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The Beatles told us: "All you need is love." They were right, but along with love must come marriage. But marriage rates have plummeted, especially among young men. A Pulitzer Prize-worthy story by Sean Salai of The Washington Times crunches all the numbers. To say they are worrisome would be a vast understatement. -- In 2025, nearly twice as many men ages 18 to 39 were unmarried as were married. -- There were 30.4 million unmarried men ages 18 to 39 in 2025, up 47% from 20.7 million in 2000. -- In the same period, married men in this age...

The Institute for Family Studies (IFS) recently estimated that the gap between unmarried and married men under the age of 40 continues to widen—with 15 million more bachelors than husbands between the ages of 20 to 39 in 2025. The gap has widened by 12.4 million since 2000, when the gap between married and unmarried stood at 2.6 million. IFS also reports, according to a General Social Survey, 11 percent of young adults in the early 2000s said they were “not too happy.” That percentage is now at 26 percent. During the same period, the number of married men ages...

More young men in America are remaining single than ever before, with the rate almost doubling over the last quarter century, according to concerning new data released earlier this week. Statistics compiled by the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) revealed that there were 30.4 million single men aged 18 to 39 in 2025 in the U.S., amounting to almost 10 million more bachelors than there were in 2000 (20.7 million). IFS further estimated that there were 15 million more single men than husbands in this age group in 2025. In 2000, there was only a 2.6 million difference. This rise...

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin on Thursday asserted that Somali-born Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) “married her brother” as part of an alleged fraudulent immigration scheme — and could face deportation. Mullin made the comment to conservative podcaster Benny Johnson, as he discussed the “ongoing” federal investigation into the “Squad” congresswoman, at the GOP midterm convention in Dallas. “We know that she married her brother to try to bring him to the United States,” Mullin said confidently. “We know he lives now in London,” the DHS chief added, referring to Omar’s ex-husband.

If you’re looking to get married, the place to go might be the Provo area in Utah. Or maybe Fort Wayne and the southern suburbs in Indiana. Both locations feature some of the highest rates of new marriages over the past year in the country, according to a new project by the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) called the Marriage Map. In the Provo area, fully 13.2 percent of never-married adults aged 22 to 39 got married last year. In the Fort Wayne area, the number was 10.6 percent. The Marriage Map is a newly released, interactive online map created...

WASHINGTON — The feds nabbed 11 suspects accused of operating a decade-long, multimillion-dollar marriage fraud scheme that resulted in around 1,000 sham weddings between primarily Chinese nationals and US citizens for the purpose of getting the Asians green cards. The “cottage industry” uncovered Wednesday charged foreign nationals up to $100,000 for each fake union, including submitting fraudulent applications to US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) on behalf of those seeking lawful permanent residency. The sham wedding ring used advertisements on social media platforms, held phony marraige ceremonies and even had both parties to the fake unions sign bizarre pre-nuptial agreements,...

Weddings are a joyous occasion, and I’ve heard of at least three in my social circles in the upcoming months. But two of these weddings are diverting from the norm of a weekend celebratory affair, choosing instead to hold their nuptials on a weekday. “A weekday?!” one might well say. “How inconsiderate! I can’t take a whole day off from work just to attend a wedding!”But perhaps that’s the whole point – not to be inconsiderate, of course, but to trim costs. After all, setting a wedding for a weekday reduces the costs of venues, caterers, florists, and other services,...

For most Virginians, three more years of Governor Abigail Spanberger (D) feels like an eternity. The mom-next-door-turned-radical-Democrat has spent the last seven months shedding her moderate skin and pushing policies that are wildly out-of-step with her middle-of-the-road state. And while voters can’t send her packing any time soon, they can deliver an emphatic rebuke to the historically unpopular governor on two issues that matter most: abortion and marriage. In November, Virginians have a chance to beat back the extremists in Richmond on a pair of ballot initiatives that could turn the Commonwealth into a deep-blue stronghold on core social values....

A majority of Americans still support same-sex 'marriage,' but a new poll reaffirms a notable decline over the past few years.

One of the most worrying trends in Western societies is the failing institution of marriage. Not only are divorce rates high, but increasingly young people are opting out altogether. A generation ago, 80 to 90 percent of the population in the United States would have been married by the age of 35; the number is now closer to 60 percent and has been falling over the past 10 years. That number matters because marriages are less likely to produce children after 35. In virtually all Western countries, the birth rate is now below replacement, which is almost certainly linked to...

For years we've been told there are certain issues that are simply too controversial to decide. So what do organizations do? They create a committee. Study it. Delay it. Hope the controversy cools off before anyone has to take a position. That's exactly what happened this week. The only problem? The organization wasn't a Fortune 500 company trying to navigate corporate politics. It wasn't Congress trying to avoid a difficult vote. It was a Christian denomination trying to decide whether its pastors should be... monogamous. Yes, you read that correctly. The Presbyterian Church (USA) postponed debate over a proposal that...

Americans age 50 and older are getting divorced—with almost half of all broken marriages in recent years coming from aging Gen Xers and Baby Boomers. Gray divorces doubled between 1990 and 2010, until they comprised about one in four of all divorces nationally... And though divorce has been dropping in most age groups across America, it has not among people 50 years and older. Michael Stutman, a top New York City divorce lawyer, thinks a “popular culture” shift around modern marriage expectations, coupled with staring down the barrel of mortality, could be playing a part. “The thing about people who...

Couples who marry before conceiving their first child are 50% less likely to break up than those who conceive outside of wedlock, findings of a new study show.... Benson analyzed data on 3,324 couples and tracked their children born in the early 2000s until their 14th birthday. He found a significant “marriage effect” regardless of socioeconomic background, race, religion, education, region, and several other control variables.

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The warning signs have been there for decades. Back in 1983, American author Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a powerful book — The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment — arguing that a male revolt was underway. Since the 1950s, she suggested, men had begun rebelling against the breadwinner ethic, inspired by Playboy culture, the counterculture and a desire for personal freedom. They were rejecting the cultural ideology that had shamed them into tying the knot and becoming a good provider, lest they be seen as immature, irresponsible and less than a real man.Ehrenreich understood that marriage was...

It's a bit weird to think of dating or marriage as a market — but this is a newsletter that tries to make sense of the world through economics. And, like any market, shifts in supply and demand can reshape romantic outcomes in pretty profound ways. First, a dating story that illustrates this dynamic. Then we'll get to a fascinating new study that may help explain why getting married has become harder for many American women. But first, the story. If you haven't heard of him, Jack Antonoff is a musician and super-producer. He, for example, produced a slew of...

In Focus delivers deeper coverage of the political, cultural, and ideological issues shaping America. Published daily by senior writers and experts, these in-depth pieces go beyond the headlines to give readers the full picture. You can find our full list of In Focus pieces here.Democrats rarely mention our nation’s fertility crisis, but when they do, they always offer the same solution: more immigration. Here is former President Bill Clinton stumping for Vice President Kamala Harris in the most recent presidential election."We got the lowest birth rate we've had in well over 100 years,” Clinton told Harris supporters less than a...

Elisabeth “Betty” Broderick, who in 1989 infamously murdered her ex-husband and his new bride as they slept in the bedroom of their California home, has died at 78 while serving a life sentence. Broderick died on Friday at the California Institution for Women of natural causes, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation confirmed to People.

As the U.S. birth rate continues to plummet to record lows, data shows that a significant percentage of liberals are deprioritizing the importance of marriage and having children, especially among teens. Among conservatives, however, the phenomenon does not appear to be occurring. In an article published last week by the Institute for Family Studies (IFS), sociologists Brad Wilcox and Grant Bailey highlight how the aspirations that many liberals claim to have about marrying and having children are not lining up with their real-world behavior, which appears to be heavily influenced by negative media narratives. They note that mainstream media outlets...

The data are in, they’re not looking good, and the implications for America’s future are dire. Recently, a report was released on the latest fertility rate numbers for the United States, and they are alarming. For several years, they’ve been low enough to cause worry about American replacement rates, but in 2025, they hit a new low:AdvertisementThe United States is experiencing a demographic shift that could reshape the nation’s future. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows America’s total fertility rate has plummeted to a historic low of 1.6 children per woman—well below the 2.1 replacement level...