The end of marriage as we know it

Article here. Excerpt:

'Across the U.S., an increasing number of young adults are treating the traditional wedding altar like a hazardous waste site. Their mass refusal to pair up fuels a predictable spiral. Fewer marriages produce fewer babies, and a society without babies eventually ceases to exist.

Part of this transformation is being driven by a massive demographic shift in higher education. Women now earn roughly 60 percent of bachelor’s degrees. This educational imbalance directly feeds into the white-collar economy. A large cadre of corporate women now routinely out-earn their male romantic partners, creating a dynamic the old domestic playbooks never anticipated.
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A research team at the University of Pennsylvania recently attempted to calculate the exact structural toll of this financial shift. The sociologists tracked 544,911 opposite-sex couples across 29 affluent nations over a 16-year period, analyzing a dataset comprising 437,102 married pairings and 107,809 cohabiting couples. The findings were sobering. Couples where the woman holds higher economic or social status are 36 percent more likely to split than those built on a more traditional division of labor.
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For the last 40 years, mainstream psychological orthodoxy pinned the blame for these breakups entirely on the fragile male ego. The academic establishment insisted that men, socialized under the “Me Tarzan, You Jane” school of thought, suffered deep psychological trauma whenever a woman brought home the larger paycheck.

But Penn’s data completely demolishes this theory. The researchers compared deeply conservative cultures with hyper-progressive Nordic societies and found the exact same 36 percent spike in separation rates everywhere when women out-earn their male partners. The pattern holds firm in egalitarian Sweden and traditional southern Europe alike; the husband’s internal narrative of masculine dominance is not the main issue here. The breakdown crosses cultural lines with perfect indifference.'