A husband, a wife, and a stable home used to be the starting point most Americans built a life from, regardless of what they earned. Increasingly, it is the reward reserved for those who already have the most. The data on who gets married in America today should alarm anyone who cares about opportunity, family, and the working class this country was built on.
In 1960, roughly seven out of every ten American adults were married. Today, that number has fallen to about half, a nine point decline in just the past quarter century alone, according to Pew Research Center. That decline, on its own, might simply read as a story about changing social preferences. What makes it a genuine crisis is who is still getting married and who has largely stopped. Researchers at the Institute for Family Studies, the nation’s leading center for marriage research, warned bluntly this past November that unless something changes, marriage in America “will continue to be perceived as a luxury good,” a phrase that should stop any reader who still believes marriage is simply a personal choice unrelated to class and opportunity. Increasingly, it is not. Marriage in America has become something the educated and affluent do, and something everyone else increasingly does not, and that gap is quietly widening the very inequality this country claims to want to close.
The Numbers Behind the Divide
The data is not subtle. According to Pew’s analysis, roughly 60 percent of women with a college degree are married, compared with less than half of women with a high school education or less, a gap that has grown wider, not narrower, over the past several decades. College educated workers earn on average about 75 percent more annually than those with only a high school diploma, and that income gap tracks almost perfectly with the marriage gap. Sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and the nation’s most prominent marriage researcher, put the trend plainly: college educated and more affluent Americans now enjoy relatively strong and stable marriages, and the substantial economic and social benefits that come with them, while working class and poor Americans increasingly do not. Marriage rates have declined at every education level over the past several decades, but the decline has been sharpest, and most damaging, among Americans without a college degree.
This is not simply a story about who falls in love with whom. It is a story about who believes they can afford to build a life together at all, and what it means for a country when the institution most reliably associated with financial stability, child wellbeing, and long term happiness quietly becomes unavailable to the very people who need its benefits the most.
Fast Facts
1960: Roughly 7 in 10 American adults were married
Today: Roughly half of American adults are married, a 9 point decline over the past 25 years
Education gap: About 60 percent of college educated women are married, compared with under 50 percent of women with a high school education or less
Wealth gap: Married men and women in their 50s hold roughly 10 times the assets of those who never married
The success sequence: 97 percent of Millennials who finish high school, work full time, and marry before having children are not poor by their early 30s
November 2025: The Institute for Family Studies warns marriage risks being permanently “perceived as a luxury good”
Why the College Educated Still Say “I Do”
Researchers who study this divide point to a shift in how Americans, particularly women, now think about who qualifies as marriage material in the first place. Wilcox has described it as a rising bar: couples today, especially those without a college degree, increasingly feel they need to reach a certain level of financial stability, a steady job, savings, a place of their own, before marriage feels achievable, rather than treating marriage as the foundation two people build that stability together. “We’re setting a higher bar for marriage today,” Wilcox has explained, “and that bar is not easily met for working class and poor women and men.” Sociologists have also documented a growing preference for what researchers call egalitarian marriage, in which both partners bring meaningful income and status to the relationship, a shift that, however reasonable it sounds in principle, has made marriage feel further out of reach for couples where one or both partners are working unstable, lower wage jobs. College graduates, meanwhile, increasingly marry other college graduates, concentrating the economic advantages of dual income, dual degree households even further at the top.
The result is a country quietly sorting itself by class not just through income, but through household structure itself. The people with the most resources are the same people most likely to be married, raising children in two parent, two income households that compound their advantages generation after generation. The people with the fewest resources are increasingly raising children alone, without the built in economic partnership marriage has always provided, at exactly the moment they can least afford to go without it.
What Working Class Families Are Losing
The financial case for marriage is not a matter of ideology. It is one of the most consistently documented findings in family research. Married men and women in their fifties hold roughly ten times the assets of Americans who never married, according to Wilcox’s research, a gap driven by decades of pooled income, shared housing costs, and the kind of long term financial planning that two committed earners can do far more easily than one. Marriage has also proven to be a stronger predictor of personal happiness than income itself. The General Social Survey found that being married increased the odds of reporting happiness by 151 percent, and a very happy marriage increased those odds by 545 percent, compared with an 88 percent increase in happiness odds tied to higher income alone. Put simply, a good marriage does more for a person’s actual wellbeing than a raise does, and yet it is precisely the Americans most in need of that boost who are least likely to have access to it.
Children bear the weight of this divide most directly. Kids raised in stable, married households are, on average, healthier, do better in school, are less likely to end up in the criminal justice system, and go on to achieve more in their own lives, outcomes researchers have documented consistently across decades of family studies. That does not mean every single family without married parents is failing its children, and it does not mean married parents guarantee success. It means that, as a matter of broad statistical reality, the collapse of marriage among working class Americans is quietly stripping an entire generation of children of one of the most reliable advantages this country has ever been able to offer for free.
A Sequence That Still Works, If We’d Teach It
Perhaps the single most useful piece of research on this entire subject comes from Wilcox and IFS research director Wendy Wang, who studied what they call the success sequence: finishing at least high school, working full time, and marrying before having children, completed in that order. The results are striking. A full 97 percent of Millennials who followed those three steps, in that order, were not poor by their late twenties or early thirties, and more than 80 percent had landed in the middle or upper income bracket. Marrying before having children, specifically, more than doubled young adults’ odds of reaching the middle or top income tier compared with having a baby first, and cut the odds of poverty by 60 percent. The pattern holds across racial lines, though unevenly: Black Americans who followed none of the three success sequence steps had a 73 percent chance of being poor by 38, compared with 54 percent for Hispanic Americans and 39 percent for whites who skipped the same steps, a gap that reflects real and unequal access to the resources, stable schools, and job opportunities that make each step easier to reach in the first place.
That last point matters, and this magazine will not pretend otherwise. Wilcox and Wang themselves acknowledge that young adults from poorer neighborhoods and weaker schools have a genuinely harder time completing the sequence, with only about 31 percent of lower income young adults on track compared with a much higher share of their upper income peers. But the honest reading of that data is not that the sequence does not work. It is that too few young Americans, particularly those without college educated parents to model it for them, are ever taught that the order in which they make these decisions matters enormously for the life they will end up living. More than half of Millennial parents in this data had their first child before marriage, not because marriage stopped working as an economic strategy, but because fewer people are being taught that it still does.
“It’s a big mistake to put Mammon before marriage.”
— W. Bradford Wilcox, director, National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia
How Washington Made It Worse
Culture is only part of this story. Federal policy has spent decades quietly punishing the very working class couples this country should be encouraging to marry. Means tested programs, from housing assistance to healthcare subsidies to portions of the tax code, routinely phase out benefits once a household combines two incomes through marriage, creating a very real financial penalty for lower income couples who choose to formalize their relationship rather than simply cohabitate. A single mother working a modest job can lose meaningful government support the moment she marries a partner earning a similar wage, even though the household’s actual expenses, rent, childcare, healthcare, do not disappear just because two incomes are now on paper together. Researchers and policymakers across the ideological spectrum, including panels convened by the American Enterprise Institute, have called for exactly this kind of reform: restructuring tax policy and federal assistance programs to stop penalizing marriage among the very families who stand to benefit from it most. It is difficult to preach the value of marriage to working class Americans with one hand while the federal government’s benefit structure quietly fines them for it with the other.
The Cultural Piece Money Can’t Buy
Policy reform alone will not solve this. Researchers studying marital happiness and stability have consistently found that shared faith and supportive religious community meaningfully strengthen marriages, correlating with lower divorce rates and greater relationship satisfaction, precisely because churches have historically supplied the values, social networks, and accountability that make a marriage mindset feel normal and achievable rather than aspirational. That is exactly the role this magazine believes churches, families, and communities of faith are built to play, and exactly the role too many working class communities have lost access to as religious participation has declined alongside marriage itself. Wilcox has called for reviving what he describes plainly as a marriage mindset, promoted not just through policy but through schools, colleges, churches, and everyday culture, restoring marriage to its rightful place as the first rung of the ladder rather than the reward waiting at the top of it.
The Bottom Line
Marriage was never meant to be a luxury reserved for those who have already made it. It was meant to be the very thing that helped ordinary Americans make it in the first place, the shared foundation two people build a stable, prosperous life from together, regardless of what either of them earned on their own. The data is unambiguous: the Americans most likely to marry today are the Americans who need marriage’s benefits the least, while the Americans who could benefit most from a stable, two income household are increasingly told, by culture and by policy alike, that marriage is something to achieve only after everything else falls into place. That is exactly backward, and reversing it will take more than good intentions. It will take a tax code that stops punishing working couples for marrying, a culture willing to teach young people plainly that the order of these decisions changes their lives, and churches and communities willing to do the patient work of making marriage feel possible again for the Americans who have quietly been priced out of it.
References
Institute for Family Studies, “High-Earning Women Are More Likely to Marry,” November 2025
Wikipedia, “Marriage gap”
CBS News, “Who gets married today? The rich and educated”
CNBC, “The class divide: Marriage as a ‘luxury good'”
Institute for Family Studies, “The Millennial Success Sequence: Marriage, Kids, and the ‘Success Sequence’ Among Young Adults”
American Enterprise Institute, “Straight Talk About the Success Sequence, Marriage, and Poverty”
Institute for Family Studies, “What Does the Success Sequence Mean?”
Deseret News, “Success sequence: These three steps help keep people out of poverty”
BYU News, “Forum: Mammon or marriage?” featuring W. Bradford Wilcox
Fox News Radio, “Professor: Get Married, Stay Married: A Recipe for Health, Wealth and Happiness”
