Brad Wilcox, a University of Virginia sociology professor, found that couples who see marriage as a soulmate connection are twice as likely to divorce. Two surveys of married adults showed that the soulmate view correlates with more doubts about the marriage and higher divorce risk, even when accounting for demographics.
Hi everybody, most honest talk about men and women in the American media as far as I know. I may be wrong. I certainly intend it to be that. Male-Female Hour on the Dennis Prager Show. Fascinating topic for you today. Wall Street Journal published a piece written by a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia. Named Brad Wilcox. Oh really? Which one? Oh yeah, wait, oh, the one on, on how it's good for men. That's Brad Wilcox. Oh, he's done a PragerU video. I was thinking, what, a professor of sociology wrote a coherent piece? Sure enough, we found them years ago. This is the, this is the title of the piece: Don't Buy the Soulmate Myth. The Soulmate Myth. Romance is not enough to forge a stable and happy marriage. So this— I'm going to read to you a little from this long article. Men and women who buy into the soulmate model appear more likely to end up divorced. That's really powerful. This was apparent in the 2019 California Family Survey. Conducted by YouGov for the Institute for Family Studies, which asked 918 husbands and wives aged 18 to 50 to describe their approach to marriage and family life. They had to pick whether they saw marriage through the soulmate lens as, quote, mostly about an intense emotional/romantic connection, or through the lens of family, viewing marriage as about romance but also about kids, money, and raising a family together. The survey found that husbands and wives who took the soulmate view were markedly more likely to report doubts about the future of their marriage, compared to those who took a family-first view, even after controlling for factors like education, race, gender, and the presence of children. Likewise, in the 2022 State of Our Union survey, a poll that I oversaw, I, dentist— I, Brad Wilcox— of 2,000 husbands and wives aged 18 to 55 across the US. We found that after controlling for the usual demographic factors, those who followed the soulmate model were about twice as likely to report they were divorcing or likely to divorce. For the full episode of The Dennis Prager Show, go to PragerTopia.com, sign up, and become a full member.
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