Recently, while waiting in line at the airport to check my bag, I met a friendly, talkative woman who seemed to be in her late 30s. She shared with me how she was in a long-distance marriage and was traveling that day to visit her husband, who lives in Australia. They had been together for about five years, visiting each other every six months. Curious about this unusual arrangement, I asked why she didn’t move to Australia to be with him.
Her answer stopped me dead in my tracks: she had a dog. Moving the animal to Australia would be expensive and stressful for her beloved pet.
We have a marriage crisis.
As the prominent sociologist Dr. Mark Regnerus argues in his book “The Future of Christian Marriage,” matrimony is increasingly seen as a capstone to individual fulfillment, rather than the cornerstone of human development. Marriage is now often viewed as a matter of personal desire and romance, rather than love and self-sacrifice toward a spouse and potential future children. As a result, many people today prioritize prolonged education, career advancement, pets, travel, or “self-discovery” over finding a spouse and committing to a lifelong partnership earlier in life.
According to a Pew Research study, as of 2021, one in four 40-year-olds in America had never been married. This reality harms not only individuals’ immediate well-being but also their deeper personal development. In his book “Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization” Brad Wilcox notes that contrary to the myth that “flying solo” brings greater benefits for individuals, in generally stable marriages:
“Social science tells us that men and women who get married in America typically reap large returns from the investments they make in wedlock. Those who get and stay married today are much more likely to be prospering, flourishing socially, and happy.”
Yet in the era after the Industrial and Sexual Revolutions, men and women have developed the illusion that they no longer need each other, in part due to increased economic independence.
This decline suggests that the pleasure marriage offers is an insufficient motivation, especially since today marriage seems less necessary for economic stability. The tendency to forgo marriage is rooted in large part in materialism. After all, from a materialist perspective that views people mainly as bodies with material needs and desires, marriage appears an unattractive choice.
Daily sacrifices for a spouse during sickness and hardship, waking at 4 a.m. to soothe a crying baby, and accepting the responsibility of providing for more mouths — all of these challenge the individual’s immediate comfort. Besides, romantic pleasure is readily available outside of marriage in today’s culture.
Yet, human societies have never survived without marriage, and throughout history, most people have lived within or surrounded by this institution. This enduring pattern points to something deeper than materialism, which tends to prioritize individual sensual desires. Materialism can disguise the necessity of marriage, both for the individual and for society. Viewing vocational choices only through the lens of personal interest overlooks marriage’s unique role: it frees individuals from the tension between pleasure and pain, guiding them toward a selfless love that paradoxically leads to more personal fulfillment.
When someone treats family as just another item on a checklist of personal dreams, they implicitly embrace the individualistic belief that denies humans’ nature as social beings made for love and community. The outcome of this distorted view of one’s personhood is actually self-limitation – not true freedom and happiness – because it’s no longer in line with the way man was made to function and flourish.
Saint John Paul II writes the following in “Centesimus Annus” in 1991 regarding the dangers of materialism being that marriage becomes an equal among other pursuits rather than a whole separate category of fulfillment:
[I]t often happens that people are discouraged from creating the proper conditions for human reproduction and are led to consider themselves and their lives as a series of sensations to be experienced rather than as a work to be accomplished. The result is a lack of freedom, which causes a person to reject a commitment to enter into a stable relationship with another person and to bring children into the world, or which leads people to consider children as one of the many ‘things’ which an individual can have or not have, according to taste, and which compete with other possibilities.”
Materialism limits freedom by denying the whole human nature and our deep communal needs. People discover their true selves through love, duty, and stable commitment, not before it. Viewing marriage as simply an item in a wishlist below career, education, and travel leads to a degradation of the individual and his or her true human need for mutually-committed love. Placing material goods above marriage, at best, commoditizes love by putting the value of matrimony below economic goods.
Marriage is a natural human necessity for most people, not just for spiritual reasons but for temporal reasons as well. As just one example of its temporal benefit, marriage is linked to better outcomes. Pew Research Center reported that in 2019, “the median earnings of men without a partner were $35,600, lagging far behind those of partnered men ($57,000). Unpartnered women also trail their partnered counterparts in median earnings. . .”
It’s fitting that an institution that teaches self-giving love also promotes prosperity in practical terms. This paradox refutes the reasoning of many who forgo marriage for economic considerations.
Neither materialism nor individual economic independence can change this truth: marriage remains an essential foundation for a healthy society.
What if we reimagined marriage not as the end of personal freedom, but as its true beginning? A society that honors marriage as a vocation of love, duty, and mutual sacrifice lays the groundwork for human flourishing, not just emotionally and spiritually, but economically and culturally. When men and women choose lifelong commitment over fleeting comfort, they don’t just build stronger families — they build a stronger civilization.
Because when a dog outweighs a husband, something in our priorities has gone terribly wrong.
