Study Says Lack Of “Economically-Attractive Men” Reason For Declining Marriage Rates

The United States is facing a seldom-talked-about crisis: declining birth and marriage rates. While the first is largely in part to Planned Parenthood’s success in routinely massacring the unborn year after year, the second has a number of plausible reasons for happening. But one study finds that the reason, or at least one of the biggest ones, is the lack of “economically-attractive men” who are unmarried.
 
The study’s authors examined data gathered on recent marriages from 2007-2012 and 2013-2017 (5-year marriages). According to studyfinds.org, the “data was used to estimate the financial and sociodemographic characteristics of unmarried women’s potential husbands by creating economic profiles that resembled real husbands who had married comparable women.” These husbands then were compared to actual data of unmarried men throughout the country, including state and local locations.
 
The researchers found that these “dream” husbands had an average income 58% higher that the real unmarried men, were 30% more likely to be employed than real unmarried men and were 19% more likely to have a college degree than unmarried men.
 
Dr. Daniel T. Lichter, lead author of the study, explains: “Most American women hope to marry but current shortages of marriageable men – men with a stable job and a good income – make this increasingly difficult, especially in the current gig economy of unstable low-paying service jobs. Marriage is still based on love, but it also is fundamentally an economic transaction. Many young men today have little to bring to the marriage bargain, especially as young women’s educational levels on average now exceed their male suitors.”
 
Of course, this is on average and I believe there are a multitude of factors that affect the current marriage rates (and I’ll get to them), but this does point out quite a delicious irony for the feminist movement: women may be strong and independent, but they still DESIRE a husband who is not a deadbeat, beta loser.
 
I am reminded of an article I wrote a long time ago, back in November of 2017, about a similar subject. In that article, I talked about how the UK Daily Mail said that women, even those who considered themselves “feminist”, still found muscular and wealthy men to be attractive.
 
I also talked about the reasons for that to be the case: muscles are a sign of potential safety from physical harm (as long as the guy is a good man and not an abuser) and money is a sign of potential safety from financial harm (no one wants to starve).
 
So it makes sense that these mentalities that are as old as time itself remain in humans: we seek safety and comfort. Men seek to be able to protect their women and women seek to be able to be protected by their men. This isn’t sexism or misogyny but basic biology. The strong and fit will seek to protect those they have an emotional connection to. This is why men and women can become pretty much superhuman when their children are in danger.
 
But that’s physical protection. Financial protection is a rather new form of protection (in the grand scheme of things, but it has been around for millennia as well). Women seek men who are financially stable and capable of providing for a family. This is as true today as millennia ago.
 
In a day and age when student loan debt financially cripple most people, and in an age when more women are enrolled into colleges than men are (56% of college students nationwide are women), it comes as no surprise that there is such a hole in desirable men. Women tend to want to marry up, not sideways or down. When a woman does financially better than a man, she finds little to no reason to get married to that man (again, there are other factors to marriage, but this is an important one).
 
If she is able to sustain herself financially, that is one less reason to get married. Now, I’m not saying we should roll back the clock to a time when a woman was legally incapable of working, but I am saying that the feminist movement regarding female independence creates this sort of scenario: almost no man is good enough.
 
And that is another major reason, at least as far as I can see, for declining marriage rates. Cornell University points out the lack of economically-attractive men, and they are not wrong, but I do not think they quite got to the root of the overarching problem.
 
The lack of economically-attractive men is an effect, not a cause. The cause, at least one of the biggest ones, in my opinion, is the feminist movement. The idea of a “strong and independent woman”, while the norm today, naturally serves to divide men and women. Now, I’m not saying women shouldn’t be strong and independent, but independence itself indicates a separation. Independence means to be apart from another thing upon which one might at one point have depended.
 
It’s a matter of cause and effect: women seeking “independence” from men means women being apart from men and not really finding it necessary to be with men. As such, declining marriage rates seem logical and, in my opinion, by design.
 
 
Women’s ability to be financially independent and equal, while not a bad thing in itself, does render men with one less asset to bring into the “marriage bargain”, as Dr. Lichter mentioned. Again, women tend to want to marry up. With the standard rising, less men become financially attractive and marriage rates go down.
 
It also doesn’t help that extreme militant Leftists insist that all men are rapists, men rape women in college all the time, that toxic masculinity is even a thing and that men are, overall, not to be trusted with anything, least of all women.
 
Much as the feminist movement might try and suggest they are for “equality”, they really are not doing that. Men and women are already considered legally equal. The “problems” they bring up, such as the fictitious wage gap, comes as a result of women working less total hours than men on average, not as a result of sexism. Not to mention that they regularly attack “straight, white men” as often as they can, highlighting not only their hatred towards straight and white people, but also towards men.
 
The problem of declining marriage rates is multifaceted, but the constant attacks against men just for being men certainly don’t help matters any. It only serves to create distrust on impressionable young women.
 
The study points out an interesting portion about this problem, but I wouldn’t say that a lack of economically-attractive men is a cause of declining marriage rates. It’s an effect, as is declining marriage rates, of militant feminazism.
 
But another major cause, I’d say, is the overall lack of regard for the importance and value of marriage. What do I mean by that? I mean that most people view it as a unity of love, and while it is that, that’s not the entire point. Marriage is a unity, not only between a man and a woman but also a unity between the two and the Lord, who is at the head of the marriage.
 
Let me share with you what Ephesians 5:22-33 says:
 
“Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.”
 
That is a lot to cover, and I do not quite have the time to do so, but one important thing about this is just who created marriage: God. The same God who created you and me created the unity between a husband and wife; created the marriage between the two. It’s why we say it’s “holy matrimony”. But the “holy” part has largely been taken out of the idea of marriage. From gay marriage to an unmarried man and woman living in the same place and even having a baby together while not even thinking on the need for marriage, these things deprive marriage of all its spiritual meaning.
 
The fact that marriage rates are down is a crisis to people like us, Christians, but not to people like the Left, who do not value marriage in the least. Marriage means nothing more to them than unity of the flesh, and even then, they understand they don’t need marriage for that. What they advocate and support fervently is sexual immorality that goes against the meaning and significance of marriage, not to mention God’s Word.
 
As with shootings, this is yet another effect of our turning our backs against the Lord as a nation. Slowly but surely, His Word is becoming less and less recognized as the ultimate authority. His Word is becoming less and less relevant in people’s eyes and seek to outright rebel against every bit of it. Marriage, an institution built by the Lord, is becoming less and less relevant, and so, less and less sought after by people.
 
Now, again, the study pointed out that women do, indeed, still want to get married, which points to the feminazis’ failure, at least to a certain extent. But it’s only a matter of time until marriage itself becomes completely irrelevant in many people’s eyes. Its definition and significance has certainly already been heavily altered from what God intended it to be.
 
But in sum, what I’m trying to convey is the eternal importance of following the Lord, His Word and His Authority. Marriage is extremely important, in my opinion, and it’s taken quite the beating in recent time. I can only hope and pray that these trends, of declining marriage and birth rates, will be bucked and overturned so that people will get married more and have beautiful families together.
 
Proverbs 18:22
“He who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the Lord.”
 
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