Divorce Rates Are Falling and Marriage Is Rising, Says Leading Researcher
A prominent family researcher says reports of marriage’s decline have been overstated—and that the institution is rebounding.
University of Virginia sociology professor Brad Wilcox makes that case in an article for The Atlantic, arguing that the often-cited claim that half of all marriages end in divorce is flat-out wrong and that the divorce rate is actually declining. Meanwhile, the percentage of children growing up in married, two-parent homes is on the rise. Wilcox is a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies.
“Marriage looks like it’s coming back,” Wilcox wrote. “Stable marriage is a norm again, and the way that most people rear the rising generation.”
He said that one key to marriage’s resurgence is the falling divorce rate.
“Since the early 1980s, the divorce rate has now fallen by almost 40 percent—and about half of that decline has happened in just the past 15 years,” he wrote.
“The idea that marriage will end in failure half the time or more (well entrenched in many American minds)—is out of date. The proportion of first marriages expected to end in divorce has fallen to about 40 percent in recent years.”
Secondly, he wrote that more children today are growing up in a married home than in previous years.
“After falling for more than 40 years beginning in the late 1960s, the share of children living in married families bottomed out at 64 percent in 2012 before rising to 66 percent in 2024, according to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey,” he wrote. “And the share of children raised in an intact married family for the duration of their childhood has climbed from a low point of 52 percent in 2014 to 54 percent in 2024.”
Wilcox contrasted the data with claims by controversial social media personality Andrew Tate, who once asserted there is “zero statistical advantage” for men getting married today.
“It’s important for teen boys and young men to hear the entirety of this message. Marriage changes men, but not in the nefarious ways Andrew Tate might think,” Wilcox wrote. “Men work harder and find more success at work after they get married; they drink less as well. And marriage can channel noble characteristics and behaviors that have classically been identified with masculinity: protection, provision, ambition, stoicism. That’s good for both men and women—and can help young men identify and work toward a model of prosocial masculinity that diverges from the one being peddled by manosphere influencers such as Tate.”
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Michael Foust has covered the intersection of faith and news for 20 years. His stories have appeared in Baptist Press, Christianity Today, The Christian Post, the Leaf-Chronicle, the Toronto Star and the Knoxville News-Sentinel.
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Originally published July 31, 2025.
