A Review of I … Do? Why Marriage Still Matters by Andrea Mrozek and Peter Jon Mitchell, Cascade Books, 2024.

“Marriage is a public good, and now more than ever North Americans need to reimagine what a healthy marriage culture could look like in a pluralistic society” write Andrea Mrozek and Peter Jon Mitchell, as they lay out the case for marriage in their highly readable and informative I … Do? Why Marriage Still Matters. Arguing that marriage has significant benefits not only for married adults and their children but also for the wider community, the authors express the hope that their book will contribute to public conversations on the subject.  

I am probably a minority audience for this book. I believe in marriage for the reasons so ably brought forward by the authors. Most of my friends also take marriage seriously and are aware of the good that it offers. Still, I have reservations serious enough that I would hesitate to encourage any young man to marry. The book strengthened my appreciation for why the institution deserves to be saved, but it did not address my concerns.

In general, the authors direct their arguments toward those who, modern and progressive in outlook, increasingly find marriage unnecessary or irrelevant—if not an actual evil that stifles women and denies human nature. North Americans increasingly defer marriage until later in life or choose to cohabit. Even among policy analysts and social commentators who might be expected to tout its demonstrated benefits, the subject of marriage has been largely sidelined.

The good news on marriage is far-reaching, as the authors show. Children born to and raised by their two married parents fare better than other children on a range of measures. They are less likely to grow up in poverty or to be physically or sexually abused. They are more likely to finish school and to secure employment. They have fewer emotional and behavioural problems, being “less likely to attempt suicide, experience mental illness, or abuse drugs.” Married adults also experience benefits, enjoying better health and greater longevity than their single or divorced counterparts, while escaping social ills such as isolation, addiction and homelessness. The wider society is strengthened too, as married couples tend to be more civic-minded than others, supporting sports clubs, rotary clubs, business associations, places of worship and charities.

While arguing in favour of marriage, Mrozek and Mitchell are well aware of the changes that have worked against it over the past century. They show how, for example, attempts to make divorce less painful have also vastly increased its likelihood. As they argue convincingly, the trend across North America to no-fault divorce did not necessarily decrease divorce trauma, especially for those spouses who found themselves divorced against their wishes, or for the children powerless to keep their families together. Marital breakdown is not made less acrimonious or heartbreaking simply because it has been legally simplified; on the contrary, Mrozek and Mitchell suggest, the pain has simply been spread to more people.

The authors are persuasive in arguing that the romantic view of marriage that has predominated in the West over the last century has perhaps hastened its demise. “The soulmate model, by relying too heavily on emotion and by diminishing the rewards of longevity, ultimately fails to value other aspects of marriage that benefit family members and wider society.” The benefits of stability, commitment and increased financial security are not negligible, extending beyond elusive notions of the soulmate. The authors propose instead the more heroic model of marriage as an epic adventure: sometimes difficult and at times requiring sacrifice, but involving a fulfilling goal.

Mrozek and Mitchell make their evidence-based proposal for valuing marriage in a manner respectful of those hostile to it, conceding that marriage involves trade-offs and is not necessarily for everyone. They suggest that the forces weakening marriage have been not so much intentional as accidental or peripheral, involving the “many little ways we’ve forgotten that even important, long-standing institutions can crumble if left untended.” I fear that this position radically underestimates the longstanding and determined hostility to marriage that has animated feminist and progressivist factions from Charles Fourier to Betty Friedan, and from Victoria Woodhull to Sophie Lewis. The advocates who have successfully spread their anti-marriage animus throughout our societies don’t care if the outcomes of marriage can be shown to be good for children or communities. Their commitment to utopian goals, such as sexual liberation or gender equality, makes them impervious to incidental problems like loneliness or drug addiction, which they believe will be easily solved once their desired outcome has been reached.

Surely, the repeated undermining of marriage we have seen over the past decades has been quite deliberate? The progressive wing of the Liberal Party of Canada, for example, has increasingly treated marriage as no different from non-marital cohabitation, same-sex unions or any other family arrangement, deserving of no special protections, advantages or recognition—in fact, quite the reverse. Articles with titles such as “Is Marriage a Bad Deal for Women?” flood the pages of Psychology Today (the answer, in case anyone wonders, is a resounding yes), while women who divorce their husbands are lauded for their courage, truth-telling and loyalty to self.

In the past decade, the Liberals under former prime minister Justin Trudeau pursued and touted their commitment to explicitly anti-family feminist policies such as employment quotas for women, government-subsidized childcare and government-subsidized contraceptives. The ideal, clearly, is a sexually liberated female populace having ever fewer children, unencumbered by the few they do have and indifferent to their surgical elimination. Many other feminist policies, from domestic violence initiatives to equity hiring programs, have increasingly demonized men as oppressors, reduced men’s earning power (thus making them undesirable as mates) and delegitimized their roles as fathers. That some feminist advocates now express pro-marriage views—a fact greeted by Mrozek and Mitchell as good news—doesn’t matter if marriage and men’s position within it have been so thoroughly weakened in law and cultural esteem as to be unable to deliver their traditional advantages.

In directing their arguments toward those who don’t care what happens to marriage or are actively hostile to it on principle, Mrozek and Mitchell have little to say to the men who are uneasy about marriage, not because of the challenges and sacrifices of the married state but because of the catastrophic damage wrought by divorce. A marriage that can be unilaterally dissolved by one party for no significant or proven reason is a marriage in little more than name. Many of the victims of unilateral divorce are male, as women initiate divorce in about 70 per cent of cases. Women, we are often told by the experts (who applaud the ease with which marriages can be abandoned), are less likely than men to settle for an unsatisfying arrangement, though not as inclined to part from their husbands’ money. Where children are involved, divorced men can find themselves reduced to being visitors in their children’s lives if that is the ex-wife’s wish. Men who have committed no crime can even find themselves subject to years-long no-contact orders from anti-male family court judges.

In extolling the health and other benefits of marriage, and even repeating the rather insulting notion that marriage “civilizes men”, Mrozek and Mitchell say nothing about the particularly devastating consequences of divorce for such men, who kill themselves at a rate approximately nine times greater than post-divorce women do. It is hard to believe there would be general silence if women were killing themselves so often when their husbands abandoned them. Many men, looking at marriage as it is now constituted and seeing the agony of friends or relatives, simply find the risks too great. They are ready for the commitment of marriage, desirous of building a home and having children, and quite happy to work harder and take on other necessary obligations—but they are not willing to be sacrificial lambs if their spouse wants out. The only way not to be divorced, unfortunately, is not to get married. Given that Canadian family law treats common-law partnerships like marriages, some of these men are regretfully choosing not to cohabit or have children either.

Here we come to the difficult conundrum that this otherwise potent book does not address. If marriage is the key social good that the research shows it to be, isn’t it necessary to protect it through law and social policy—for example, by ending no-fault divorce, by rewarding married couples with tax incentives and other legal and policy protections, by guaranteeing the rights of children and fathers through mandated equal parenting after divorce and through other initiatives to prioritize marital stability? If we are to honour marriage as a unique social good, shouldn’t we be willing to demand it be publicly recognized and supported as such? Lacking such support, it is likely to remain a fragile, imperiled institution. Perhaps these are issues that can be addressed in a follow-up volume—one that I would be very interested to read.

Janice Fiamengo, PhD, is a senior fellow with the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy and a professor of English at the University of Ottawa.