TLDR: This article examines the modern way of marriage as played out across propoganda and the data that suggests it’s institution may be archaic and in need of a rebrand.

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The Reason for Marriage

For most of recorded history, marriage was not a love story, it was a trade agreement.

Marriage acted as a contract between families, a mechanism for consolidating land, for producing legitimate heirs, a transfer of property. That property being someone’s soon-to-be-wife, someone’s daughter, someone’s sister.

Be glad that you may not know the word coverture, which erased a woman’s legal identity upon marriage and placed her rights into her husband’s “ownership”. It was not repealed in the United States until the 1970s and 80s, when some new laws finally gave married women the right to open a bank account, apply for credit, and manage their own money without a husband’s signature. This means that the version of marriage that’s considered the gold standard of feminine achievement is, at most, fifty years old.

In short, the present version of marriage as we know it is younger than our parents.

Data doesn’t lie, unfortunately

The numbers support this too, trust me, I did my research. According to Pew Research, 40% of American women under 40 now say they are unlikely to ever marry, a number that taken off mostly in recent years. Between 2019 and 2023, women who said marriage was “not important to a fulfilling life” jumped from 31% to 48%.

Nearly 70% of divorces in heterosexual marriages are initiated by women, and the majority of divorced women have no interest in remarrying. 89% of the world’s population now lives in a country with falling marriage rates.

Now take a guess at who society blames for these numbers. I’ll wait, it’s a tough one!

If you guessed women, you’re the winner, because just as all things are, women are named the problem in these numbers. Society labels women as confused, damaged or commitment-phobic. They’re “too ambitious” or “not able to keep a man” or “difficult”. The discourse in right-wing media and male red-pill communities would have you believe that the answer is simple: women are failing to find good men and be great women.

However, I believe more women are making a rational assessment of an institution that was never designed with their interests in mind, and they (we) are responding accordingly.

The Mental Load of Women

It’s not hard to connect the dots about declining marriage rates when you’re given some facts. According to the American Time Use Survey, women in 2022 spent an ~2.4 hours per day on chores compared to ~1.5 hours for men. That gap widens even more when we add the complexity of parenting.

The mental load (i.e. the invisible management of schedules and appointments and emotional temperatures and family logistics) sits almost entirely with women. Even in relationships where both parents work, men’s careers take priority over women’s and one tends to strain, or worse, stop altogether.

And when marriages end, women’s household income drops by 41% compared to 23% for men, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Women notice that. If the divorce rate is high, and leaves a woman worse off financially, it’s normal to see the hesitation.

As one can imagine, Tthe response to this has been fascinating (read: sometimes frightening) to watch in real time.

On one side, there is a genuine and growing movement of women deciding that marriage is simply not worth it for them. On another, there is a political and cultural effort to make sure marriage as a concept stays strong, even if done by force.

The Propoganda Machine

That includes some serious legal conversations about restricting (or even eliminating) no-fault divorce, which allows people to leave marriages without proving abuse or abandonment. Essentially, you can divorce because…you decided to. No questions. The argument for removing this right is typically due to protecting children or honoring the commitment made to each other, but what it does, in reality, is keep women from leaving their husband if they cheat, if they misuse their money, if they’re rude or disrespectful over time. In a country that’s already made it nearly impossible to prove abuse, this protects the sanctity of marriage instead of the sanctity of the women’s lives who want to leave.

Recently at CPAC we see this push for marriage more than ever with the tool of glamorizing marriage and attempting to prove to women that it’s their duty. The trad wife aesthetic is already circulating on social media and celebrating the woman in the home, cooking and cleaning after the kids. It makes this beautiful aesthetic image of femininity that also acts as a liberation from the grind of modern ambition.

The “just get married” discourse pushes marriage as a solution to women’s exhaustion, as if they aren’t also exhausted by the patriarchal views of their partners. Women are tired of feeling forced into lives against their choosing.

Women are tired of these arguments to “do as their told” because these arguments are old. They’re the same arguments that have been made in every era when women start to do something else for themselves. When women get jobs in the workplace, become financially independent, start their own businesses, it’s dressed up as a threat to society and immediately being made into the problem.

The truth is that more married mothers are unhappy than their childfree, single counterparts.
Isn’t that worth exploring?

Women Are Choosing Differently Now

What’s actually happening though, if you’re able to see through the propoganda, is a negotiation. Women are not abandoning the desire for companionship or the love of their life or sharing moments with a partner. It would be a mistake to view the decline in marriage as a connection to women’s disinterest in partnership all together.

What women reject is a specific institutional form of marriage that was built for a world in which they were an asset, with a clear role to play, and no ability to leave or color outside the lines. When a woman’s financial dependence are at the feet of their male partner and the terms of said partnership are non-negotiable, you can’t exactly expect women to daydream about their wedding day anymore.

Is it truly a celebration of love, when it looks like a jail cell?

The truth is marriage has plenty of logistical good to offer including legal protections, tax benefits, etc. as well as the beautiful aspects of building a life in love with someone you were lucky enough to meet because your train ran late one day, so you sat next to a stranger on a bench.

Women still love love. That hasn’t changed.
Just look at sales of ACOTAR or streaming numbers for Heated Rivalry or Bridgerton.

But the offer of marriage is only worth accepting if the terms don’t trap someone. Filing for divorce when a marriage stops working is not giving up. Choosing to remain single rather than accept a bad deal is not settling for loneliness, nor is it the fault of a woman. Shifting priorities into building a partnership, married or not, on genuinely equal terms is not a radical or unreasonable ask.

The Modern Way of Marriage is Maybe to Abstain

Marriage doesn’t deserve admiration or respect or aspiration on it’s own.

We need to be honest about whether or not marriage still serves as valuable, or harmful, to women. And women, increasingly and correctly, are the ones doing that evaluation.

And instead of blaming women for their choice to opt out, maybe look into why that is.

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Sources

^{Pew Research Center, 2024 — Share of U.S. adults living without a romantic partner
Survey Center on American Life, January 2025 — Much Ado About Marriage
Divorce.com, 2025 — Why Women Initiate Divorce More Often Than Men
University of Houston / Opting Out research, 2023 — Opting Out: Women Messing with Marriage around the World
UAB Institute for Human Rights, April 2025 — Marriage, Inequality, and Human Rights}