W. Bradford Wilcox, Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, is currently leading STI's Marriage Matters Project.
The Marriage Matters Project is an extensive, four-year project that examines the social and cultural sources of marital quality and stability in the modern world. Over the course of the last half-century, three social revolutions--the family revolution, the gender revolution, and the secular revolution--have profoundly reshaped the character, quality, and stability of marriage in the West. The influence of these revolutions on marriage has been complex, and not entirely negative. One thinks, for instance, of how the gender revolution has encouraged husbands to invest more in the emotional lives of their wives and children.
Nevertheless, these three revolutions have posed, both individually and collectively, serious challenges to the institution of marriage over the last five decades. This is important because marriage plays a signal role in fostering the social, psychological, and economic welfare of children, adults, and communities; in particular, marriage is a seedbed of character for children and a central field for the cultivation of character among adults. The Marriage Matters Project aims to assess the enduring consequences of these revolutions for the institution of marriage by considering the role that four values —unconditional love, generativity, gender complementarity, and religious faith— now play in shaping the quality and stability of contemporary marriage in the West.
This project hypothesizes that marriages organized around all four of these core values will be more stable and possibly happier than marriages that do not embody a commitment to all these values. In essence, Marriage Matters will determine if marriages organized around a “soulmate” model of marriage —where couples focus on emotional intimacy and their own personal fulfillment— are happier and more stable than marriages organized around an “institutional” model of marriage— where couples seek the goods of intimacy, childbearing, childrearing, economic cooperation, and mutual support in their marriages. This study focuses in particular on the quality and stability of marriages among young adults (18-45) in the United States.
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