Key Takeaways

The Research: A Gap That Has Grown by 12 Million in 25 Years

Writing in The Epoch Times on September 16, 2026, Timothy S. Goeglein, vice president of government and external relations at Focus on the Family and co-author of “What Really Matters: Restoring a Legacy of Faith, Freedom, and Family,” draws on Institute for Family Studies data to document a trend that is both remarkable and underreported.

In the year 2000, the gap between unmarried and married men between the ages of 20 and 39 stood at 2.6 million. By 2025, that gap had grown to 15 million. In 25 years, America added 12.4 million more bachelors to the ranks of men in their prime marriage years, without a corresponding increase in husbands.

The human cost of that trend is visible in the happiness data. According to the General Social Survey, 11% of young adults in the early 2000s described themselves as “not too happy.” That figure now stands at 26%. More than one in four young adults in America today describe themselves as not happy. And the group leading that charge, according to Goeglein, is single men, those who are postponing marriage, rejecting it, or who are not being chosen as suitable partners because of the ways in which broader social changes have left them underprepared for the relationship they want.

The Core Finding: Young Men Are Not Giving Up on Marriage. They Have No Road Map to Find It.

The most important claim in Goeglein’s Epoch Times piece is not the data. It is the diagnosis underneath the data.

Young men, he argues, have not abandoned the desire for marriage. The research consistently shows that most young men still want to marry, still want to become fathers, still carry the aspiration for a committed life with a partner. What they lack is a framework for getting there.

As Goeglein writes: many young men have no idea what it takes to be a husband or father because they had no one to model that for them. Growing up in a culture of family breakdown, widespread divorce, and widespread fatherlessness, many young men arrived at adulthood without having watched a man they respected love a woman consistently, sacrifice for his children willingly, and stay when it was hard. They have the hunger without the map.

George Gilder’s observation, cited in the piece, captures the condition precisely: “Men lust, but they don’t know what for; they wander, and lose track of the goal; they fight and compete, but they forget the prize; they spread seed but spurn the seasons of growth; they chase power and glory but miss the meaning of life.”

Brad Wilcox of the Institute for Family Studies agrees: men like this are more likely to be aimless, unhappy, and either unwilling or unable to make the move toward the settled, purposeful life that marriage produces.

The unhappiness data is not incidental to this. Single men are not unhappy because they are deficient. They are unhappy because they are missing the relationship that, more than any other single factor, research consistently identifies as the strongest predictor of a man’s flourishing.

The Counterintuitive Angle: The Problem Is Not That Young Men Reject Marriage. It Is That Nobody Showed Them What It Looks Like.

Here is the reframe that the Goeglein piece points toward, and that should change how every pastor approaches ministry to young men.

The dominant cultural narrative around the male marriage retreat tends toward one of two explanations. Either men are selfish and immature, preferring the freedom of bachelorhood to the demands of commitment. Or men are rational actors responding to a legal and cultural system that has made marriage a bad deal. Both of these explanations carry some truth. Neither is the primary one.

The primary explanation, and the one with the most direct pastoral implications, is formation. Men who grow up watching their fathers love their mothers, who see marriage modeled as something worth sacrificing for, who are formed in communities where the pathway from young man to husband and father is visible, celebrated, and supported: these men tend to make that transition. Men who grow up without those models, in households without fathers, in communities where marriage is statistically rare, in a culture that offers them no positive vision of manhood oriented toward commitment: these men tend not to.

Young men have not given up on marriage. They have no GPS to help them get there. And that is a formation problem, not a motivation problem. Formation is exactly what the local church is designed to provide.

What This Means for Your Church

At Communio, the Goeglein piece names something we see in congregations across the country: the young men who are most in need of what the church offers are often the least visible within it. They are not hostile to faith. They are not ideologically opposed to marriage. They are simply adrift, without the models, the community, or the clear pathway that would help them move from where they are to where they want to be.

The church that takes this seriously does not simply preach about marriage to the men in its pews and hope the message lands. It builds the kind of relational community where men are known, where older married men invest in younger single men, where the vision of marriage as purposeful and worth pursuing is held out not just in sermons but in visible, lived example, and where the practical pathway from single life toward commitment is supported at every stage.

Think about the young men in your congregation and the surrounding community right now. The ones in their late 20s and early 30s who are not unhappy exactly, but who are aimless in the way Gilder described. Who have jobs, hobbies, friendships of a kind, but no clear direction. Who want something more but have no clear picture of what it would look like or how to get there. These are not lost causes. They are men who are missing what the church is uniquely positioned to give them.

Communio helps churches build the relational culture and ministry strategy that reaches young men before the drift becomes permanent, equipping them with the formation, the community, and the vision that turns the aspiration for marriage into the confidence and readiness to pursue it.

The 15 million gap is not inevitable. It is the result of decades of formation failure. And formation failure can be reversed, one man, one community, and one faithful local church at a time.

Take the Next Step

Communio partners with churches to build relationship ministry that reaches young adults, forms men for marriage and fatherhood, and builds the relational culture where commitment becomes possible.

► Read the full Epoch Times opinion piece by Timothy S. Goeglein → theepochtimes.com

► Explore Communio’s resources for churches → communio.org

Frequently Asked Questions

How large is the gap between bachelors and husbands in America today? According to Institute for Family Studies data cited in The Epoch Times, there are now 15 million more bachelors than husbands between the ages of 20 and 39 in America. In 2000, that gap stood at just 2.6 million. It has widened by 12.4 million in 25 years, representing one of the most significant shifts in male family formation in modern American history.

Why are young men increasingly unhappy? The General Social Survey finds that 26% of young adults now describe themselves as “not too happy,” up from 11% in the early 2000s. Single men are leading that unhappiness trend. Research consistently identifies marriage as one of the strongest predictors of a man’s flourishing, and the decline in married men in their 20s and 30s is directly reflected in the rising unhappiness data.

Have young men given up on marriage? The evidence suggests most have not. Young men still report wanting to marry and become fathers. The problem is not desire. It is formation and readiness. As Goeglein argues, many young men have no internal road map for what it means to be a husband or father because they grew up without a model for either. They have the aspiration but lack the formation, the community, and the pathway to act on it.

What role does the church play in addressing the male marriage retreat? The local church is uniquely positioned to provide what young men are most often missing: a community where manhood is modeled by older married men, where the vision of marriage as purposeful and worth sacrificing for is lived visibly, and where the pathway from single young man to committed husband and father is supported at every stage. Formation is the church’s core competency, and formation is precisely what the male marriage retreat reveals as the missing piece.

How can Communio help churches reach young men? Communio helps churches build the relational culture and ministry strategy that reaches young adults, including young men who are adrift or unprepared for the commitment they ultimately want. Through community events, relationship skills programming, and a data-informed approach to young adult ministry, Communio helps churches create the environment where young men find the models, community, and vision that make marriage not just desirable but achievable.

Credit: This post draws on “Why Men Aren’t Marrying” by Timothy S. Goeglein, published in The Epoch Times on September 16, 2026, and data from the Institute for Family Studies and the General Social Survey. Read the full Epoch Times piece here.