Is marriage good for women?
Years ago I wrote a piece itemizing the reasons marriage disadvantages women. Here's an updated version.
Note: I published a much shorter version of this piece a few years ago. This is an updated, detailed version, with more statistics and data.
In the popular imagination, marriage is for women. From the time we’re little girls, we’re taught to fantasize about a wedding, to play at wifedom and motherhood as our male peers play with LEGOs and build construction sites. There are a lot of social forces—Barbie, Disney, princess culture, a million dress-up kits, heteronormative parenting scripts, and harmful gender myths to name just a few—working overtime to convince little girls to get married.
It takes a lot of work to encourage us to ignore what’s right in front of our eyes—that marriage means more work, that husbands are often terrible, that so many women in our lives had to give up hopes and dreams and identities to get or stay married.
There’s a reason men are so obsessed with telling women we need marriage and men. There’s a reason they get so very angry when we suggest that marriage disadvantages women, or that most marriages are bad. They know that it takes significant indoctrination to get women to ignore the plain truth. They know that marriage benefits them, and they know that if women abandon marriage altogether, they’ll have to work harder and maybe even learn how to become likable, good at sex, and able to provide something other than a paycheck.
Imagine if we told girls the truth.
Imagine if we admitted to them that there is a single choice in life that will, on average:
shorten women’s life expectancy
undermine their ability to parent their children effectively
greatly increase the risk of their children being exposed to violence and all other forms of abuse
lower women’s earning power
erode their mental health
make them less happy over the long-term
weaken women’s relationships with family and friends
erode women’s libido
reduce the quality of a woman’s sex life
immediately increase household labor
increase risk of and exposure to abuse and violence
elevate risk of depression, anxiety, and trauma