Is marriage a good choice? Not if you’re a woman.
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. Imagine if we told girls the truth.
There is a single choice in life that will, on average:
shorten women’s life expectancy
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
That choice is cisgender heterosexual marriage.
It is true that it’s not all men and not all marriages. I’m married to a man who does his fair share and supports me to realize my full potential. It’s that experience that has made me so keenly aware of what’s all around us: miserable women who think the trash marriages they have are normal (because in a patriarchal society, they are). So please don’t message me with your #notallmen defenses and your insistence that your marriage is special.
Liberation for women requires liberation for all women. If you can’t care about what’s happening to the average woman because it’s not happening to you, then you’re unable to be a part of the solution.
If we want to save marriage, we have to acknowledge how bad it is.
If we want to destroy it, we have to acknowledge how bad it is.
No matter how you feel about marriage, caring about women begins with acknowledging the ways in which marriage and marriage culture keep women trapped, subservient, and too exhausted to turn their full attention toward collective liberation.
Let’s consider a few key data points:
Men are literally buying their downtime with women's work: working mothers get about 30 minutes of downtime each day, compared to 4 hours for working fathers. Across the globe, women work longer and harder than men, proving that the problem isn’t a gendered division of labor. It’s a tendency to expect that women will simply do more work.
Divorce makes women happier. Divorced women say divorcing improved their happiness compared to married life.
Working mothers spend significantly more time on household labor and childcare than do working fathers.
Straight women have fewer orgasms than any other group.
Sexual exclusivity may be more difficult for women than for men, and married sex may be less satisfying.
Having a baby reduces mothers’ sleep for years. It does not significantly affect fathers’ sleep.
The wage gap is wider for working mothers, even though working mothers work more efficiently than any other group.
Husbands create 7 additional hours of work for their wives each week.
Single women are happier, report higher levels of pleasure, and live longer.
Even when women work full-time or are the lead earners, they do 70 to 80% of household labor.
And what about men? Turns out they’ve been misled, too. Those perennial manboys who would do anything to avoid marriage should know that marriage is great for men. They get free labor. More downtime. More social status. They earn more money. They have more sex, and while their wives experience a decline in libido and sexual quality, they don’t. They live longer and healthier lives. Men’s health deteriorates when they divorce, while women’s health does not. Wives who do not work directly contribute to their male partners’ earnings. Dads earn more money just for becoming fathers, even when the quality of their work does not improve.
Overwhelmingly, the above data points represent averages only. This means the good men factor into the final result, and make things look better than they actually are. Spend a little time in online mommy groups for women of a variety of races and socioeconomic statuses, and you’ll notice an emerging theme: No matter who works or where, no matter how much money the couple has, no matter what intersecting oppressions they experience, it’s the woman who does the overwhelming majority not just of household labor, but of all labor—from maintaining family relationships to preparing the kids to launch. They do this in a thankless environment where such behavior is normalized, even treated as amusing. Their husbands become angry and threatening when they demand better. And they overwhelmingly feel trapped and demoralized.
Perhaps most troubling of all, the data show how marriage can become a prison. Marriage reduces women’s earnings by 10 to 20%. Differences in ability, life choices, and other variables do not explain this reduction. The culprit is marriage, and all the social baggage that comes with it. So at the very moment women are entering a social construct that is overwhelmingly bad for them, they’re reducing their economic ability to leave.
It doesn't have to be this way. Household inequity is a form of abuse with real and long-lasting consequences for women's well-being.
Not all men are this way. Not all marriages are this way. None of them have to be.
Demand better. And stop telling girls to look forward to marriage. They probably shouldn't. Give them tools and books and crafts, not princesses and fairytales