Normies Are Realizing Marriage is Cool (Uh Oh!)

In this episode, Simone and Malcolm explore the surprising resurgence of traditional marriages and their benefits, contrasting it with the red pill philosophy advocating against marriage. Through statistics and insights from Brad Wilcox's article 'Why Marriage Survives,' they analyze trends in divorce rates, childbearing, and marriage stability since the 1980s. They discuss how societal shifts are changing perceptions of relationships among young adults, emphasized by Andrew Tate's controversial views on masculinity and marriage. Additionally, the episode touches on gender roles, economic stability in relationships, and the importance of mutual respect and attentiveness in modern marriages.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] now it's radical monogamy, where monogamy. But like, I'm not a square or anything.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I, I love this concept of like, marriage. Have you thought of it?

Ooh, I don't know. No, no. I wanna get

Malcolm Collins: that dirty. Yeah. I'm gonna have a husband who I serve. What the food for? Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.

Simone Collins: And I'm gonna get pregnant. We're legally bound to each other. What is this? The Omega verse?

This is kinky. Oh God. No. It's really come to that though.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be going over the surprising increase in traditional marriages and traditional marriage structures and why they might be beneficial to people contrasting with the red pill ethos that will go into as well in this, where you get somebody who says, no, marriage is always bad.

It is just a trap for the man. It is just bad for the man. Which I'm sure [00:01:00] you've heard a hundred times on web PE sites.

Simone Collins: Okay. How do you define traditional marriage?

Malcolm Collins: And this is, well, you'll, you'll understand from the statistics that we're going over 'cause we're gonna be going over a lot of statistics in this episode.

And we're going to be doing it through the eyes of a piece by Brad Wilcox in The Atlantic called Why Marriage Survives.

Simone Collins: Nice. Brad Wilcox. Okay, let's do it. I'm excited.

Malcolm Collins: You're acting like we know him. Do we know him?

Simone Collins: We've met him a couple times at events.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, wild. Okay, cool. He's a prenatal list.

Simone Collins: Yeah. He, he's all about marriage.

His, his angle in the prenatal list movement is, I'm the marriage guy, so

Malcolm Collins: it would make sense that he's running. Sorry. By the way, Brad, if you, I met you. I'm just terrible with Ames. So, and faces, and I met you again. I'd be like, oh, you're that guy. You know, but sorry. Anyway so I'm gonna dive right in and I've cut out all of the fluff from this, and so we're just gonna go like stats heavy.

Okay.

Simone Collins: Awesome.

Malcolm Collins: First, the decline in the divorce rate was accelerating since the early 1980s. The divorce rate had now fallen by almost 40% and about half that decline happened in just the past 15 years. So I'm gonna [00:02:00] read that again. First, the decline in the divorce rate is accelerating, so fewer people are getting divorced and it's happening at an even faster rate as time goes on.

Simone Collins: But don't you think that's also a product of there being far fewer marriages?

Malcolm Collins: We'll get to that. Okay. Since, since the 1980s, the divorce rate has fallen by 40%. So when people get, wow. Since the 1980s, it's fallen by 40% and half that decline has happened in just the last 15 years. Hmm. Unless otherwise noted.

All figures in this article are the result of my analysis of national data. The idea that marriage will end in failure half the time or more was entrenched in American minds is out of date. The proportion of forced marriages expected to end in divorce has fallen to about 40% in recent years. So. Number of divorces are falling, but still, I mean, 40% for first marriage people.

And I love it when people come to you will be like, that's my odds of getting divorced if I get into a marriage. And I'm like, no, it's not like, you know, dumb people [00:03:00] get married too. Like thoughtless people get married too. People get drunk and get married in Vegas. Like the, the, these people who are ending up like you, you influence the odds that your marriage will end in divorce by how much thought you put into that marriage when you went into it. It is not a staple 40% for every individual. If you go to me and you said bet. On these marriages ending in divorce and I was given information on both people and how they vetted each other.

And I placed bets based on logic, and then another person placed bets on a, just a 40% number. Yeah, I would own that person. I would just completely come away with all the money. Because it isn't a blanket 40%, it is a 40% conditional on the circumstances that you were in when you got married.

Simone Collins: Second.

Yeah, I'm actually, I, I'm gonna see if I can find prediction markets for divorce. 'cause I bet that there are,

Malcolm Collins: I wonder if there's a prediction market for our divorce. I know that the number of there is for the number of [00:04:00] kids we have market on, the number of kids we'll have, but yeah. Second non-marital childbearing after almost half a century of increase, stalled out in 2009 at 41%.

Oh to down to 40% over the last few years. So basically for a long time, the amount of kids born out of wedlock was increasing. And it stalled out about 15 years ago. And, and it's been slow, very slowly going down. Um hmm. For children less divorce and a small decline in childbearing. Outside of wedlock means more stability after falling for more than 40 years.

Beginning in the 1960s, the share of children living in married families bottomed out at 64% in 2012 before rising to. 66% in 2024 according to the Census Bureau current population survey and the share of children raised in an intact myriad family for the duration of their childhoods, has climbed from a low point of 52% in 2014 to 54% into thousand [00:05:00] 24.

So, just to, to go over the, the bigger number there. After falling for more than 40 years, beginning in the 18, 1960s, the share of children living in married families bottomed out in 2012. So basically we saw this long period of decline and then a bottoming out. Yeah, that makes sense. With things beginning to potentially turn around.

Now, third shift may now be underway as well, although it is much less established in the first two. The rate of new marriages among prime aged adult, which hit its nadir during the pandemic, has risen in each of the three years of data since 2020. So again this is the rate of new marriages in prime age adults which.

In 2023, the most recent year available, it was higher than any year since 2008. At least. Some of this increase is a post pandemic bounce, but the share of all primary aged adults who are married has also leveled off in the past few years that, [00:06:00] that this, the decades long decline in the proportion of Mary's Americans who are married may have reached its low point. Some of these shifts are modest. Kunst was surely right that couples and families in the US will continue to live in a variety of arrangements and particular caution is warranted

as to the number of new marriages, , it's quite possible that the longer trend towards fewer people marrying will reassert itself, but