AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
If your algorithm is anything like mine, every time you hop on social media, you're bombarded with posts and headlines like women are refusing to be with men in record numbers, or men are generally not attracted to ambitious, career-driven women. And how bad is America's romantic recession? Clearly, people on the internet have a lot to say about love and marriage in America. But like most things on the web, it's not all based in reality. And we're going to dig into some of those stereotypes about marriage and dating between men and women with Stephanie Murray. She's a contributing writer at The Atlantic and also writes the Substack Family Stuff. Welcome to the program.
STEPHANIE MURRAY: Thank you for having me.
RASCOE: Can you give us a broad overview of what people are lamenting when it comes to marriage specifically? Are people these days not getting married as much?
MURRAY: Yeah, that's true. Marriage rates are down, right? People are getting married later. Fewer people are getting married. People are complaining about, I think, a lot of things. Whether or not it's all backed up in the data, I'm not sure.
RASCOE: Well, who is more likely to get married now, and who's getting left out?
MURRAY: It's interesting because a lot of the discourse, as it were, is about highly educated women, you know, who can't find men who live up to their standards or...
RASCOE: Yes. They want too much.
MURRAY: Yes.
RASCOE: (Laughter).
MURRAY: Or, you know, men don't want to marry women who are working and very ambitious. But that, I don't think, really lines up with trends because highly educated women are the ones who are still getting married. Their marriage rates are pretty stable. Where the drop off has occurred is among women without a college degree. Their marriage rates have plummeted.
RASCOE: If highly educated women are out there getting married, what about this claim that men don't like working women with fancy jobs? Have you looked into that specific claim, and what have you found?
MURRAY: Yeah, I'm not seeing much that makes me think there's anything to that. Highly educated women, their marriage rates are broadly stable. But high-earning women, their marriage rates are actually rising. They're, like, the only group in society that are actually increasingly getting married. I haven't seen much at all that suggests that having too much money or education will actually harm your marriage prospects for either man or woman. People tend to marry people of a similar, you know, education. Their status match or education match. That is mostly what happens, right?
RASCOE: But there is this growing education gap between men and women in the U.S. right now, right? Women are outpacing men in college enrollment and completion. How is that affecting relationships?
MURRAY: Yeah, so that's really interesting because something that I just said is kind of mysterious, right? I just said that highly educated women, their marriage rates are stable. But at the same time, we've got this emerging gap between the amount of college-educated men and women, right? So how is that? If more women are getting college degrees than men, how is it that women are still marrying? It's because, increasingly, they are marrying down, so to speak. They're marrying men without college degrees. That's now actually more common than the reverse - right? - where a man with a college degree is married to a woman with a college degree.
RASCOE: Education is one thing, but how much money you make is another. And even in 2025, in my experience, you know, how much each partner earns in the relationship still seems to be a big deal.
MURRAY: Yeah, education doesn't map perfectly onto earnings. And so even when you look at these marriages where women are marrying down and marrying men with less education than themselves, the men still tend to be breadwinners in the relationship.
There was a paper that came out recently by some researchers at Yale, Cornell and Harvard University, and what they found is that the men who are sort of marrying up, their earnings have risen over time. They're doing pretty well for them, financially speaking. Whereas the men who are not marrying up, their earnings have declined over time pretty substantially. So they're really struggling. What this tells us is that women with a lot of education are marrying down increasingly educationally, but they're doing so by sort of plucking out the highest earners among men without college degrees.
RASCOE: OK. There's still this traditional thing of the man being the breadwinner.
MURRAY: Yes, I should say that women who are more educated than their husbands are more likely to be the breadwinner in their marriage than other women, but still pretty unlikely.
RASCOE: What else do you think that people don't understand about marriage and dating today?
MURRAY: I think that there's a lot of focus on the sort of diverging fortunes of men and women. I think that gets maybe a little bit too much of the attention, if I'm being honest. Now, this is just my perspective. I think what we're actually seeing is that, increasingly, partnership is sort of a privilege. And I think it's true that the economics of being single have changed. Such that, not that long ago, in the grand scheme of things - especially if you were a woman - your best shot at financial security was getting married, right? And that's really not true anymore. It is possible for people to live a life being single. On some level, we could say that maybe marriage has become a bit of a luxury. I think that's the real story. I don't think it's as much the story that, like, men and women are - just can't stand each other.
(LAUGHTER)
RASCOE: Which is what we hear all the time. I got to ask you, like, what would you tell people who are listening, who are looking for a long-term relationship in their 30s or 40s? Are the odds in their favor?
MURRAY: That - oh, my gosh.
RASCOE: (Laughter).
MURRAY: I don't know if I can answer that.
RASCOE: (Laughter) And what if you're a host of a weekend show? Does that raise your prospects?
(LAUGHTER)
MURRAY: I'm sure it does. I'm sure it really does.
RASCOE: (Laughter) We will see. Well, thank you so much. That is journalist Stephanie Murray. She's a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and you can also find her writing on her Substack, Family Stuff. Thank you so much for joining us.
MURRAY: Thank you for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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