Making a Bad Situation Worse: Where Lee’s Right and Where Lee’s Wrong

Gary Lee’s The Limits of Marriage is highly logical, wonderfully informative, and enviably written.  But is his functionalist view of the decline of marriage true?  Superficially, yes.  Fundamentally, no.

He correctly argues that most single moms would not be better off if they simply married the fathers of their children.  Why not?  To put it a little more harshly than Lee: Because the fathers of the children of single moms are rarely “father material.”  On average, they have low attachment...