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I think we're going to see a continued growth of more egalitarian marriages in a large subset of the population. But we're going to also continue to see what I call a neo-traditional model of family life. What I mean by neo-traditional is that it's progressive in a sense that men, particularly religious men, are investing more and more—especially in the emotional arena—in their wives and children. But it's traditional in that there's still some kind of effort to, in a sense, mark off who is the primary breadwinner and who is the primary nurturer. That may mean that both the husband and wife are working in the outside labor force, but there's still some effort to give the lead for breadwinning to the husband and the lead for nurturing to the wife. This kind of neo-traditional family model is here to stay. I think that prediction is somewhat at odds with what many of my colleagues in the academy would predict.

We have to think more seriously about family pluralism in the U.S. There are different models of family life in the United States, from single-parent families to more egalitarian married families to more neo-traditional married families. The first two tend to get most of the focus in the media. The third group gets less attention, but it makes up about a third of all families in the United States or more, depending upon how you describe neo-traditional. So they're an important group. And what this research suggests is that the marriages in this neo-traditional group are happier and probably also more stable than the other forms of families in the U.S.

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Wilcox on women

Here are Wilcox and Steven L. Nock's findings: "What's Love Got to Do with It? Equality, Equity, Commitment, and Women's Marital Quality." And www.happiestwives.org is a website about the study.

Here is his page at the University of Virginia sociology department.

Slate has some more on this same study, focusing on the fate of feminists in view of Wilcox and Nock's findings.

PBS interviewed Wilcox on family and parenting

Douglas LeBlanc interviewed Wilcox for CT about his book, Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands

Silent land

Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practices of Contemplation is available through Christianbook.com and other retailers.

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October 2006, Vol. 50, No. 10