How Resentment Erodes Family Formation

How Resentment Erodes Family Formation

Marriage is not a contract in the ordinary sense. It is a voluntary sacrifice — a binding of the self to particular people, in a particular place, for a particular duration. It requires accepting that the return will be delayed, partial, and often invisible. Resentment is structurally incompatible with this.

The Data

The numbers are not in serious dispute. The U.S. refined marriage rate fell from 37.5 marriages per 1,000 unmarried adults in 2008 to 33.6 in 2023. The share of married adults fell from 55.9 percent in 1996 to 46.4 percent in 2023. Among 12th-grade girls, the share who said they were most likely to choose marriage one day fell from 83 percent in 1993 to 61 percent in 2023.

Three Critiques of the Family

The attack on the family in the twentieth century came from three distinct directions. It is important not to collapse them.

1. The Marxist critique. Marx and Engels, in the Communist Manifesto (1848), argued that the “bourgeois family” is a unit of private property and inheritance and must be abolished as such. The authors distinguished the bourgeois family form from family affection — but the distinction did not survive in the hands of later activists.
2. The feminist critique. Simone de Beauvoir, in The Second Sex (1949), documented in meticulous detail the ways women’s lives were constrained by marriage and motherhood. She argued that marriage, as practiced, automatically confers a subordinate status incompatible with genuine freedom.
3. The identitarian critique. Michel Foucault argued that what counts as true is produced by regimes of power — including the definition of “family” itself.

Murray’s Data

The most rigorous conservative response is Charles Murray’s Coming Apart (2012), which documented the divergence of family structure between upper- and lower-income Americans. Out-of-wedlock births among working-class whites rose to 44 percent among women with only a high school education.

The Causal Direction Problem

Murray’s data is not disputed. His interpretation is. Critics point to economic factors — the decline of manufacturing employment, wage stagnation for men without college degrees, the expansion of the welfare state — as equal or greater causes. See the dedicated studies page on father absence and selection effects for the details.

Consequences for Children

Father absence in early childhood is associated with increased odds of depression at age 24. Children raised without a present biological father tend to experience poorer health, behavioral, and socioeconomic outcomes. These are not moral claims. They are statistical findings.

The Mechanism

A voluntary sacrifice requires the sacrificer to believe the sacrifice is worth making — that the return, however delayed or invisible, is real. The resentful frame denies this. It insists that every obligation is extracted rather than offered. It converts the sacrifice into a tax.

A man who believes his marriage is a tax will resent his wife. A man who believes his children are a tax will resent his children. And a man who resents the people he is bound to cannot sustain the bonds.