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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...

Raise your hand if someone close to you – friend, relative, co-worker – has been personally touched by divorce. Sadly, I’ve been able to raise my hand for all three at certain points of my life, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you can as well. Perhaps you’ve even been divorced yourself. The prevalence of divorce in our culture is likely why so few say anything against it. Afraid of stepping on toes, we dance around the topic, telling divorcees that they’re “so brave” for separating from their partner, or that they did the right thing to get out and...

I used to be entirely in the camp that said you should kick your kids out at 18 and force them to live independently and make their own way in the world. I don’t feel that way at all anymore. I want all my kids to live with us until they get married. Even after they’re married, if they want to live on our property, or close by, my wife and I would love that. The important thing is to teach your kids responsibility, which we’re doing. They need to contribute and help around the house, which all of our...

Modern women are at a crossroads. There seems to be an irreconcilable difference between a career-driven woman…and the opportunity to approach womanhood and traditional goals as a life of their own. But when you look into these two paths online, they are actually far more similar… Infatuated by the haze of traditional influencers like Nara Smith, Erika Kirk and Ballerina Farm’s Hannah Neeleman, those replicating these lifestyles have fully lost the actual degree of agency and success these “trad-wives” have achieved. Look no further than Erika Kirk, who is the current Chief Executive Officer of Turning Point USA…She has a...

A Catholic bishop in Belgium has announced plans to ordain married men to the priesthood by 2028, despite the Roman Catholic Church’s requirement of clerical celibacy.Bishop Johan Bonny of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Antwerp recently released a pastoral letter claiming that “the consensus on this question is almost total” among Church leaders.“The question is no longer whether the Church can ordain married men as priests but when it will do so, and who will do it,” wrote Bonny. “Any delay comes across as an excuse.”The bishop said he “will make every effort to ordain married men as priests for...