‘Meh’ to marriage affects you and me

Marriage: RIP? “The concept of marriage is almost dead,” a university professor friend tells me. This was his response to the The Canadian Married Family Index, authored by my Cardus colleagues. His students don’t care about marriage. 

This “meh” attitude from the youth is seemingly commonplace. However, as support for and participation in marriage has waned, policy reports pumping marriage up have increased, thereby proving an inverse relationship with marital decline. Three important efforts have been released recently, all with an eye to showing how and where marriage is stronger or weaker, and importantly asking us to consider why there are disparities. Marriage may be declining, but this decline is not even across the continent. 

In Canada, the recent Cardus Married Family Index shows marriage is declining as a portion of all family forms. The index compares each province in 2021 with itself in 2001, also looking at the total fertility rate and the portion of children living with married parents. Every province and territory has seen a decline in marriage, with the steepest declines in Quebec and Nunavut, the smallest in Alberta. 

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In the United States, a recent report jointly produced by the Social Capital Campaign and the Institute for Family Studies highlights “marriage deserts,” the places where the share of those married is lower than 33 percent. Urban centres like Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Washington DC and St. Louis make up the top five marriage deserts. “Marriage gardens,” those places where marriage blooms and thrives with the percentage of householders who are married higher than 61 percent, are found in the suburbs of Houston, Provo-Oren in Utah, Dallas, and New York City. 

Which leads us to the third effort, this time from the Institute for Family Studies. GoGetMarried.org wants young people setting out in life to be able to make informed choices about where they live including consideration for the family factor. “If you’re trying to figure out where to move after school, wondering why dating in your city feels way too hard, or just curious what the numbers look like where you live regardless of your age or status, the marriage map has the answers,” they write. Those interested can see the percentage of singles, by sex, filtering for age and whether they are employed, among other factors. Perhaps counter-intuitively, the places with the most single people are not the places where the most new marriages happen. 

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What is the average person to make of all this work? 

First of all, declining marriage is a problem. New marriages, at their best, signify hope in the future. Marriage creates a new kingdom, a place where our young people become responsible adults because they have the opportunity to create a household with kids of their own. This is why decline of marriage is part of the story of declining fertility as the Cardus index points out. 

While not every Canadian will be familiar with every city in the top ten of the marriage deserts, we all know the first city on the list. I don’t think anyone hears the city name “Detroit” and associates it with vitality and growth. It conjures up images of emptied and abandoned buildings instead. Marriage is always intermingled with other factors, but it is a factor for thriving too. 

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A map showing where people are more likely to get married reflects an area where there is already a proclivity toward marriage, most likely based in religion. Thus, Utah as a home for many new marriages is no surprise, what with the emphasis Mormonism places on family. But Ocean County, New Jersey, might be. Turns out there is a large Orthodox Jewish population there—also people who value and prioritize marriage. Either way, back when I was single, moving to those places as a non-Mormon, non-Jewish woman would have done little to increase my chances of getting married. 

I don’t think marriage will ever die. As nerdy as it sounds, I believe each of these academic studies contributes something significant to our understanding of marriage and why it matters. Each one draws attention to the importance of marriage, which is more than borne out in research. However you phrase it—marriage as a source of social capital, of community building, of wealth building or as a social good—we have a “meh” attitude toward marriage at our peril. Everybody has a responsibility to nurture, cheerlead and better understand marriage in a culture that takes it too much for granted.

(Andrea Mrozek is a Senior Fellow at Cardus Family)

A version of this article appeared in the November 08, 2026 issue of The Catholic Register with the headline "‘Meh’ to marriage affects you and me".