Is Marriage Actually Worth It? - Brad Wilcox

what do you think about people on the internet who say that marriage is a terrible deal for men and women yeah Chris you know I've been sort of playing the marriage uh horn for a long time and it's primarily been kind of critiquing folks on the left in the mainstream media as you know I've kind of gone after Folks at Bloomberg New York Times and elsewhere what's kind of new is we're getting all these voices from the online right from the red pill right you know like Andrew Tate and pearl Davis who are you know saying things like in in Pearl's words that that marriage is a death sentence for men or you know in Andrew Tate's words that um basically um there's no return you know on uh marriage there's zero Advantage as his is terminology you know for uh for men when it comes to getting married so we're kind of getting it now from the left and the right here um and um I think it's in some ways emblematic of the difficulties that of course comes primar from the women on the left and primarily the men on the right and it's partly kind of a reflection of the difficulties that a lot of younger adults are facing in finding you know a spouse finding a partner who would be worthy of marriage and so that's partly kind of an expression of frustration but I think it also kind of conveys what I call kind of the Midas mindset and that's this idea like what really matters in life is work it's money it's kind of building your own brand and I think in in different ways these folks too are kind of um you know propagating this mest mindset because you know they think that the real action is where um you know your work is at you know where your your brand is at uh where your bank accounts at you definitely see this from the left women on the left in a perhaps surprising way that you wouldn't have done 50 years ago whereby it is all about Financial Security and being a boss [ __ ] and being independent and I don't need no man and you know if he comes to me fine but I'm not going to go looking for him so that seems to be the equivalent that odd uh horseshoe Theory where some elements of the right and some elements of the left end up kind of saying very similar talking points even though they don't agree on everything else yeah know what's striking is sort of how similar their message is I mean they're kind of encouraging women and men separately to kind of Stay Free of family encumbrances stay free of marriage and to know to pursue individualism to pursue money pursue career in different ways and that that's sort of the pathway towards fulfillment when in fact the data lead us obviously in a very different direction what is happening with current marriage rates give me the 30,000 foot view yeah so I think that's certainly one of the one of the the pieces of bad news that I convey in the book um that is that the marriage rat has come down about 65% what we're seeing now in the adult population is just under 50% of folks are married so we're kind of of you know that's a that's a new record a new low um and we're projecting where would that have been if it's at 50% now are just under where would that have been 30 years ago 50 years ago whatever 75% you know we're talking like you know the the the late 60s early 70s basically so um so that's obviously a big change in recent decades and then we're also projecting to um you know between 80 90% of folks would have been getting married you know Coming of Age um in you know in the in the 70s you know give or take um whereas today we're projecting that probably more than one in four young adults you know in their 20s today will never get married this is kind of record demographic um territory that that we're entering into um and just means they going to be a lot of kind of permanent bachelors and permanent bachelorettes at least when it comes to sort of um having put a ring on it in in this culture today what is driving this we've talked about you know some cultural forces that are going on and some memes and some movements and stuff like that but from my position they usually seem to be in reaction it's a cope not always there are people who genuinely believe these things but there's a lot of people retreating into their inner citadels of I have struggled to make this work therefore this is the philosophy that I find and if what you say is correct that you're going to have more people who are potentially uh participants of this new party uh than people who aren't that's going to allow it to proliferate more and get more and more popular but like structurally what's happening what are the other big dynamics that are causing this increase in uh lack of marriage yeah well I think you know obviously there's an economic story here um on the one hand as a society we kind of we're very affluent so we don't depend upon marriage you know economically like we did in earlier centuries that's that's part of the story at the same time the economy has kind of moved in directions that have made a whole class of men less economically valuable less needed in today's world and so they're less attractive as as husbands um they're more likely to get divorced if they do end up married um down the road so I think the fact that men who are not kind of oriented towards the information economy are struggling more um is part of the economic story um when it comes to policies a lot of our policies end up kind of penalizing marriage unwittingly things like Medicaid for instance I've talked to just recently here in Charlottesville I talked to a you know we we're having a marriage event at a restaurant and so one of the waitresses was kind of engaging afterwards and she was kind of saying well yeah she and her husband are together but they're not legally married they've got two kids I'm like what's the story well you know she gets her insurance through Medicaid and were they to get married they'd move above that threshold um and lose access to you know Medicaid for her and for her two uh her two kids so there's ways in which our public policies unintentionally um penalize marriage culturally I think obviously seen a big shift towards individualism since the late 1960s that have um you know made us think more about ourselves and less about others and that plays into marriage and family in obvious ways we've also seen a parallel shift away from religion um which is also a big factor I think in the decline of marriage since religion is a big predictor both of getting married and and staying married and having children um and then I think there's just been this kind of um what what I just described earlier as a kind of a Midas mindset where I think um in part the rise of the internet the rise of smartphones um urbanization as well there's a lot of good work that's been done on this in in in in Asia um from psychologist in Asia kind of just basically have made people focus a lot more on um on status and on kind of their prospects sort of in The Mating sector but less on kind of like actually putting a ring on it and transitioning into you know having kids and having a family so there's a kind of Arrested it's not adolescent so much as kind of an arrested sort of young adulthood where people you know are just focusing on that sort of 20-some stage of life and not transitioning into into marriage and Parenthood um and that's also I think um and that's just kind of magnified you know accelerated by the way in which technology is allowing people to kind of um you know live the life the online life you know the Instagram life um and all the kind of you know I'd say kind of transient and short-term values that are magnified on on platforms like Instagram and now Tik Tok too what are the self-reports saying you know this is your assessment looking at the data with your biases and all the rest of it sure right what what are people saying when they are asked by psychologists and sociologists why are you not yet married why don't you want to get married if you don't want to get married what's the word on the ground well there certainly are people who are saying you know that they're um they're they're they're not ready for marriage yet they're not ready to kind of settle down they're you know enjoying their 20-some years having fun they're trying to get their job their career kind of launched successfully they think there's some kind of obstacle you know between being married and being focused on you know on their work um people in the lower income strata like I mentioned some of them will talk about the way in which public policy penalizes marriage um a lot of folks say it's hard to meet someone who kind of meets their standards both in terms of you know having their stuff together a lot of women say the men in their lives you know aren't sufficiently um you know grown up don't have that that that clear sense of mission and direction that kind of capacity to kind of you know care for themselves and care for others um you know there are men who would report to that the women alive are are too materialistic they're looking for you know um just a breadwinner or provider but not someone who's going to really be a partner to them um so there's just a whole range of different reasons that you hear from people when it comes to why they're either not able to marry or why marriage is not right now appealing to them or why marriage is not even on their their longer term Horizon and what about divorce rates what's the what's the Insight then well divorces come so the statistic people sort of think is still you know true is that they think that one and two marriages today will end in divorce but what we actually see in the research is it's probably closer to around 40% a little bit north of 40% of marriages want and divorce today the divorce rates come down since 1980 by about 40% it Rose dramatically from the late 60s to 1980 you know basically more than doubled in that era so I think what's important for people to realize is that sort of um um all the tum out that we saw with the divorce revolution of 1970s and early 80s is kind of settled down but that's in line with decreasing rates of marriage correct so we have a selection effect going on here correct so the kinds of people today who are getting married are more educated they're more affluent and they're relatively more religious they're also in a country like the us maybe a country too like the UK um they're more likely to have you know be immigrants you know non-natives right so um in my book I talk about how asian-americans are disproportionately married in the US and we've seen a lot of immigrants coming from Asia obviously in recent decades for instance and they're more likely to be married than native born Americans but just in general immigrants are more likely to be married in the US than native born Americans are as well yeah that is interesting so recent years have seen a rise in unpartnered Americans as well especially young men 34% of young women between 18 29 is single 63% of young men in that same age bracket are also single so it's not just a no marriage culture it's a no dating culture as well so we have seen dramatic declines in dating Al that statistic that you mentioned has been challenged by my colleague nck GFR he thinks that there's a gap between you know young women and young men um there but it's not quite that or young men are more likely to be single but it's not quite that uh that dramatic but still it is the case that we're seeing kind of record shares of young adults who have not gotten married higher among young men obviously than young women because women tend to marry guys who are a bit older than they are um and we have seen evidence from people like Jee twangy that dating is is down um and so I talk about kind of like the closing of the American Heart unfolding where again we're seeing you know for 20-some a record share of them projected never to marry more than more than one in four and then when it comes to fertility um we think that um that there'll be you know also kind of continued declines in um in fertility in the US as well one of the biggest memes one of the most common memes that you hear about on the internet especially for men but also in some regards for women given that they're socioeconomically more viable on their own now is that marriage is a bad deal financially what what does the data actually say yeah so it was striking that you know um when I was finishing up this book um Bloomberg had a you know an article that said women who get single and don't have kids are getting richer um and it kind of claim that you know women who are kind of forgoing marriage and motherhood were you know better off than women who are married um and that's that's not not true what we do see is that um women who are married are markedly more likely to be well off um and they're also much less likely to be poor so they're about 80% less likely to be poor even controlling for things like you know race and age and education and then they have about 10 times the assets heading into retirement you know in their 50s um compared to their uh their single female peers um so and the story for for men is is is pretty similar when it comes to Assets in one's 50s um and then men earn between sort of 10 and 25% more um as married men than their uh their single peers um now part of that's the selection effect where the kinds of men who you are getting married are more likely to have the kind of ethic that would um lead to financial success we also see evidence though too from twin studies that men who are um who are who are married are doing better financially than than their twin who is not married so it's pretty rigorous evidence that something about marriage per se is associated with men flourishing uh financially what do you think's the mechanism so what actually a colleague of mine here at UVA uh found was that men who are married are less likely to get fired for instance um even controlling for things like you know race and age and education um she also found too that men who are married are less likely to quit a job without having first found a replacement job whereas single guys just more likely to say you know that's it I've had it I'm I'm out of here and then they're unemployed and struggling to find a job so I think being married just makes guys more prudent about um their approach to um you know uh their approach to to finding work what do you say to the guys that have serious concerns getting married is a huge risk because she's going to leave me and take half of everything that I own and I'm going to be stuck paying uh either her life or child support or something for the rest of my life um prenups are not even worth the paper that they're written on you know I see a lot of this on in comment sections and on the internet what's the truth and what's your take on it well I think the tough thing about this right is it's there's a kind of mindset thing which I'm sure you're familiar with kind of an many sper like and so if your mindset is kind of revolving around fear if you're thinking about that dword divorce you know heading into marriage in your marriage um you know you're more likely to end up getting divorced right so if you get a prenup you know my own book indicates that folks who have prenups have lower marital happiness and they're more likely to be you know thinking that divorce is um is on the horizon so I it's one of those things where like if you have more of an all-in mindset you know like I am fully in and and you obviously marry someone who shares that that mindset where you're not talking about divorce you're not thinking about divorce you don't really see it as an option you're much more likely to be not just avoiding divorce court but flourishing in your marriage because you're going to have a greater you know Foundation of security and Trust in your marriage um but beyond that it's it's worth pointing out as they do in the book that there are ways in which it looks like people can kind of solidify their marriage and reduce their risk of divorce so we see for instance is that people who go on regular date nights um over one study had about 25% less uh risk of getting divorced um people who are religious especially who attend church together are between 30 and 50% less likely to get divorced um folks who don't commit infidelity are markably less likely to get divorced but my point is simply is that there are things you can kind of do right and if you're not religious you know the thing I would say is is um you know surround yourself with couples who are stably married we know from the work of um Nicholas christakis at Yale for instance that if you're sister gets divorced if your best friend gets divorced in the face of kind of you know ordinary marital difficulties that you know most of us have if we've been married for five 10 15 20 years whatever um your odds have divorce you know Skyrocket but if you're sister you know is stably married and has kind of navigated the inevitable challenge associated with married life if your best friend has you know stably um remain stably married and navigated those challenges successfully your odds of getting dived you know go way down um so there's a birds of a feather flock together thing here right Chris and so you need to be really I think deliberate once you're married or as you're heading into marriage about picking friends who are you know with you and for you in your marriage and who are kind of you know um living the kinds of lives that lend themselves to stable family so if you surround yourself in you know or Ste yourself in networks that are more familyfriendly that's also protective Factor as well pick your couple's date night Partners carefully then is the is the adice yeah and you know we've had like you know Governor Mark Sanford right you know that Republican governor in South Carolina you know he he he was hiking the Appalachian Trail was the story he gave to one journalist right well turns out he was in in South America um rening a woman who wasn't his wife because he and his buddies would go every year on some kind of international trip that was just kind of crazy um and so I think in Mark Sanford's case part of the reason that he ended up divorced was he he he wasn't good about picking friends who were you know um gonna be kind of leading him down the the best path uh marriage wise so the obvious I guess criticism or or question here that gets opened up is why should I as a man or a woman let go of these things that make me happy I want to go to South America with my boys I don't want to spend my time playing [ __ ] back gamon or Scrabble or shads with this bunch of other couples I don't want to restrict my freedom and my opportunities to choose what I want to sleep with who I want to go where I want to work how I want to leave a job when I want all of these things sound like restrictions on my freedoms what's in it for me why should I if if I'm so happy doing all of these things why like what about happiness what what are the happiest people from a relationship status perspective yeah well I think it's important just to kind of basically stress that yeah getting married does mean taking options off the table both in terms of Ro romantic Partners in terms of your free time you know it does mean you're sacrificing a lot in terms of your freedom but the point that I would make is that we are social animals that's Aristotle term we're hardwired to connect right and so it ends up being the case that that friendships and family relationships are the things that are most important for our sense of meaning purpose happiness um and there's just no question today that married men and women especially married fathers and married mothers are the happiest folks out there in the prime of life I'm looking at folks 18 to 55 and you know finding that when it comes to reports of being kind of very happy um with your life that um both women um and men who are married moms and dads are about twice as likely to be very happy with their lives compared to their single and childless peers um so that's a pretty big difference um and then when it comes to kind of a range of indicators from money to Career Success to sexual frequency um to religious attendance to self-rated health these are all things that predict happiness um you know for ordinary marriage Americans and pretty powerfully so but none of those factors Chris kind of compares to a good marriage women and men who are happily married are about 545 per more likely say that they're very happy with their lives um and as I've looked at the statea set called the GSS the General Social Survey it's kind of like the goal standard for you know social um attitudes and behaviors in the US I can't find any variable in the GSS that predicts Global Life satisfaction um like a good marriage and when I've kind of mentioned that statistic the push back that I get from you know more Progressive academics is well yeah it's a selection effect Brad the kinds of women and men who are happy are going to be happily married but my response to that is well you would expect then that you would see kind of a similar story playing out for you know like a career satisfaction indicator in the GSS and well it's true that people who are you know happy with their jobs are also happy with their lives again there's no fact that predicts happiness in the GSS um you know like a good marriage we see other data sets too you know from Harvard for instance um tracking men longitudinally you know um that come to kind of similar conclusions as well so I think it's just kind of important to underline that yes marriage requires sacrifices uh lots of them um but there are major Returns on on that investment for most folks and the final piece I would say about the happiness story is that I looked at generosity in marriage a number of years ago and what I found was that having a spouse a husband or wife who was generous towards you boosted you know your happiness in the marriage in ways that be I think you know expected but being generous towards your wife generous towards your husband was an even better predictor of your happiness in the marriage and again if that's one of the best predictors of Happiness overall just I think suggests to us that kind of living for others um as long as you make a good choice and that's obviously a huge caveat um living for your spouse living for your kids uh living for your kin and living for your friends to an important extent these are the things obviously that gives our lives meaning Direction purpose and a sense of happiness and living for ourselves I think often ends at making us miserable one of the things that people who are reticent about getting married or concerned about it have the same way as the financial concern is well I'm rolling the dice you know a um at least if I'm single my happiness lies exclusively in the power of my own hands whereas if I get into a marriage I am now my happiness is contingent on this other person and we try and do our best to screen whoever it is and work out how crazy or not crazy they might be uh but we there is a non-zero chance that we get that wrong and that now means that I have sacrificed um okay pay singlet tenness for unhappy married uh rolling that dice that that sort of roulette spin uh is it causes trepidation for people yeah Chris and I think it's a legitimate concern um and as as we discussed before about 40% of folks getting married today will get divorced so it's it's it is a major I think concern um but I think there is um you know there are two other things that I would say to to that kind of person number one is that nothing in life worth having you know I think doesn't require a measure of risk a and a you know potential for real failure in terms of whether it's professional success whether it's you know being a great athlete whatever it might be all these things that you know I think tend to lend our lives a sense of meaning Direction and happiness often require risk and that's true I think for love and marriage as well um the other thing that I would say too is that um even when marriages fail um and I certainly have you know friends whose marriages have failed both women and men um what I also see though is oftentimes they have kids and and in the immediate aftermath of divorce that can be extraordinarily difficult both for them and for their children but as they kind of move into their you know 50s and 60s and 70s you know if if they're um deliberate about kind of continuing to be a good father a good mother um you know these friends of mine have gotten divorced derive a tremendous sense of um meaning and satisfaction from their relationship um relationships to with their with their kids and and then their grandkids so that's also I think can be a kind of a consolation for folks who have gotten divorced and I one more thing I would add too is that again I think there are you know I talk about in the book four groups of folks who have much um greater odds of of being kind of both happily married and and for the most part stably married and those grp groups are asian-americans they are religious Americans they're college educated Americans and they're conservative Americans and so there are things that again you can kind of do um both as a spouse and in terms of just being you know cognizant of kind of the communities where you're you know where you're Maran Asian is that your advice no I'm just saying um no the point I would make about kind of the the Asian finding is that right there's certain kinds of values in certain kinds of communities right and so you know um what Asians have is among other things like a keen recognition often times of how much marriage matters for their kids and so that sort of conditions how they deal with marital difficulties and challenges right um they tend to be surrounded by kin who are stably married um they often are kind of taking advice um from kin about who to marry especially obviously from Indian um context right so um you can if you're not Asian you can kind of take some lessons there to for your you know um uh for your uh uh your own miral path how all of that data that you've just come up with there to do with happiness and marital status how robust is it are we going to find out that this is replication crisis in in 10 years time like because that's obviously oh well that data doesn't seem to be sufficiently this or that or the other how how much are you able to bet that that's accurate and correct well I think when it comes to things like meral stability there's just no I mean I've looked at a lot of data sets when it comes to like looking at the role of ethnicity um in asan no no sorry the relationship between married whether or not you are married or single and your happiness in life and your life outcome satisfaction um yeah that's uh again lots of data sets you know the GSS um the American Family survey you know mitus there are lots of data sets that show that there's a strong Association now the question is whether or not it's causal um I think that's the where the debate comes but there's just no question that folks who are married um are more likely to say that they're satisfied with their lives they put more meaningful lives and less loneliness and just you know in England the US Europe it's you know it's definitely a common Story how does this relationship between marital status and life satisfaction happiness loneliness how does that change across time and with age so I think the best story that I saw the best study on this that I saw was actually from Britain where you are from and it just what it suggested was it kind of like the the biggest there's was there's obviously there's a honeymoon kind of Premium where people when they're first married they enjoy kind of um especially kind of large premiums when it comes to happiness um but this particular study from the UK which is kind of tracking women and men over time found this kind of like a midlife um piece where the the premium was biggest for folks FKS kind of in in midlife I think in their 40s and 50s um that's I think part to because often there there are challenges associated with raising kids um with you know changes in your obviously your health you know your your people are becoming aware of their mortality career changes all that kind of stuff is all kind of coming out you know in your 50s oftentimes and so to have like you know the benefit of a co-pilot I think can be really valuable for folks yeah does this strange smile shaped graph to happiness and life satisfaction so for the people that are just listening if you imagine it's not a particularly smooth smile it's more like a joker a joker smile um but if you had the beginning of Life on the I think it's probably like 13 or or 16 or something on the left and then you've got 80 on the right and it does seem to really dip down you know 40s basically most of your 40s seems to be pretty rough and then it kind of picks picks back up uh through your 50s um I think I'm right in saying there's at least some day that suggests the single biggest risk of suicide suicidality are men aged 40 to 45 it's this very particular demographic of men uh so it's specifically again for men I'm going to guess that being married is uh prophylactic against this uh period of lower mood yeah and know one of the biggest factors predicting uh both suicide and more broadly deaths of Despair from men is marriage um so married guys are much less likely to end up you know dying from um drinking or drugs or or suicide more directly right so what about divorced guys though yeah no they have a higher risk of all those bad things as well definitely so again we're talking about this it seems like a bit of a theme it's it's this risk reward ratio I think that a lot of people are are looking at you sort of hinted at something earlier on with the stat around if your sister or your best friend gets divorced then the likelihood of you getting divorced goes up to too there is definitely this sort of mimetic um right thing that's going on I think motherhood a lot of motherhood can be laid at the feet of this if you're not around mothers you don't see the joy that motherhood brings to mothers therefore what do you see well you see what everyone else sees which is Instagram which is a trip to Barley and a brunch with the girls and wearing cute heels and not getting stretch marks and all the rest of the things so you you kind of absor absorb the aggregate culture as opposed to the micr culture because the aggregate culture doesn't optimize for like things that aren't flashy and easily displayed on the internet and I think that there is that you must have thought of this too this sort of mimetic nature of uh the arau number of marriage being either above or below one based on how many people are getting married at the moment yeah no I think definitely this goes back to kind of the power of the smartphone social media and the internet and I think um one reason we have have you know seen um you know uh marriage come down and fertility come down recent years is that people don't kind of fully appreciate how much um you know putting a ring on it can can matter in in positive ways so there was a study done recently um that s was was suggesting that today a lot of folks think that yeah actually men benefit from marriage but women do not um and when you look at the happiness you know story in the General Social Serv surve um what you see basically is that as I as I mentioned before married moms are twice as L could it be um you know very happy as single and childless women um what you see in you know basically different data sets is that 60% of married moms say that their lives are meaningful most or all the time compared to only 36% of single and childless women um they're also much more likely to say that they're lonely right so when it comes to things like meaning loneliness and happiness what you're seeing on Instagram or Tik Tok doesn't correspond to what we see in um representative population surveys of men and and women but it it is difficult to convey that in a 280 character tweet or in a cool Tik Tok video and there's this interesting trade-off between happiness pleasure and meaning and satisfaction in some ways that it's very difficult to portray meaning and life satisfaction through a cool Instagram post it's pretty easy to show pleasure and happiness through that or at least present pleasure and happiness through that so yeah it's uh in that regard I think anything and this is anything that's difficult um anything which is a little bit more subtle you know if if someone can get the gains of appearing to have the thing without having to do the hard work of getting the thing they're going to optimize for that it's very right that's the problem with being online too much right Chris obviously you know there's um some work done by a famous psychologist at Toronto um and I'm forgetting his name right now but it's sort of just basically talking about how um folks who are kind of experiencing both a lot of suffering which when surprise us but also like virtually no suffering are the worst off and folks who kind of experience a kind of that middle range of suffering are actually the best off they're like the most emotionally resilient kind of the best you know spirit so we're actually we built to some extent right to experience some degree of of pain some degree of of uh you know of suffering some drama in our lives and if all you're doing is kind of you know um eating well drinking well you know and spending all your day on on on this device you know doesn't actually end up well for you longer term is is is the is the point how does being married change or impact mental and physical health well um yeah in terms of things like depression and anxiety they tend to go down happiness goes up as I said before loneliness goes down um when it comes to physical health there the story is a little bit more complicated um on one indicator in particular uh women and men who are married do worse and that is their weight right when you're married you're off the market and um you're you know you're tend to be eating it maybe eating at home more and whatever be snacking more Etc so you're not you're not kind of like making that same effort to you know to keep the pounds off and so we do see that's Wonder but generally speaking folks who are married um are are doing better healthwise um for instance St of looking at indicate that people um are more likely to recover um and and do okay in the wake of you know some kind of cancer diagnosis if you have parents older parents um been to the hospital you know um you see that oftentimes that spouse is really kind of working the the nurses and doctors in ways that tend to R down to the benefit of you know her her husband or uh his wife um so there's just no question that folks who are married um do better on the vast majority of Health outcomes and live longer especially true for guys they think it's what's the tell the stats that eight nine years is what I've what I've read and um and work done by Linda White um and Maggie Gallagher um you know that men who are stably married live eight to nine years longer than their peers who don't get married or who get divorced um so um and women who who are married live longer too but they don't enjoy the same kind of of Premium as married men do um that's that's a part we think too because you know men who are are single are just much more likely to um you know do crazy things like ride motorcycles getting fights in in bars on a Friday or Saturday night you know what have you so um men are just more prone to engaging the kinds of risky behaviors that put them at risk of an earlier death but married men tend to steer clear of a lot of those behaviors and there must be a mediating effect of loneliness here as well uh I had Robin dun show a while ago and he was talking about this Inner Circle he says that you can keep around about five friends in the Inner Circle but a relationship takes up two of those five slots so if you have a partner a significant other you've maybe only got space for three other people but the most common answer at the moment when people are asked how many close friends do you have to call on an emergency is zero that's not the average but it's the most common it's more common than any other number is zero I think the number of men who say that they have no close friends triple no uh 5x from 3% to 15% from 1990 to 2020 so you know in the wake of this atomized individualized bleep bleep cyberpunk 2077 hellscape having one person that's always going to be in your boat with you rowing seems like a a pretty good fallback yeah that's right I mean there's you know there's certainly been sociologists and psychologists who who want to sort of talk up the the Virtues Of Living Single and obviously not everyone who's single is doing badly plenty of folks are doing great and there are plenty of folks who are married who are miserable but on average I think that's because we're hardwired to connect people who are married are more likely to be uh to be flourishing and uh that's you know that's sort of the average story what role does wanting kids have in encouraging people to get married have you been able to pass out someone early on knows that they want kids therefore they get married in order to be able to have kids is is that like a predictor yeah I think we do see today in a more secular World um people are less motivated to kind of get married you know just for religious reasons or to kind of you know legitimate their relationship you know in terms of living together whatnot so I think once they begin to think about having kids um they're more likely to think about doing that in the context of marriage um wanting to kind of give their kids the gift of of married parents I mean see even you know um in northern Europe where marriage is sort of much more optional that after either after the first child or you know before the first kid you know as folks kind of um think about Parenthood or they want to kind of give their kids that you know that experience of married parents um you know they'll get married so I think there's still a way in which people who are kind of more child centered um think about marriages as the ideal place to be and rear kids and of course they're right there's just no question that kids are more likely to be benefiting uh when their parents are married than kids who are in other um you know other situations what impact do kidss have on marriage marriage success and then on happiness as well so um there's no question that um kind of having a baby is a hugely stressful thing for couples um and so you do marital quality dip especially off you know after the first child comes along um but I think what often happens is that kind of couples reach a kind of equilibrium you know some six months year whatever it might be after the you know the baby comes and they begin to adjust to this new um this new creature and this new reality now I think this this adjustment can be harder for people who've spent a very long time living without children um because kids do take a lot of time and energy and effort and you know they can be obviously extremely difficult and frustrating in different ways so I think um the transition to Parenthood is certainly a challenge um but what's interesting though Chris is that there was a lot of research before kind of 2000 that indicated that parents were less happy than their childless peers and since 2000 we've seen that relationship switch so that parents today are happier than childless adults um and of course no group of parents are happier than married parents so again when you kind of look when you look at the General Social Survey what you find is that the happiest group of women and men um particularly kind of in midlife in sort of 30s 40s 50s are married parents and I think what's happening here in part might be that childless adults um have fewer of those sort of resources um social resources or connections you know School connections Sports connections for folks who are religious religious connections that tend to flow from being a parent so I have a lot of kids and my days are are often very busy and you know I can be stressed out but I'm I'm never lonely you know I I'm going to a you know basketball practice I'm dropping off kids at school in the morning you know going to church with with a family on Sunday morning you know so there's all this social stuff happening I'm saying as a sociologist that's that's worth kind of noting and my peers who are single and childless you know they don't have those child related activities um and then when it comes to just kind of like free time too like you just you can't spend you know too much time on a device if you're a halfway decent husband wife father mother right so I think that's also thing that that get getting married or having kids is a antiphone use technology totally totally saying that I think so I think you know the rise of smartphones um in screens in the last you know decade or so I think maybe and I haven't I need to I haven't seen any really good evidence on this but my hypothesis is that you know married parents may be less likely to um get sort of uh sucked down that electronic Rabbit Hole than folks who are single and childless what about the reverse relationship what are the differences and outcomes for kids from Married versus non-married homes you know there's a lot of people that would say well I don't need to get married in order to be able to raise a child it's useless it's just a piece of paper in any case look at how many people get divorced what's even the point yeah I there's been I think really since the 1970s Chris with the dramatic rise and divorce and non-metal childbearing a lot of folks have been kind of making the argument that what matters for kids is not you know their parents marri marriage um but you know just you know getting love and and maybe money as well so kind of what matters for kids is not is not marriage but it's it's money and you know and a loving family and that can take many different forms I was raised by a single mom and I think I turned out okay my sister turned out okay you know many kids turn out okay you know from different family forms but I'm also a sociologist and on average what I can tell you is that kids are more likely to flourish you know educationally socially and emotionally when they have the benefit of married parents I think you know in my book probably the most striking statistic that I came up with just in kind of running the numbers with my colleague Wendy Wong is that we find in the National longitudinal survey of Youth that young men today in America are more likely to spend some time in prison or in jail before they turn 30 um than they are to graduate from college if they're from any kind of non- intact family and by by contrast you know guys from intact families are you know about four times more likely to graduate from college than they are to land in prison or in jail that's kind of the probably the most dramatic um statistic but it kind of just gives you a sense of like how much um a Sibly married Family Matters socially and emotionally I think especially for uh for our kids I've been a fan of your Twitter for quite a while and some of the stuff that I've seen over the last couple of years I think from you young black women from intact two parent families are more likely to graduate from college 36% versus young white women from one parent families 28% young black men from intact two parent families are less likely to be incarcerated 14% than young white men from one parent families boys who grew up apart from their biological father are about two times more likely to land in prison or jail by age 30 fatherlessness is a better predictor of incarceration than race or growing up poor and 95% of upper income moms are married 76% of middle-income moms are married and 35% of lower income mums are married so fascinating yeah these are the statistics and it's important I think to um just remind folks that you know oftentimes um the biggest privilege that kids have is not how much money their parents make but whether or not their their parents are married and in a decent relationship it's important to kind of add that cabin important to acknowledge that kind of a decent marriage or a great marriage is is the best context for our kids what role does political affiliation have here with seeing an increasing amount of data talking about uh young gen Z gen a boys uh skewing skewing aggressively right and that the girls are kind of going left but when we get into the older age brackets what's the political affiliation role well Chris you know when it comes to marriage a lot of folks in the media and the academy understand and appreciate that you know education money matter the folks who are college educated folks who are in that upper middle class bracket are more likely today to get married and stay married what they don't realize though is it's not just class it's also culture so a majority of of college educated Americans in the US and that 1855 bracket are married but also a majority of folks who are religious um and a majority of folks who are conservative whereas the majority of folks who are not religious are not married and majority of folks who are either self ided as moderates or liberal are not married as well so what I'm saying to you Chris is that it's both class and culture today that predict who is getting married and who is staying married um now on the sort of politics Point more concretely what we see is that for single adults about one in five young adults under the age of 30 um are not going to be able to find someone at least right now who kind of shares their ideological commitments um and so what that means more concretely to is that you know um liberal women are going to have um difficulty oftentimes finding enough liberal men and conservative men who are single are going to find you know or have difficulty finding enough um conservative women um who are kind of sharing their there's an increase in uh an unpreparedness of people to date across the aisle as well I saw you tweet about that yeah and so I think the hard thing about this too right is that I think um particularly when it comes to sort of how you think about work and family and how you want to organize the division of labor in your own household you know how much you think it's important for moms to care for young children for instance or for you know for men to to be good Breadwinners um couples who are not on the same page on those issues really struggle so what I would say to couples who are dating is um it's fine to date someone who doesn't share your politics but you know it's really important to kind of come to um roughly common ground when it comes to thinking about how you want to raise your kids and divide up work and family because those things are are very real issues for couples today um once they have children yeah so you could have somebody who doesn't share your particular political ideology but does agree with you about how family life should be set up inside of the house and that might just make for spicy Thanksgiving Day dinners but outside of that the stru of how all of this stuff is put together is interesting I had a a conversation with a friend who I'm not going to name but this was their controversial thesis which they have no intention of sharing publicly that the current dating and mating crisis is good in overall cultural evolutionary terms many are called to propagate their genes beyond the demographic pinch Point few are chosen whoever manages to propagate their family in the face of a structurally anti-natalist antic culture will manage to do do so by virtue of having developed strong enough immune response to toxic messages a celibate clergy is good because it scream out a propensity for fanaticism out of the gene pool and that's from Carl San yeah I mean the only thing that I will say there I think is that you know I I'm conservative as you know but I think um and I would certainly acknowledge that you know in the last uh seven years there are plenty of of of things that conservatives um you know uh can and should um be concerned about in their own tribe right I think what progressives don't appreciate though is that they have their own um challenges in their own tribe right and I think what for for progressives their some of their biggest challenges surround marriage and family and so we do see you know in my book and elsewhere some evidence when it comes to um getting married and having children that kind of not only is there a gap between conservatives and liberals um in their likelihood of getting married and having kids um but that that Gap is growing because I think progressives for a wide number of different reasons are um less oriented towards marriage and less oriented towards Parenthood um and they have fewer of the kind of the Norms you know that would sort of steer them into marriage in the first place and then allow them to sort of um you more easily navigate marriage in the second place so one concrete example of what I'm talking about is we've seen for instance um in recent years growing kind of interest in polyamory or support for polyamory and less kind of support for like the classic marriage Norm that um you should be faithful in marriage and yet we see in the in the you know in the data in the General Social Survey that couples who or husbands and wives who believe that you know um that sex outside of marriage is always wrong are more likely to be happily married um and I certainly see you know they're also more other data sets they're more stably married so I think the challenge for progressives is that some of the newer ideas some of the newer Norms that have kind of filtered into their into their tribe into their camp in recent decades are ones that are kind of profoundly um either well are are profoundly anti- nuptial and anti-natal um and so that's a challenge that I don't think progressives have fully kind of WRA their heads around that is the way in which a lot of their newer commitments are making it more difficult for them to you know to find a spouse to prioritize getting married um and then to have a family yeah and also there's a good chunk of data that suggests people who are left of center are more unhappy presumably this could be done whilst controlling for marital status as well so you have someone whose worldview or psychology or lifestyle predisposes them to being less happy than their Centrist and right of Center counterparts it also discourages them from getting precisely the kind of Union that seems to be very robust in improving their level of happiness and then for the people who are doing it you know for the the movement because I want to be sort of a good liberal whatever whatever that means because political orientation is moderately genetically heritable like all of our traits are if you are someone who genuinely cares about propagating liberal ideology long term but you are anti-natalist in your philosophy you are creating a dying future for the philosophy that you say that you care about which is this sort of it's still as far as I can see that because also people left of center reject behavioral genetics largely or a lot of the time um that is a hammer blow that I think hasn't hit yet properly and I think that if people on the left fully understood and realized that they would have a different approach so um a couple of things I would say in response to that one is that um I have looked at the sort of Gap in happiness between conservatives and liberals and do find that you know a large minority of that Gap can be attributed to differences in the likelihood of being married and the likelihood of being happily married so that's that's certainly a real thing that there's a kind of conservatives are happier in general and part of the reason that they're happier in general is they're more likely to be married in the first place and then happily married in the second place and they're they're Progressive peers um and in terms of kind of like the long-term implications of all this I think the obviously the one flying the ointment for conservatives is that many of their kids end up you know kind of leaving the the you know um the tribe once they hit you know young adulthood and so there are plenty of obviously progressiv out there who are raised in conservative or religious homes who are now you know um no longer cons conservative and or no longer religious so that's where we do get obviously kind of new waves of progressives and New Waves of more secular folks kind of emerging um but again what's striking about some of the newer data on marriage and fertility is that the Gap seems to be growing between conservatives and liberals in ways that might have long-term implications for the ideological makeup of uh a place like the United States yeah so one of the things that we haven't necessarily spoken about here are the Dynamics when it comes to choosing a mate what's the soulmate myth so the soulmate myth is this idea that what really matters when it comes to love and marriage is finding someone who kind of fits you perfectly and who is GNA kind of make you happy and fulfilled almost all of the time kind of it's it's a very romanticized view of Love and Marriage it's one that you kind of get in you know sometimes Taylor Swift songs it's one that you can get in plenty of movies it's one that you get in books like Eat Pray Love right right and so um the problem of course with this with this idea with what I call the soulmate myth is that we know just physiologically the butterflies Chris Fly Away within a few months or within a year or two of you know of either dating or or marrying someone um there's just kind of like there's physiologically a high when you first meet someone when you first connect with someone um and a lot of those hormones just kind of like you know go away after a period of time and so that that sort of that magic that you first experience in a romantic relationship begins to dissipate um and so the challenge is how do you kind of move beyond that and recognize that there are other things that connect you to that person so I think having a you know um a more realistic view of marriage that yes you kind of try to cultivate the romance in your um in your relationship and that's why regular date nights are really valuable for instance but you also recognize that marriage is about more than just those feelings um it's about things like money things like companionship things like kids um but beyond that I would say it's it's kind of a a recognition that love is about not feelings but seeking the good of the other and so couples who kind of have that I think richer view of marriage um one that's not as romanticized are more likely not just to kind of Go the Distance to avoid Divorce Court um but they're also more likely to enjoy a higher quality marriage because they just have a richer view of what marriage is all about and they're not as sort of um you know uh likely to be um susceptible to the es and flows of of those romantic feelings um you know in a relationship did you see Mia Khalifa trended I think it was about two or three months ago on Tik Tok for saying um marriage is nothing special it's a piece of paper and if the person that you are with isn't helping you grow then it is time for you to move on I didn't see that particular comment but again I think this is the hard thing for people who are kind of who have that mentality to wrap their heads around if that's your view then your odds of failing at marriage are extremely high but if your view is instead that you love this person and that you're committed to this person and that you will the good of this person um you know come hell water um your odds of of making it are extremely high and your but and your odds of actually being happy with in the in the marriage and in life more generally are going to be high too most of the time the problem is that we are not able it is very difficult to make ourselves believe something we can make ourselves do things all the time you you can stay in a marriage there are millions and billions of people probably that have stayed in un happy marriages but believing that marriage is not supposed to be what a recent guest taught me is the Confluence era for as long as you can benefit me and I can benefit you this relationship works and at the moment that that stops happening the Confluence is gone and therefore we don't need to stick about so it's all well and good saying look the thing that is best for you is to believe that marriage is supposed to be more than just about this Confluence or about the butterflies or whatever but we are inexorably linked to the culture and the cultural moment and the memes and the trends that we find ourselves in and extricating ourselves from that is difficult completely agree with you I think the challenge here Chris and this is why my book is subtitled defy the elites that's part of the the subtitle right and you know I've gotten push back on that from folks well the elites are actually the ones who are you know more likely today to get married in the first place and to be stably married in the second place and and my own data indicates to be reasonably happy right and that's I think in part because they talk left and walk right often times right they talk left walk right it's what I mean luy belief it's a yeah they you know so there's you know they don't live the kind of individualistic lives that they kind of propagate in you know on Twitter or if they're heading up a school board or you know um in some kind of mainstream media publication they actually they're more likely to sort of Honor some of these older Traditions that tend to reinforce strong and stable marriages in their private lives um so you know so for instance I you know I mentioned like the importance of fidelity um that would be one example or we could talk about you know for instance joint checking accounts these things are are linked to happier marriages more stable marriages they even have experimental evidence this really fascinating study Indian University found that couples who are randomly assigned to joint accounts and then other couples who randomly assigned to separate accounts um you know the folks who were assigned to joint accounts did much better in the first few years of marriage than those who were assigned to the you know the individualistic kind of more you know often I think Elite kind of strategy um that we're hearing today whereas you know kind of a lot of the Traditions that we have about you know marriage and family kind of grew up for reasons that there was a kind of social utility to them um wisdom to them that emerged so yeah I think the challenge is that culturally you have to defy many of the elite messages that are more individualistic um more me first kind of thinking uh you know both in in media and then online and social media today and if you can kind of steer clear of a lot of that me first thinking and a lot of those me first um Norms you know in your marriage you're more likely to flourish in your marriage and to have a happily married husband or or wife you know um on the journey how important is male income and providership when it comes to being an eligible mate obviously this is one of the the metam memes of the internet and you know I tried to sort of meme into existence with an idea of the tall girl problem that socioeconomic success amongst young women means that there is an Ever decreasing pool of eligible mates for them in the maale side but how just how important is it like what is it what what makes women happy what do they want well there's just no question that um that men's sort of status as Breadwinners is very important in both kind of predicting entry into marriage uh marital stability and marital quality although it's it's has changed in recent years kind of in this in in this way so what I'm kind of seeing in the more recent data is it's not necessarily sort of who earns how much money in the marriage so much as it it's he is stably employed full-time okay that's what seems to predict um for instance marital quality and marital stability in important ways um and what I found was that kind of the precise division of who are and what was not as important in predicting her uh marital happiness as it has been in some previous research on this topic then when it comes to divorce we see is that when she loses her job there is no effect on the stability of their marriage um this is work done by Sasha kowal at Harvard in sociology there but when he loses his job his risk of divorce increases um I mean their divorce increases risk by about onethird so there's something about kind of that stability um that sense of identity I think for men that comes from fulltime employment uh respect it often I think accr to them from their wife um and when he doesn't have that full-time job um it's just much more likely to be a problem both in kind of getting a relationship started and sustained um so I think people don't appreciate that there still is a very gendered story when it comes to work and marriage and that story is that women are looking for and respect men who have um you know a decent job and men who are not employed um you know full-time are I think you know just having much greater difficulty even today and still you know navigating marriage successfully do you have you've said you have quite a few kids are some of them sons are they all girls I have sons and daughters yes cool um so I don't know how old they are but at some point your sons are going to begin dating they're going to enter the dating Market given the current world of men's advice and the current state of the dating environment yeah what are you going to tell your sons or what would you tell a struggling young guy who reads too much of the internet about how to be as eligible of a mate to the opposite sex as they can be well Chris it's interesting you know one of the things that I would say both to my to my sons but just to young men and I do say to young men more generally um is that you know there are a lot of complaints that we're getting you know there was a a critique of my kind of thesis in New York Times recently from you know a journalist and she was saying there just aren't any good men out there and so you know my response to that kind of idea is I think there are some legitimate concerns we have to understand the why why aren't you finding enough good men out there I think it's part because we're not kind of giving young men enough kind of concrete advice about what is appealing and attractive to women um and so one of the things that I find also in my chapter on gender is that women are happier when you know um they're rating the men in their lives to be physically stronger right so um so what I would say to young men who are interested kind of in in dating and getting married is that you know get in shape physically um I'm you know I'm not I'm not as even my guest I'm not a big athlete but I swim regularly um and so if you're not like an athlete you know you can find things you know to do run Swim Bike go to the gym whatever but get in decent physical shape I think that's one thing that I would say um to them because women do value um you know physical strength and they value guys who are who are um can take care of themselves physically that's that's one thing that I would say um I would say also kind of have a sense of mission in life you know I'm want to do this jobwise it doesn't matter what it is really I don't think but just to have like a clear sense of like I'm I'm learning this thing to do this job and that might change over time that's fine but to have a sense of like professionally like you you want to do something and you have like a plan and a purpose basically that extends of course too to things that are of a more Civic character I think women also kind of have tremendous respect for guys who are you know volunteering um in in their communities as well um you they want to same thing applies to religion you know if if you know um if you're in that religious uh subset so I think a sense of mission matters as well um and then I would also say um to young men that when it comes to uh dating to really take the initiative initially um I ask my women in my large family classes at UVA kind of what's your preference you know when it comes to that first date um is it that you take the initiative to ask someone out on the date or that he he takes the initiative and about 80% of the women in my classes I've got large classes at UVA would say it's their preference that he takes the initiative it's a sign of his interest in them and it's also a sign of like his willingness to um to engage in risk and healthy ways as well so um so I would you know I talk to young men about kind of the importance of taking initiative the importance of having a sense of Mission um especially when it comes to some you know something related to you know school or work depending upon their stage of life um and the importance of kind of being in decent physical shape because these are all things that women appreciate and I think we're not telling men enough and Adolescent males as well that you know you've got to get off the Xbox you've got to get off your phone um you've got to get out there and and hit the gym or do something get more serious about your study studies or your skills you know your training um Tech whatever it might be um you know get a job and and make a mark and if you do those kinds of things and develop competencies obviously in certain kinds of areas then you will gonner the respect and the interest of um women in your millu yeah I mean it's the competence that women I think largely are looking for you know if you were to just ask someone would you rather have a competent or an incompetent partner not clarifying in what domain by how much like who wants to be with a useless partner that doesn't have any agency that doesn't have any intentionality that that isn't able to enact change that they want in any area of their life or even in specific areas of their life like if you're unable to get in shape it identifies that in some regard you aren't competent at being able to control your own body and your own physicality if you aren't able to hold down a job it shows that you aren't competent at being able to show up on time or be reliable or be disciplined or be whatever the thing is and Jordan Peterson was on the show a couple of months ago and he said women use wealth as a proxy for competence it's not the wealth that they're after it's just the most reliable Ru Hune rubric signal that they can find to say here is a rank order starting with [ __ ] Elon mus whoever's at the top now some Arab shake and and and going all the way down here is a rank ordered list of 3.5 billion men and and you can work a kind of a compet it's the best video game ever made it's the best video game ever made yeah I think a key word you mentioned there is of course is agency and I think there's so much passivity among young men today and among teenage boys today um way too much screen time way too much video games and and at a certain point um you know women notice that and it's a it's a big turnoff especially when it comes to marriage because they want a guy who has a sense of agency and who exemplifies that in his life in a variety of different domains what do you think about most of the advice coming out of the manosphere obviously there is this huge uh market for speaking to men uh as you've identified we're not necessarily telling men the right things is the manosphere getting anything right or what are the things that it gets most wrong what do you wish that you could sort of sponge from it yeah I mean I certainly think some of the things we've talked about just in the last few minutes are articulated in different ways people like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate I think what's problematic is that on parts of the manosphere it's a very kind of self centered self-oriented approach to masculinity particularly people like and Tate obviously and there's also kind of a there's a way in which women are talked down um and you know are um described in very you know degrading or demeaning or or negative ways um so I think it can cultivate a certain sense of um of Suspicion needless suspicion on the part of men now obviously we all we all both women and men have to be Discerning because there are people out there who are Bad actors um or who've got vices are going to make them bad spouses or there's just not a good fit for a particular person and you you have to kind of figure out do you have the capacity for friendship with this person do they have some key virtues that will make them a good husband a good father a good wife and a good mother um but I think parts of the Manis feere are painting and obviously an overly negative view of women in marriage um and are encouraging men to be selfish in ways that will make them you know bad romantic partners and uh reduce their odds of of succeeding in marriage as well which ultimately results in them dying on average eight or nine years earlier being more likely alcohol abuse and this is again this is what Pearl Davis and and Andrew ton really acknowledge or appreciate is that yes marriage is a risk no doubt but the guys who are not married today never married and guys who are divorced um are just much more likely to be especially if they're not college educated if they're not kind of doing well professionally you know at the top of some game um they are just much more likely to be floundering and to you know end up um yeah sad lonely um and vulnerable to these deaths of Despair what about from a woman's side it's not something that I often see coming from the right uh from anybody sort of uh right or far left um bits of dating advice for women you know women who want to get married who want to find a partner who want to be Discerning with their mate Choice um but who also know that in a post me to World men are maybe more reticent about approaching them they're maybe more concerned about they they maybe don't have quite the same uh like patriarchy fueled uh agency that perhaps our great-grandfathers would have done um what do you say to women uh when it comes to attracting selecting male partner so I think for both young women and young men I would certainly say you know given the challenges that people are facing today is number one if you have you know friends who are kind of um wise and Discerning and roughly your age or a little bit older or even on you know a lot older kind of just let it be known that you're interested in getting married and have them kind of you know do the the sort of ma in game you know crowdsource the potential M mat matchmaking you know is is you know I I regularly introduce students that I know are interested in getting married or young adults you know to one another just so and you know that's that can be fruitful um I think so you know letting it be known to people you trust uh judgment you trust um I think if you have a religious bone in your body um go to church synagogue mosque Temple whatever um the folks who are in those communities are much more marriage-minded than the folks who are not and that that's worth kind of you know taking seriously if you have any kind of religious interest background um I would say also kind of for women in particular kind of given the fact that a lot of guys are worried about the me too you know suspicion um you know signaling with a with a smile uh with a compliment with extra attention you know cultivating receptivity is a hugely overlooked uh way of doing this I was reminded of the uh I guess it would have been the the aristocracy during the Renaissance would drop a handkerchief um you know you need a nonverbal Q equivalent of dropping a handkerchief yeah all that I think is is valuable and then you know some folks are just not going to have any any success in person right and so um you know I certainly know folks are happily married today who met on you know on some dating service but just be kind of discerning about the service you pick so obviously Tinder is probably not the best option um there are you know newer sites um that are kind of cultivating a more you you know marriage oriented approach um that are accessible um online for instance you know that can um you know uh be helpful so I think if you're GNA seek out um a a dating site you know pick one um that is oriented towards marriage oriented towards serious relationships Brad Wilcox ladies and gentlemen Brad I've been a massive fan of your work for a long time I'm really glad that you've dug into the uh deepened dark murky data that's sort of borne all of this stuff out where should people go they want to learn more about your work and the book and and and keep up to date with what you do where should they go uh they can type in get married and that'll you know um go to Harper for for the book um I'm on Twitter at Brad Wilcox ifs and then on on the web oftentimes at family studies.org as well those are three places to to uh to look me up Brad I really appreciate you thank you for today it's great to be with you Chris thanks for having me on if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe