The Importance of Sexual Restraint and Friendship in Marriage Formation For young adults today, the word “friend” has multiple and sometimes contradictory meanings. For example, the term “friend” can refer to one’s “best friend (BFF)” or “boyfriend” or “girlfriend”—labels that typically convey an ongoing relationship of commitment and concern between two people. But at the […]

In June of 2009 one of the most prominent conservative governors in the United States disappeared without notice. Where he went—and what he later said about it—illustrate a profound cultural shift in public and private attitudes regarding marriage. This shift, documented and explored by leading American sociologists, confronts a popular misconception about marriage, namely, that […]

It should be obvious that the family—and marriage in particular—is under a great deal of popular and political scrutiny. There is a tug-of-war in the social sciences over what we know with confidence about the contemporary family, which has not changed a great deal, and what can be said about it (and who can say […]

I want to begin, in talking about marriage and men, with a story. It is a story about a guy named Doug. I talked to him awhile ago about his work and his family and his life in general. He said to me, “Prior to getting married, I really didn’t have a care in the […]

The topic of this article is marriageable men. It a phrase that not everyone is familiar with. A lot of experts and researchers posit that one of the reasons that we have seen a big decline in marriage, particularly among low-income folks, is that men are out of work and are thus not marriageable. They […]

How Cohabitation Changes Marriage My colleague Scott Stanley and I put out a report in the summer of 2014 that was called “Before I Do,” sponsored by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia; that report is the foundation for this article.[1] A generation or two ago, people formed relationships and made commitments […]

New Insights into Pitirim Sorokin’s American Sex Revolution The distinguished Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin published a remarkable book, The American Sex Revolution, in 1956.[1] It was ignored by most in the social science profession, one reviewer calling it “an explosive little volume”[2] and another “scalding,” “censorious,” and “scolding.”[3] Some thought that Sorokin was a hysterical[4] […]

Sherif Girgis, Robert George, and I have argued that there is a comprehensive good called marriage.[1] And we engage in it by a comprehensive act that unites a man and a woman as husband and wife and then leads towards the comprehensive good of marriage: the creation and the raising of new life. It calls […]

I want to begin with a general set of thoughts about why it is important to have a serious intellectual discussion about marriage, in particular in an environment where we share a common faith or a common set of assumptions and understandings about moral and political theory. It is very easy for people to think,“I […]