A Step Forward in the Debate about Masculinity

Early in 2019, the men’s razor company Gillette raised eyebrows with a new commercial. The ad depicted stereotypically disordered male behavior—aggression, catcalling, and a “boys will be boys” indifference to both—and contrasted it with a new generation of men taking a stand against that patriarchal past: a father breaks up a fight between two boys, a young man cuts off another’s unwanted advances toward a female stranger.

Many on the right complained that Gillette drew a glib equivalence between masculinity and toxicity, and the commercial was admittedly both myopic and preachy. But the conservative dismissiveness of the ad largely settled into a defensive, abrasive machismo. The ad was simplistic, but its critics missed an opportunity to think through the meaning of masculinity, and about the importance of male—and especially paternal—role models.

Conversations about sex and gender are surely just as difficult now as in 2019. Any talk about masculinity can easily veer into the same sclerotic patterns of the Gillette hubbub: a left that paints with uncritically broad brushes, and a right that gets defensive and dumbs down its beliefs. Richard Reeves’s latest book, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It, manages to avoid predictability, blending statistical insight and easygoing wit to craft a fruitful exploration of the male malaise.

Reeves, a liberal economist at the Brookings Institution, bookends Of Boys and Men by presenting the educational, economic, and cultural challenges men face, and he proposes policy and social solutions for each. They’re all insightful and (unsurprisingly) subject to debate, especially, in my view, his discussion of fatherhood and marriage. But one of the most important lessons of the book—which Reeves introduces to reassure readers that they can care about both women’s equality and men’s struggles—is that “we can hold two thoughts in our head at once.” In that vein, we can disagree, even deeply, about some of Reeves’s premises or proposals, while also recognizing that Of Boys and Men models the sort of intellectual dexterity needed to tackle complicated matters in our polarized times.

 

Men Falling Behind

Reeves begins his book by pointing out how boys are falling behind in the classroom. He surveys data showing they are 14 percentage points less likely than girls to be ready to start school at age 5, as well as 6 percentage points less likely to graduate high school on time. Look ahead at college, and young men are 15 percentage points less likely to graduate with a bachelor’s. Women are narrowing gaps between themselves and their male classmates in typically male-dominant subjects (such as STEM), while stereotypically female subjects like nursing and teaching remain so.

Men are also being outdone in the job market. Worries about the wage gap—which Reeves handles with careful nuance—or about a C-suite glass ceiling have some legitimacy, but overemphasizing them paints an incomplete picture. The lack of female representation among Fortune 500 CEOs tells us that a small—albeit influential—proportion of men are doing very well. But by the same token, the people struggling the most economically are more likely to be men. An astounding one-third of men with only a high school diploma (approximately 5 million men) are out of the labor force.

To address these labor market problems, Reeves draws from the women-in-STEM push and calls for similar efforts for men in health care, education, administration, and literacy—or as he calls it, HEAL. In the same way that Melinda Gates pledged $1 billion to promote women in STEM, Reeves proposes an equal “men can HEAL” push. He envisions a combination of government and philanthropic funds for training and scholarships, and for marketing these often well-paying careers. Child care administrators and occupational therapists, two examples Reeves cites, respectively earned on average $70,000 and $72,000 in 2019.

 

One of the most discussed policy proposals in the book deals with educational gaps, which Reeves wants to address largely by “redshirting boys,” or delaying their start in kindergarten by a year. It’s not that young boys are less able than their female counterparts, but rather that they cognitively develop at a different pace, about two years slower than girls. For Reeves, giving boys the “gift” of an extra year before starting school “recognizes natural sex differences, especially the fact that boys are at a developmental disadvantage to girls at critical points in their schooling.”

Reeves’s reasoning reflects an important aspect of his approach: he acknowledges the importance of biology, and thinks that understanding biological factors should moderate a tendency, frequently seen on today’s left, to confuse equality with sameness. After examining data on men’s and women’s different career interests and outcomes, for example, Reeves concludes that we should at the very least consider that biology and “informed personal agency” play some role in occupational choices. He rejects attributing all gender gaps to sexism, or expecting perfect 50–50 representation in all fields.

People of different political stripes can debate the scope and specifics of both the HEAL movement and redshirting boys, among other proposals in Of Boys and Men, but Reeves leaves the possibility of fruitful deliberation very much open. He helpfully frames his discussion of education and jobs so that potential disagreements will be about means, rather than  fundamental ends.

But the same can’t be said about the third aspect of the male malaise Reeves identifies: the cultural status of fatherhood.

Fatherhood without Marriage?

Reeves recognizes a sense of aimlessness has taken hold of many men’s most personal relationships: between men and women, and between fathers and children. But he primarily wants to address the latter problem, and to do so by envisioning fatherhood as an independent institution, considered separately from marriage. We should address and improve relationships between fathers and children first, irrespective of whether fathers are married to their kids’ mothers. Our safety net should expect more than mere economic support from fathers—particularly among noncustodial parents—and reward them for involvement in their kids’ lives. In a nutshell, our culture and policy should reconcile themselves with the reality that we live in “a world where mothers don’t need men, but children still need their dads.”

Why doesn’t Reeves concurrently advance a marital renewal? For one thing, he regards the traditional model of marriage as too rigidly predicated on the expectation of a male breadwinner, and by extension on the economic dependence of women. From it flows a notion of fatherhood that may have encouraged family formation in the past, but that is now “unfit for a world of gender equality.” The decline of marriage poses problems, but it’s largely indicative of positive gains in autonomy for women, in his view.

Reeves emphasizes that many unmarried, nonresidential fathers are very involved in their kids’ lives. Black fathers, for example—44 percent of whom are nonresidential—are more likely than white nonresidential fathers to help around the house, take kids to activities, and be generally present, according to one study he cites. Reeves argues that our cultural expectations of fatherhood “urgently need an update, to become more focused on direct relationships with children” (emphasis added). Since about 40 percent of births in the United States take place outside of marriage, he concludes that insisting on a model that assumes an indissoluble link between fatherhood and marriage is just anachronistic.

But Reeves doesn’t fully reckon with the gravity of divorcing fatherhood from marriage. Chapter 12 of Of Boys and Men, which Reeves dedicates to his independent fatherhood proposal, advances particular policies to support “direct” fatherhood unmediated by marriage, from paid parental leave to child support reforms, to encouraging father-friendly jobs. But he spends surprisingly little time directly arguing against the empirical and philosophical case for fatherhood within marriage as distinctly positive.

For example, Reeves writes that “there is no residency requirement for good fatherhood. The relationship is what matters.” Fair enough. But which model—fatherhood within marriage or nonresidential fatherhood—tends to facilitate more of the positive interactions needed to build healthy relationships between fathers and children? In general, the one where more of those interactions can potentially take place. A study by Penn State sociologist Paul Amato suggested this, reporting that from 1976 to 2002, 29 percent of nonresident fathers had no contact with their kids in the previous year, while only 31 percent had weekly contact.

 

In fact, contact with their biological father plays a positive role in advancing the two other major concerns Reeves has for boys: work and education. A 2022 report from the Institute for Family Studies found that “[y]oung men who grew up with their biological father are more than twice as likely to graduate college by their late 20s, compared to those raised in families without their biological father (35% vs. 14%).” According to the Census Bureau, approximately 62 percent of children lived with their biological parents in 2019, and 59 percent lived with married biological parents. In other words, growing up with a biological father is deeply intertwined with growing up with a married father—there are very few cohabitating biological or single biological fathers.

Beyond social science, there’s also a conceptual issue at the heart of Reeves’s proposal. It’s undeniable that many working mothers don’t need men in the same way past generations did—if what we mean by “need” is economic support. But it’s also very clear that mothers do need men. Without men, well, they wouldn’t be mothers (and vice versa) for the very simple yet profound fact that the sexes need each other in order to fulfill their biological end. This is more than a semantic trick—it’s a recognition that mutual dependence is at the heart of our biology. At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, men and women could not exist without each other—and that realization should caution us against overemphasizing independence.

Moreover, shouldn’t fatherhood also entail modeling what lasting commitment to a spouse looks like? Reeves is right to stress that fatherhood should mean more than just economic support, but he misses the fact that prospects for decoupling marriage from fatherhood are similarly discouraging in this regard. In a study by the late Princeton sociologist Sara McLanahan, 80 percent of unmarried parents were in a romantic relationship (with each other) at time of the birth of their child. But here’s how McLanahan summarized her five-year follow-up with them:

Despite their “high hopes,” most unmarried parents were unable to maintain stable unions. Only 15 percent of all our unmarried couples were married at the time of the five-year interview, and only a third were still romantically involved (Recall that over 80 percent of parents were romantically involved at birth.) Among couples who were cohabitating at birth, the picture was somewhat better: after five years, 26 percent were married to each other and another 26 percent were living together.

In divorcing fatherhood from marriage so hastily, Reeves misses an opportunity to consider why reimagining marriage is a key aspect of reinvigorating fatherhood as well. It’s the biggest drawback of Of Boys and Men.

Nevertheless, Reeves’s proposal has clearly opened a door to fruitful further debate. His case for direct fatherhood should temper a traditionalist reflex to assume that nonresidence is equivalent to abandonment—there are clearly many nontraditional, not-married, or separated fathers who embody dedication to their children. But if engaged fatherhood is so empirically and conceptually intertwined with marriage, then we would lose key aspects of both by separating them. We shouldn’t idealize marriage or how it affects fatherhood, but we shouldn’t hastily decouple marriage and fatherhood either.

Successfully reimagining marriage and fatherhood will probably even entail letting go of some of the overly rigid gender roles that Reeves criticizes in Of Boys and Men: more female breadwinners and paternal homemakers, as well as various policies and workplace arrangements to support the parent–child bond are all likely to be a part of the future of the family. But so should giving boys and men not just the tools to excel at school and work, but the habits and vocabulary to strive toward commitment, dedication, and love in the most personal dimensions of their lives.

 

Improving the Debate

Of Boys and Men is a book about men, written by a man, claiming that our culture doesn’t take men’s problems seriously. In the wrong hands, it would have been the latest entry in a seemingly incessant culture war, a callback to the silliness of the Gillette controversy. Yet it has been a resounding mainstream success. In matters of gender and sex, some might believe it’s impossible for there to be any interest in men’s issues across the ideological spectrum. The success of Of Boys and Men suggests that’s not the case.

Of Boys and Men has a point of view, but Reeves doesn’t close off the possibility of exchange or criticism by making a caricature of his opponents. This is the sort of book that not only exposes an often ignored issue, but elevates the quality of our conversations about it, even amid disagreement. That is perhaps its most impressive feat.

The Peace of Parenthood

What is it like to be a parent, and what might it teach us? In my own life, questions that had once seemed abstract have quite rapidly taken the form of an immersive experience: I have eighteen-month-old twin daughters, with a third daughter on the way in October, and so perhaps I can be permitted some reflections ahead of Father’s Day that I hope will resonate with others. Parenthood is full of surprises, but I’ve been struck by how I’ve come to understand it as fundamentally peaceful.

Peace is not the first thing that people typically associate with parenting. According to a Pew survey earlier this year, most parents describe parenting as “rewarding” or “enjoyable,” but significant numbers also find it “tiring” and “stressful.” These findings reflect the cost-benefit lens through which the modern world tends to view parenthood: a generally exhausting ordeal that imposes fearful constraints and burdens, while occasionally providing moments of happiness. In many ways, our most urgent social and political challenges—declining birthrates and family formation; pervasive feelings of isolation and anxiety—are the inevitable products of a cultural fixation on the costs of parenthood.

I’m not immune to cost-benefit reasoning (especially when buying diapers for twins), but I now realize that it neglects the core truth that being a parent is essentially peaceful in nature. It is peaceful not in the contemporary sense of freedom from discord (did I mention twins?). Rather, parenting is peaceful in the deepest meaning of the term, which is when we understand, embrace, love, and find joy in one another as gift.

 

By emphasizing the peace of parenthood, we might provide a useful corrective to the prevailing cultural narrative that views the enterprise with such ambivalence. The relationship between peace and parenthood was not obvious to me before I had kids, and I think the same is true of other young people who might be pondering the questions I opened with. While familiar notions of parenting as happy, rewarding, stressful, or intense tell us something, they don’t quite capture the whole story.

Peace

In our secular age, peace is often defined in negative terms of what is lacking or missing, such as the absence or end of conflict. In this account, peace in the public realm means freedom from civil disturbance, while inside our minds it means freedom from troubling thoughts or emotions. In this latter sense, Augustine’s view that peace is “the tranquility of order” finds faint and distorted echoes in the modern emphasis on subjectivity and psychological analysis.

But there is a deeper, spiritual dimension of peace that I believe the experience of parenting helps bring more clearly into view. We might consider the Hebrew word shalom, a comprehensive term that encompasses the positive aspects of flourishing relationships, not just the absence of hostility. We might also note that in the Catholic Mass, just before congregants offer each other a sign of peace, they are reminded that Jesus said to his apostles, “Peace I leave you, my peace I give you.” Far from an instruction to withdraw into solitude, this is meant as an affirmation that true peace is a gift from God, something positive and relational that enables us to open up to each other and establish new connections.

 

This model of peace also works as a basic description of parenting. More than any other experience, being a parent opens us up to new life, and it deepens existing relationships within our families: husbands and wives grow closer, grandparents watch children become parents. It also encourages us to honor and delight in something outside ourselves. Our failure to see peace in its fullest sense as openness to the gift of God in others is, I think, related to growing cultural misgivings about parenthood. If we increasingly fail to see peace as something positive and oriented toward others, then we won’t associate it with parenthood. And to the extent that we see parenthood as daunting and isolating—as anything but peaceful—then it will be ever more difficult to encourage young people to form their own families.

Gift

Contrary to the modern focus on the costs of parenting, I have learned through being a parent that the true meaning of peace is the condition in which we understand one another as gift. Of course, there is a rich biblical tradition of viewing children as a gift, or a reward, from God. More broadly, this is related to the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic view that creation itself is a gift; not self-standing, but created ex nihilo, from nothing, in a free expression of God’s love that is impossible for us to reciprocate. In this sense, creation is a gift in itself, a gift that signals a relationship, and a gift that instantiates its recipients. Something similar is true of the parent–child bond, and this bears upon parenting in three important ways.

First, the category of gift highlights that parenting involves reciprocal exchange even within the context of a highly asymmetrical relationship. Parents give time, care, and love to their children, who are entirely dependent and seemingly unable to reciprocate. Yet parents also know that children do offer reciprocal gifts in the form of laughter, smiles, joy, and love. This kind of reciprocal exchange cannot be expressed in economic terms, but it’s a profound part of the parent–child relationship.

Second, when we define peace as understanding one another as gift, it follows that we give part of ourselves to the recipient. An Aristotelian philosopher might describe this as the cause imparting something of itself to the effect. By analogy, a father recognizes that to give part of himself to a child—to welcome, treasure, and love the child—is to imbue the child with something of his own character. It might be true that modern parents exaggerate the impact of their efforts, but I still treasure the time I share with my children precisely because its usefulness is not measurable. Time, care, and attention each mediate, and give meaning to, the parent–child relationship.

Third, the category of gift reminds us to embrace what we receive from our children. As social media feeds demonstrate, it’s all too easy to celebrate the pleasurable parts of parenting, the conveniently photogenic occasions when the trip to the beach goes perfectly according to plan. But what about the less glamorous moments? As Public Discourse writer Nathanael Blake observed: “Changing a diaper is not that difficult. Doing it in the dark at 3:30 a.m. after a few weeks of rarely sleeping for more than ninety minutes at a stretch, while being screamed at, is the hard part.” Like so many others, I’ve learned that embracing the hard parts of parenting turns out not to be so hard after all; it’s a natural function of the peace of parenthood, of finding joy in what comes to us from our children—in all its gloriously messy forms.

 

Joy

So far, I’ve suggested that peace is not just the absence of conflict, but something positive, a state when we open up to the new life for which we are responsible and which presents itself to us in its own unique way. In addition, the other aspect of peace that I’ve come to appreciate through parenting is that it is characterized by joyful relationships. In his excellent dictionary of scholastic philosophy, Bernard Wuellner defines internal peace as “the calm and joy of soul in its love of a possessed good without further intense effort or uncertainty.” As it relates to parenting, I’d add that peace is not simply an internal state, but something outward-looking, oriented toward others.

That parenting is joyful might not seem like much of a revelation. On the other hand, parents often look harried and feel panicked. Though parenting is stressful, it gives rise to joyful relationships in which we feel fundamentally at peace because we’re not afraid or distracted, no longer striving for unattainable things or preoccupied with trivial concerns. There is, as Wuellner put it, no need for “further intense effort or uncertainty.” Michael Oakeshott noted that a child’s game is joyful because it has “no ulterior purpose, no further result aimed at; . . . it is not a striving after what one has not got.” The same might be said of parenting itself, of loving and treasuring our children for who they are and not for the value or utility of what they can offer.

Today it often seems that parenting is seen in the same way that some historians have viewed history: just one thing after another. One more obstacle to overcome; one more fire to put out. But my own experience has taught me not only that peace is (perhaps surprisingly) central to parenting, but that parenting itself offers us a positive vision of peace to inhabit—the opportunity to embrace, love, and find joy in one another as gift.

On Marital Fidelity: Its Personal and Public Benefits

Editor’s Note: This essay is the second in a three-part series that, in recognition of Fidelity Month, reflects on the importance of fidelity to God, our families, and our country. You can watch a recording of Public Discourse’s recent webinar on Fidelity Month here. 

In the famous story of Penelope from Homer’s Odyssey, we hear about a woman who faithfully waited for her spouse, Odysseus, to return home from war. Despite the attention of more than a hundred suitors, the queen of Ithaca employs diplomacy and cunning to defer their attentions for twenty years, symbolically weaving and reweaving a burial shroud to buy her time. Not until she could confirm that Odysseus had died was she willing to entertain the idea of remarriage. But what about Odysseus? Was he faithful to her?

It depends on how you look at it. During his arduous ocean journey home, he meets up with two separate seductresses. The first, Circe, uses her magic to charm Odysseus into an intimate relationship as she provides for his every desire. After a year of island comforts, however, he asks her to release him and his crew so they can return home.

 

Later in the journey, Odysseus is shipwrecked alone on an island, where the obsessed nymph Calypso makes him her amorous prisoner for seven years. She offers Odysseus immortality if he will stay and become her husband forever. But every day, he goes to the shoreline to weep and pray, longing to return to his wife and son. Eventually, Zeus intercedes, and Calypso is forced to free him. He finally makes it home to an epic reunion with Penelope.

My reading of Odysseus’s entanglements is a merciful one, of a hero who falls but ultimately triumphs in the virtue of fidelity. The commitment to marriage is often fraught with difficulties and missteps, but what matters is turning things around, healing wounds, and persevering in faithful married love.

What Is Marital Fidelity?

In modern lingo, marital fidelity is often taken to mean abstaining from sex with anyone other than one’s spouse. However, this involves not only an oversimplification, but a hyper-focus on the sexual aspect of marriage. If marriage is what natural law teaches it is, namely, the union of a man and a woman who 1) give their whole selves to each other: minds, wills, hearts, and bodies; 2) are open to begetting children; 3) agree to a lifelong union; and 4) are exclusive (no side-partners allowed), then it’s not merely about keeping our hands off others, but primarily about being faithful to the whole gift of self being given and received in marriage.

Therefore, we can distinguish among different kinds of infidelity that offend different parts of the marital union. Infidelity of mind and will involves intellectually desiring or wishing for intimacy with another person outside the marriage bond—which includes neglecting to care for one’s spouse, even if no other person is involved. Emotional infidelity, on the other hand, involves misdirecting the heart, allowing one’s feelings to attach to someone else, and/or neglecting our spouse’s emotional needs. And physical infidelity, of course, involves the body and includes succumbing to outside physical, including sexual, acts of affection, and/or neglecting our spouse’s physical-sexual needs.

Essentially, it is possible to cheat not only through sex but in several ways, including by creating intellectual and/or emotional bonds with an opposite-sex friend other than our spouse. Indeed, intellectual and emotional infidelity are often the ladder rungs that lead to the slide down into sexual infidelity. We are body-soul unities, and the sharing of our souls (through our minds and emotions) naturally leads to the sharing of our bodies. So, guarding marital love includes directing our most intimate treasures toward our spouse and warding off alternative appeals, as Penelope did. Or after falling, getting up again, like Odysseus.

It takes concerted effort to avoid indiscretions on all these fronts, but that is where the complete gift of the will matters. When fidelity becomes difficult and a thousand Siren songs are playing in our ears, we tie our will to the mast and take the necessary measures to avoid entrapments. This is made easier by the positive effort to focus on weaving (and reweaving) the two strands of the marriage, man and woman, into one. Committed couples strive toward a more perfect union every day, focusing on daily collaboration, mutual understanding, forbearance, making compromises, patiently bearing each other’s faults, displaying good humor, and making creative sacrifices to add joy to the daily grind. In this way, the lion’s share of romantic energy and attention is already in the right place, and there’s not much of either one left over for others!

 

Modern Criticisms of Marital Fidelity

Clearly, marital fidelity involves a lot of hard work, so it’s reasonable to ask: is it worth it? For decades, we have been hounded with messages that nonmarital sex, easy, no-fault divorce, cohabitation, and same-sex romantic relationships are acceptable, and that we should lighten up on the commitment to faithful marriage as the one and only ideal. Today, we hear new voices calling for society to loosen further, to consider polyamory and support open marriages and polycules, what academics call “consensual nonmonogamous (CNM) relationships.”

Still other (more cantankerous) voices are calling for society to do away with mononormativity altogether (which, like heteronormativity, is used as a term of disparagement—in this case, toward the monogamous ideal). These voices claim it’s discriminatory to put monogamy on a pedestal over and above other romantic relationships.

It’s worth pausing to ask, do they have a point? Or do the cost-benefit scales still tip in favor of fidelity?

Personal Benefits of Marital Fidelity

Social-science research on CNM partnerships is still in its infancy, but the best data to date are not flattering. Participants report lower overall happiness, relationship satisfaction, and sexual satisfaction than monogamous couples. Researchers hypothesize that this is due to minority stress, or the social stigma that still exists toward nonmonogamous partners. If only society were more accepting, the story goes, these groups would experience better outcomes. However, experience-based wisdom suggests other reasons related to the nature of the arrangement itself (and not external social factors). Here are a few of the more obvious hypotheses.

First, a firm marital commitment engenders deep psychological benefits. Once the promise to be faithful, exclusive, and permanent is given, and after some time living that way, couples experience a deep sense of psychological peace. Essentially, they realize they can trust each other. Neither has to worry about whether interest is waning, if the other has his or her eyes on the door, or if there might be a new partner on the side.

Fear of the future is also reduced, as faithful couples have confidence that they won’t be all alone as they face tragedy, illness, old age, and finally, death, especially the longer they stick together through hard times. And fears about parenting and children’s futures are reduced, as mothers can count on the father’s help and fathers can count on the mother’s help. As both sexes pour their unique talents into the parenting enterprise, a great synergy of their strengths gives children the best start in life.

By contrast, consensual nonmonogamy promotes distrust, insecurity, and fear. With no promises to be faithful, exclusive, or permanent, these relationships are unstable and prone to dissolution. Naturally, real or perceived comparisons to other sexual partners will lead to deep insecurities and frail self-esteem. The cluster of relationships will feel unfair; someone will certainly feel less loved and valued than others in the group.

Those in polyamorous relationships will also be more fearful for the future, as the instability inherent in this arrangement makes for precarious long-term planning and investing. In the case of a polycule, high-maintenance group members (the ill, aging, depressed) will be let go to fend on their own.

Challenges multiply when children enter the question. Fights over different perspectives on childcare and discipline will increase, as the revolving door of lovers means more adult opinions have to be managed about what to do with kids. And there is, of course, a heightened risk of novel sexual disease transmission, with the accompanying stress, accusations, and blaming.

 

Second, permanent marital partnerships accrue material and financial benefits. Faithfully married people are better off financially because they pool their resources, with no sharing with additional romantic partners.

They invest together in their own assets, savings, retirement accounts, and education. This investment includes the manual labor that goes unmonetized—time spent helping with children, chores, and upkeep of other material goods—rather than on outside partners unrelated to the primary home.

Married couples can also sign couple-exclusive contracts with confidence, taking advantage of longer-term opportunities including insurance policies, homeownership, and entrepreneurial endeavors.

Nonmonogamous couples, by contrast, experience greater financial confusion and struggle. Myriad questions about how to handle expenses will bring on stifling decision fatigue. In an open marriage, fights will emerge around who pays for what, lives where, and how much can be spent on new romantic pursuits.

Jealousy seems inevitable as partners spend money on outside relationships, making budgeting an emotional minefield. The instability of polyamorous relationships will preclude much long-term financial strategizing.

Third, faithful marriages generate an ethos of unity. To make the relationship last, spouses must learn to negotiate, compromise, and carve out win-win solutions. Compromise strengthens character and builds emotional resilience. Checks on personal autonomy guarantee growth in selflessness, which leads to more humble service to others, including spouse, children, neighbor, and greater society. Mercy and forbearance are required to hang on, giving rise to more compassionate spouses.

 

But open marriages and polycules foment an ethos of division. These relationships give primacy to each individual’s self-actualization through subjective feelings rather than to spousal unity, so tensions and disagreements will more likely to lead to standoffs and exits than to compromises.

Each partner will prefer to release tension outside, on new distractions and abatements, further weakening the primary relationship. Open marriages and polycules will be more susceptible to division and divorce and will bring that spirit of separation to their parenting style, being more willing to separate children from biological parents and established relational bonds. Questions of paternity, fatherly responsibility, and abortion have the potential to sow deep discord and bitter conflict.

Public Benefits of Marital Fidelity

Besides the personal advantages that marital fidelity confers, there are numerous public benefits as well—especially to children and lower income families.

Benefits to children. About 25 percent of the U.S. Population is children, and this sizable portion of our society is also the most vulnerable, dependent on us adults for their well-being. Faithful marriages provide these benefits to kids: 1) A more stable home, meaning greater stability for the child, a greater probability of a lifelong home and family. 2) A safer home, by virtually eliminating the number one risk of child abuse: an unrelated adult male in the home. 3) Higher quality parenting, due to the gender-balanced synergy described above. 4) An anchor for the child’s identity, satisfying the human desire to know and be loved by one’s biological kin. 5) Better educational outcomes, as these kids are statistically more likely to achieve higher grades and degrees, which are correlated with higher earnings later. 6) Increased financial resources, as described above, including inheritance and family-owned assets.

Benefits to the poor and to working-class men. Other vulnerable segments of our society include the poor, and working-class men. Marriage benefits them in several ways: First consider the  Success Sequence: 97 percent of millennials who follow the success sequence—that is, they graduate from high school, get a full-time job once their education is completed, and marry before having children—avoid a life of poverty. The power of this sequence, which includes monogamous marriage, can catapult many vulnerable individuals upward.

 

Marriage is also associated with better mental and physical health for men. Men faithfully married to a woman are less likely to report depression, and they experience higher levels of happiness. Likewise, men do better financially when faithfully married.

All the above benefits of faithful monogamous marriage ripple out to benefit society as a whole (see graphic). They yield more unified and stable families that strengthen the social fabric. Their ethos of unity generates “a web of trust across generations, giving rise to the acquisition of virtues and immense social capital (pp. 9–10 here).” By contrast, all the instability, brokenness, and infidelity of nonmonogamous unions will pull and tear communities apart, increasing relational anarchy and human harm, especially toward the most vulnerable: children and the poor.

 

Let us acknowledge that, in our wounded world, brokenness is often inevitable. Life happens, and often we cannot live up to the ideal, no matter how much we might try. With compassionate mercy, we can avoid painful judgments of particular people in particular situations. Nonetheless, we cannot give up on fidelity to the marriage ideal, which is the source of human healing, unity, and flourishing. Only when we acknowledge an ideal for what it is—a gold standard by which all other options are calibrated—can we work to shore up less-than-ideal situations to become the best versions of themselves possible.

Those in stable, intact families bear a special responsibility here to reach out to those who are relationally wounded, to share their relationship riches, and to offer apprenticeships in healthy family formation, so as to promote social healing writ large.

Conclusion

Over the past several decades, our civilization has experimented with a number of alternatives to faithful marriage. Yet the evidence is abundant that from a personal as well as a public perspective, we are most likely to flourish when faithful, monogamous, natural-law marriages are plentiful and the norm.

To all our modern marriage heroes, those facing challenging situations and doing all they can to put the needs of their spouse and children before their own self-centered desires, we salute you. Thank you for your national service. You are walking the path of fidelity, which leads to a brighter future for you, your family, and the entire nation.

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