If North America feels like a game of Risk these days, it may be more than just an entertaining distraction. In recent weeks, President Trump has talked of making Canada the 51st American state. To date, it appears that no one on the Canadian side of the border has speculated about making the United States the 11th Canadian Province. At today’s news rate, however, that might change soon. In the meantime, Canada and the U.S. certainly have interests and trends in common, some of which may be discomfiting to talk about. One of them is the state of marriage in two adjacent cultures under a variety of old and new stresses.

In an excellent new book, “I … Do? Why Marriage Still Matters,” Canadian authors Andrea Mrozek and Peter Jon Mitchell make a case they admit from the outset is difficult. As they write in their first chapter, “Marriage has simply become an option in family life.” This most ancient of institutions has come to be seen as an accessory, one choice among many. It is not that all the data on marriage is negative — far from it — or that the trends are uniformly unfavorable, because some are not. It is more a matter, as they write, that the institutional nature of marriage now competes with a social ethos that puts primacy on interpersonal connection, the soulmate model of marriage. This model is focused on the adults involved, on emotions and intimacy, and less on community, family, and the generations to come.

A word about the authors and their affiliations first. Andrea Mrozek is a senior fellow for family issues at Cardus, a nonpartisan Canadian think tank that represents the merger of several historically Christian institutes devoted to the study of work and family. Peter Jon Mitchell also devotes his research and publishing to family issues as a program director. The Ottawa-based nonprofit has grown substantially in recent years and seeks to provide Canadian policymakers with data and perspectives that, in Cardus’s words, clarify and strengthen, “through research and dialogue, the ways in which society’s institutions can work together for the common good.” These efforts encompass economics and education policy as well as the roles of faith and family.

“I … Do?” is clear-eyed about the steepness of the challenges in an era where, across North America, the definition of marriage, its nature as a mutual covenant designed to foster home life and the community, and the durability of the institution have all been called into question. Mrozek and Mitchell summon the wisdom of Aristotle to describe how the ancient understanding of marriage was handed down globally for centuries. The Greek philosopher wrote, some three hundred years before Christ, that marriage is “an older and more fundamental thing than the state.” For Aristotle, the authors say, “The stability of any state depended on the success of households founded on the ‘natural procreative union of male and female’.” All the more remarkably, this understanding prevailed in Western European and North American nations until the past decade, and, though intimidated in its public expression today, it has some sway even now.

As policy analysts keenly interested in data, Mrozek and Mitchell run through the good, the bad, and the bracing. Their main focus is Canada, but the similarities (and some key differences) between our northern neighbor and the United States are instructive. The institution of marriage still has its greatest impact via the differences it makes on outcomes for children across virtually the entire range of individual and social metrics. The authors sequentially describe what they deem “the marriage advantage” for men, for women, for fertility (men and women alike), for children, for couples (including health and finances), and for the shared life of the community. The advantages for children, in terms of educational achievement, juvenile crime, future earnings, and future family life have been widely documented and are not in serious dispute among a spectrum of sociologists and scholars. The tally of other benefits is powerful:

• “Married men are generally happier, earn more money, and have better economic outcomes than their unmarried peers. They are also less likely to engage in risky or harmful behaviors such as substance abuse.”
• “American survey data from 2022 show higher happiness rates for married women, with or without children.”
• “[M]arriage and fertility remain firmly linked. Absent a marriage-friendly culture, fertility rates will not increase and women will not have the number of children they desire.”
• “Studies have found that children from two-parent homes are less likely to attempt suicide, experience mental illness, or abuse drugs. ,,, A U.S. Census-based study found that children with married parents are three times less likely to live in poverty compared with children in lone-parent, cohabiting-mother, or unmarried-, biological-parent families.”
• “A meta-analysis of eighty-seven studies found that marriage was associated with a 12 percent decrease in the risk of dying among cancer patients. … [A] 2018 study found that married couples who never cohabited had the highest net worth, compared to other pairings.”
• “Evidence suggests that married people are more likely to volunteer and be active in civic engagement.”

The case for marriage, and for childbearing within it, appears to be so strong that it can scarcely be questioned. No social program of remediation or financial aid can match its documented contributions to personal and community health. But the authors are cautious on this point. Does marriage perform its constructive work for individuals who are not already well adapted to the values it requires and reinforces? In other words, is marriage self-selecting, benefiting from participants’ attributes of higher education and earning capacity, as well as personal qualities, or can it assist individuals in overcoming the weakness or lack of these qualities?

Things are further complicated by the enormous changes in legal and social policy that have occurred, some of them handed down from above, in the past 50 years. Mrozek and Mitchell delve into these issues, from the advent of no-fault divorce, legal abortion, and the Sexual Revolution to, more recently, the legalization of same-sex marriage. Their answers to these fraught questions are not definitive, but they point out the sobering truth of an increase in support for polygamous arrangements and polyamory as the potential next issues.

Most important, perhaps, is the informed way in which “I … Do?” enriches and engages a debate that some policymakers are tempted to think is over. If the soulmate model is preeminent, then marriage will remain whatever two or more people think is appropriate in alignment with their desires. There is little or no reason in logic why one person’s raw preferences, at least with respect to adults, should not be equally respected in law and culture.

The authors give us a frank look at what the most current trends tell us in this regard. They point out that a society’s total fertility rate (TFR) suffices to replicate its population at an average of 2.1 children per couple. Canada’s most recent TFR (2022) is a paltry 1.33 children per woman. The U.S. rate in 2022 was slightly better at 1.66. The phenomenon is occurring across the West, in communist China, South Korea, Japan, and elsewhere.

In the West, at least, marriage is fortunately not becoming less stable. But it is happening later in life and less frequently. After the Sexual Revolution (it is key to remember that heterosexual marriage teetered long before alternatives gained social and political momentum), the U.S. divorce rate doubled between 1960 and 1980. The divorce rate has since declined, with a variety of beneficial effects, but a gap has developed between the marriage and divorce practices of people with more income and education. For those on the progressive side of political debates, this gap represents at minimum a hypocritical silence and at most a malign neglect.

The changes in the age of first marriages are even more striking. In the 1970s in the United States the average age at marriage was 22 for women and 24 for men. Now, in both the United States and Canada, the average age at first marriage is just above 30 for men and just below 30 for women. In addition to the impact on fertility and childbearing, this reality extends the age range when sexual behavior will expose more women to unexpected pregnancy and economic risk. It is no accident that abortion rates remain especially high in this age range — the protective effect of a marital commitment (only 13% of U.S. abortions reportedly take place among married couples) has been abandoned.

One final point is worth mentioning. The authors are not glib about public policy solutions. The book’s account of the singular collapse of marriage in the historically French Catholic province of Quebec is searing. Today 67% of births in Quebec occur out of wedlock. Once dominated by the Catholic vision of religious obligations and lifelong marital commitment, the province went through what is called “the Quiet Revolution” in which secular values overthrew a dramatically weakened church.

Today, the authors say, Quebec has policies on child care and parental leave that many North Americans would cite as “an example to emulate.” Yet Quebec’s TFR in 2023 was 1.38. The authors do not abandon policy approaches altogether, citing the need for vigilance about marriage penalties in public programs as one example, but their main hope is that voices for marriage will be raised and become ever more articulate. They have amassed the data and the arguments in a book that is crucial reading for all of our hemisphere’s provinces and states.

“I … Do? Why Marriage Still Matters” is published by Cascade Books (Eugene, Oregon) (115 pp.) (2024) and is available online at various sellers.