policy is helpful, and I think we could do more to promote in our schools what’s called the success sequence, which, among other things, sucks at the value of marriage to our kids in high school, public high schools. I think we could get rid of the marriage penalty that ends up penalizing marriage for a lot of working-class families across America. I think we could have a more generous child tax credit that would help people who are particularly working in middle-class families who are kind of struggling financially to raise the next generation, kind of have an easier time with it. So there are some policies that I think would be helpful in terms of making marriage more financially and culturally appealing, attractive, and attainable, particularly against working-class and middle-class Americans. But I think, at the end of the day, we have to recognize and realize that unless the culture changes, we’re just going to see a continuing decline in marriage and fertility.

And the reason I say that is because we’re already seeing that in the Nordic countries, like for instance, Finland, where they have an incredible, suite collection of great family policies, childcare, and parental leave, and child allowances, arguably one of the best suite of family policies in the world, if you have a high degree of confidence in public policy to help families. And yet, in Finland, marriage and coupling and fertility are way down in recent years. And I think what’s happening in Finland is also happening here in the US, but just not as quite yet as pronounced. And that is it’s a combination, I think, of a couple of things. One is the Midas mindset, which you’ve talked about, focusing on education, work, and money more than other things, focus on having a good time, fun, staying free of encumbrances. Keeping more individualistic mindset among all the 20-somethings and even 30-somethings is part of the problem as well.

And then two, I think we’re seeing men losing ground, doing less well relative to the women in their lives in education and work and in other domains. And so I think women are just more skeptical about investing in a relationship, marriage, and having kids when the men in their lives don’t, from their perspective, meet the bar of what a spouse or a partner or parent should be up for. So, there’s more going on, but the point is that there’s just a series of cultural shifts that are unfolding across the developed world that are both devaluing family and the sacrifices that being a spouse and a parent require of us. And they’re elevating a more individualistic, a more live-for-the-moment ethos that, in the short term, can be attractive and appealing, but in the long term, spells not just demographic problems, but I think, more fundamentally, a very bleak and lonely and meaningless life. Not for everybody, of course, but for a growing share of people who are going to be kinless as they head into mid and late life.

Brett McKay: Well, yeah, speaking of this culture around parenthood. So let’s say someone does get married. You’re seeing a lot of people who are getting married, it’s like, “We don’t want to have kids.” But in the surveys that you’ve done, do people give reasons for why they don’t want to have kids?

Brad Wilcox: Well, there are different theories about this, everything from the cost of parenthood to the environment to, I think probably more importantly, “I just want to like do my own thing.” And we’ve seen obviously DINK videos on TikTok where these couples who are actually married, but they enjoying sleeping in on Saturday morning, they say, and they’re enjoying traveling to Florida on a regular basis, they say, and they’re just saying that they’re living the life. It’s the life that they think that they have without children. And I’m just like, “Okay, let’s check back with you in 20 years or in 40 years and see how you’re doing,” because I just can’t even imagine, to be blunt, my life without my children. I mean, every night, I’ve got a teenage daughter, hunts me down and she’ll give me a hug or a kiss on the forehead. I mean, that’s just like, “Wow.” It’s a nice way to end the night.

And yes, kids are incredibly expensive and challenging and all that kind of stuff, but I mean, just the meaning, the joy, that kids can bring to your life is amazing. And I just feel sad for people who are deliberately closing their hearts to having children. But to be more empirical for a second, again, too, what’s interesting about the research is that we saw some evidence back before 2000 that parents were less happy than childless Americans. But today, it’s no longer true. I published a piece of Deseret News you may have seen just showing that given some newer survey data, parents, particularly married parents, are happier than childless Americans. And there’s no group of happier Americans aged 18 to 55, and that’s the sort of age focus of my book, than married mothers and married fathers compared to their peers who are single and/or childless.

So, that’s often lost in our public discussions and a lot of the social media commentary, that, for all of the hard things of being a mother and a father demand of us, we do see that, compared to their peers, it’s sort of like Churchill’s point, like, yeah, democracy is like… I’m paraphrasing, obviously, it’s flawed. But compared to the alternatives, it’s much better. I think the same thing is true of parenthood. Yeah, being a parent can be really hard and challenging and frustrating and hair-pulling-inducing, but compared to the alternative, I think it often ends up being pretty, pretty good.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and something that I don’t think has helped with this is that, in the popular culture, people just tend to talk about the negatives of being a parent. They just talk about the hair-pulling stuff when your kids are driving you bonkers, and they really don’t talk about the great stuff about being a parent. Being a dad is awesome. Whenever things in life feel flimsy and meaningless, my family is the thing that feels the most real to me.

Brad Wilcox: I agree.

Brett McKay: Well, Brad, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Brad Wilcox: So I’ve got a new website, bradwilcox.com. Familystudies.org is a good place to go as well. And the National Marriage Week is kind of rolling out from February 7th to 14th this year, and they’ve got a lot of resources for people looking for things about marriage and also tips to improve your marriage. There are plenty of obviously couples out there who are struggling, and so if you’re struggling, I would encourage you to go to the National Marriage Week’s website for some ideas about how you can strengthen your relationship as you head towards Valentine’s Day.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Brad Wilcox, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Brad Wilcox: Thanks so much, Brett.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Brad Wilcox. He’s the author of the book Get Married. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Check out our show notes at aom.is/marriage where you find links to resources and we delve deeper into this topic, including a link to another survey that just came out by Gallup that once again affirmed that married people are happier. We’ve also included a link to an article by one of Brad’s colleagues and former AOM podcast guest, Lyman Stone, on how the chance of divorce still doesn’t negate this happiness premium for men.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanlies.com, where you find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to get your read on the podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to listen to AOM podcasts, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.