Wendy Wang is the research director and a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies.
Conventional wisdom has long held that men are reluctant partners and women are the ones who want to marry. That was certainly once true, but not so much today.
A 2025 Pew Research analysis showed that for 12th-graders, desire for marriage among girls dropped 22 percentage points between 1993 and 2023, while among boys it remained virtually unchanged.
For single women of all ages, expanded economic opportunities mean that, for many of them, marriage — with the man as the breadwinner — no longer holds the same appeal it once did. But there is one thing most women still want men to be: their protector.
This is hardly a trivial issue. Women are far more likely to report feeling unsafe than men. A 2025 Gallup poll showed that 58 percent of American women feel safe walking alone at night, compared with 84 percent of men.
But among married women, a different picture emerges.
New data from the Institute for Family Studies and the Wheatley Institute shows that though 18 percent of heterosexual single women ages 25 to 34 said they feel unsafe most days, only 4 percent of married women said the same. These results, which came from a sample size of 689 respondents, speak to a broader question about what people want from marriage.
The marriage market is like the economy in many ways. When people establish a relationship, they want to maximize the value of that partnership. This is why economics was long the primary market incentive for marriage, at least for women. When the workforce was dominated by men, getting married gave a woman a higher standard of living and better economic security while she took care of children at home.
Today, that is hardly the case. In 2024, women ages 25 to 34 earned 95 cents for every dollar earned by men of the same age. In nearly half of U.S. marriages, women earn as much or more than their husbands. Yet women still shoulder most of the housework and child care, even when they are the primary breadwinners. Without the economic incentives, women feel as though they have less to gain from marrying and thus marriage rates have fallen. Between 1970 and 2022, the marriage rate for women dropped by about 60 percent, from 77 to 31 new marriages per 1,000 unmarried women.
Since financial security is no longer the main appeal of marriage, physical security has become the most overlooked benefit for women.
That’s true even for most progressive young women who have largely abandoned traditional views about gender roles. The IFS/Wheatley survey showed that 74 percent of young women ages 18 to 29 still believe men should protect women — even though most of them do not endorse the traditional “men as breadwinner, women as caretaker” model and believe dating costs should be shared equally. Among men, 78 percent said it was their responsibility to protect women.
Feeling safe isn’t simply a matter of having a man in the house. A man’s willingness to commit to a woman influences how safe she feels. Unmarried women who live with a partner are more likely than married women to report feeling unsafe. Nine percent of cohabiting women indicated that their partner did not contribute to their sense of physical safety. Only 2 percent of married women said the same.
That safety carries over to the dynamics within the relationship, too. Though domestic violence remains a serious problem, marriage has been shown to provide additional protection from a violent partner. Research from around the world has repeatedly found that partner violence is less common within marriage.
The growing skepticism about marriage among many educated and financially independent women is understandable. But focusing too narrowly on economic status misses what marriage is truly about: two people committing to face the world together.
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