Kids these days… Have you been dismayed by the dating and mating behaviors of the teens and young adults in your life? Shocked by the hook-up culture? Baffled by their slow-by-traditional-standards commitment to marry. 

Researcher Mark Regnerus offers insight. He’s been a professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin for 20 years and is a senior fellow at the Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture. He’s published four books and dozens of articles concerning sexual behavior, family, marriage, and religion. He helps explain what motivates the Millennial and Gen Z generations, especially when it comes to their relationships. 

The bulk of Mark’s research from 2013-2017 took a blunt look at the realities of the mating market and formed the foundation of his 2017 book, Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy. What he found was somewhat discouraging, he said, leading him to subsequently focus on marriage and the church to see if he could discover positivity about the marriage impulse. 

Are young adults leaning toward or away from marriage? What are their experiences in the marriage market?

Mark interviewed young adult Christians in seven countries across the world — including Mexico, Poland, Russia, Lebanon and Nigeria — to unearth first-person accounts of views and behaviors pertaining to marriage. 

Mark hoped to identify factors that might be particularly positive or corrosive to include in The Future of Christian Marriage, published last year. His specific aim was to show how Christians can culturally pave pathways to help people envision and realize marriage, as well as how Christian communities can help marriage thrive.  

Why is marriage important? Society needs marriage for its practical purposes, he said, considering it “hands down the best environment to raise children.”

“It’s been proven to benefit mental health, promote stability and community flourishing,” he said. “Marriage has historically been looked at as a cultural achievement, conveying community esteem. The institution also is important for men’s physical health.

“Men left to their own selves slowly destruct. Typically, marriage tends to mature men in a way they would not otherwise have picked.” When men think they aren’t marriage material — they don’t want or need it —they never move toward it. This leaves not only them, but women also, unmoored, instead of taking shelter from storms and accomplishing something together, he said. 

How have views toward marriage changed? One visible shift - the cultural expectation of timing. 

“Marriage is for later,” Mark said. They delay and delay, one reason being the expectation of a certain level of material wealth that cannot be achieved by one income. This culture prefers material achievements to the satisfying goodness of family, community and religious faith. He found most still have a positive perspective of marriage, but they feel only the rich can attain the image of what marriage can look and feel like.

“Young adults feel like they can’t make it (financially) if they get married. Material things have become the emphasis. The idea of marriage as a foundation has largely disappeared,” he said. “It is a capstone rather than a foundation from which to build.”

He noted the working class is fleeing marriage. 

“For the poor and working class, marriage is this achievement, this capstone, they cannot attain. They feel like they aren’t marriageable or else can’t find a marriageable mate.” Those who identify as Christians still esteem marriage in a way others do not, Mark said. He predicts marriage will be relegated even more to the realm of the religious in the future. 

“They are the ones who care about and give it a religious context,” he said. “But the irreligious’ disregard of marriage is affecting Christians. Christians are more likely to be influenced by non-believers than the other way around. I don’t think we are going to turn the corner on that until we recapture a vision for what marriage is once you are in it.” 

More Obstacles: 

A corollary to the problem of materialism is the cultural view of marriage that now emphasizes service to self rather than the community, other person, church or God, Mark added.

Government intervention has not proved beneficial.  Policies that were meant to support families have instead harmed marriage by financially incentivizing couples not to marry. 

Too Much Independence?

Mark’s interviews with young adults in countries outside the United States led to a surprising discovery. Adult children tend to live at home until they marry in Christian communities elsewhere. Mark suggests Americans consider this practice, which he admits is not a good fit for every family or child. 

“A 22-year-old is not a morally mature person,” Mark said. An advantage to adult children remaining in the home is that parents can still give some guidance. While the U.S. economy is built on a culture of independence, the push (or pull) out of the home can create loneliness.  

“If life is lived in a family, why would we think that several years of in-betweenness living by ourselves is a good thing?” he wondered. Another positive byproduct is the opportunity to save money for the future. However, he cautioned, if adult children are at home, their life must be productive, not consumptive. 

“Pushing up against a narrative is counterintuitive, but pretty much everywhere else, it (living at home) is normative,” he said. 

As parents model their own marriages (to their children), Mark mentioned the importance of making the home a “haven in a heartless world” to protect family and people for the future. “It becomes corrosive if the same free-market, utilitarian mentalities we esteem in the economy come home,” he said. 

He suggests creating barriers between work and home to separate time and space. 

“We have all these time-saving devices, computers in our hands to be more productive. Our children don’t need production, they need us. Make your home a haven from the economic considerations that exist outside,” he said. 

Mark cautions parents to be mindful of the advice they give their young adults. He has found the counsel to delay marriage may not be serving the next generation well.  

“The idea not to rush, it will happen, may not be very helpful. Parents who have been divorced may be terrified of being dependent on another human being. Children who have had to suffer the divorce of their parents learn the lesson that independence is good, interdependence is bad. They are told to just wait,” he said.

He mentioned for Christians in particular, the “waiting thing” is not going to work for very long if parents also expect chastity. 

Parents think they are giving prudent advice, being protective, economically and future oriented, but Mark suggested they become more self-aware about the advice they are offering.

Ways the Church Can Help

Mark noted it is incumbent on the church as a whole to esteem marriage, because “without marriages they will diminish. Very few social institutions are in the marriage esteeming business anymore,” he said. 

He suggested telling exemplary stories to paint a vision of what could be to counter the “marriage buffoonery image” portrayed in the media. “Marriage is good, and it works,” he said. Some kids catch that from their parents if their marriage is decent enough, noting the parents’ marriage doesn’t have to be great – just good enough. 

“Mom and dad squabble, but they always make up, and home is a good, stable place,” he said. “People need to spend time where being married is esteemed – it doesn’t even have to be the point of the organization,” he commented. Churches can recover a marriage-friendly culture just by being themselves.  

“It used to be understood that marriage was set apart or sacred,” Mark said. “We’ve believed marriage will be just fine, but it will not be unless is has social support. Churches are one of the few places where marriage engenders social support.”  

Churches can offer pre-marriage resources to better prepare young adults for reality. Mark noted that as marriage rates have gone down, expectations are going up, and have perhaps become unreachable. 

“We’re told to live our own lives in our 20s, then flip some switch in our 30s and care about other people. We need a detox with marital prep that’s realistic. 

“People measure the success of a marriage by the size of a bank account. Marriage needs to be framed not as an accoutrement. Marriage is not about achieving an upper-middle-class lifestyle by 30,” he said. 

Churches can also help couples navigate challenges. “Marriage is not all about a person, marriage is something you create. It takes on a life of its own, with claims on you. You are frankly not free to dissolve it at your own will,” he said. 

“Splitting is a learned behavior. If we can help couples stay together, it will help their children.” He noted that in his research, he can see the difference in the split rate after just the first year of marriage among children whose parents were divorced. 

“The cost kicks in at year one,” he said, noting the oft-cited statistic that half of all marriages end in divorce is, “not true. It never reaches that for those whose parents are still together. People come to marriage with so many risk and protective factors. How can we help other people navigate the ‘good enough’ marriage? The share of people who have great marriages is not very high. But there are a lot of good enough marriages that can move in both directions,” he said.

“Marriage is a matter of perspective. If two people are committed to the union, failure at some level is a choice.”

Cheap Sex 

Mark turned his attention to the future of Christian marriage as a mental antidote to the research findings that became the basis of his 2017 book, Cheap Sex. Information from thousands of interviews over six years led him to determine several cultural changes that affect the mating market, not just for young adults, but for everybody at any age. 

“Three things overhauled the mating market and made it a much more challenging place to find a mate and discern what others want,” he said. 

The first was the advent of artificial contraception in the 1970s. Men could start presuming women would be artificially infertile, making everybody fair game, he said. Women then lost a major tool for securing commitment from a man. “What happens to the price of sex, the access to which she controls, if there’s no risk of pregnancy? Men like the idea of cheap sex, and the price of sex has fallen dramatically.” 

He contrasts the situation to that of the previous generation, where it was not uncommon for a woman to become pregnant out of wedlock, but the rate of out-of-wedlock births was low, because the couple would marry. 

“In the mating market in the past, there was a pretty high risk of pregnancy if you fooled around, so you had to be pretty sure of that person. (With contraception, the woman) has gained control over her fertility, but the man tends to access sex before commitment is obvious.” 

The second factor Mark noted was the advent of digital pornography. 

Women now feel they have to compete with the online images, because the man wants what he sees. “It’s a race to the bottom,” Mark said. He found the prevalence and easy access to digital pornography lowers the price of sex in a way unlike the pin-up pictures of the past, because digital pornography so simulates the real thing it can serve as a replacement for sex for a segment of men, removing them from the mating market. He estimated that segment might total 15%, making competition for those remaining more fierce. 

“It’s a numbers game. Some share of the male population is off the market because they are satisfied with video games and pornography. Women lose, men win,” he said.  

The third contributing factor is the proliferation of online dating, which he has found corrupts the mating market also. Online dating makes it much easier to be deceptive and create signals that are not true, unlike in an earlier era, where people met and got to know each other face to face in a small setting. 

“We’ve created a circumstance where we cycle through people quickly, commodifying the human persona to a digital image to assess sexual attractiveness and maybe their earning power – that is not how to get to know a person with some depth,” Mark said. “It’s not ideal for human beings to find a person for life. It has some overlap with porn, circulating through images, swiping right or left, looking for other perfect things.”

Even a dating site that originated to encourage Christian marriages was counterproductive. 

“They make fewer marriages happen. Marriage rates are dropping even though people are meeting more people than ever. They are cycling through and treating them cognitively in a way that is not conducive to the marital relationship,” he asserted. 

The overwhelmingly societal wave against marriage led Mark to explore how the Christian community could counter the destructive influence.  

How about you? Will you take up the mantle to move against the Cheap Sex culture? Make your home a safe haven for your family? Will your church consider ways it can foster a marriage-friendly atmosphere? Provide opportunities for young adults to witness good marriages and cast a compelling vision for their future? 

Find out more about Mark’s research at https://www.markregnerus.com. 

Find more inspiration and resources including testimonies from couples and trusted professionals, marriage events, date night suggestions, and more.