When I was in the U.S. Army, I got married for love—and also for housing.
I was living in a tiny room with a noncommissioned officer, constantly being barged in on by staff duty patrols, surrounded by hundreds of other young men, all while trying to sustain a long-term relationship. Barracks life left little room for privacy or autonomy. Marriage, by contrast, offered a clear exit: Basic Allowance for Housing (BAH), the chance to move off post into an apartment on the Army’s dime with some to spare, and a food allowance that replaced the chow hall. No one ordered me to marry, but the incentive structure was obvious. At 20—financially stretched and housed in an institution—marriage looked less like a distant milestone and more like a rational economic upgrade. I was not alone in thinking so and acting accordingly.
That experience has been echoing in my mind as the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind 2025 that is particularly influential in the Trump administration, promotes a new family policy blueprint. Prominently featured in their plans are government-funded “marriage bootcamps,” complete with financial wedding bonuses, and other incentives designed to increase marriage rates. The conservative complaint should be familiar, but the solution is presented as new: Americans aren’t marrying enough, and the state should encourage them both financially and culturally to formalize their relationships.
But this is not an untested idea. It is a civilian version of a system the federal government has operated for decades inside the armed forces. And the military’s experience offers a revealing case study in what actually drives marriage—and divorce—and why the Heritage solution is more about locking people into marriage than ensuring happy families.
For years, social conservatives have argued that falling marriage rates reflect cultural decay: declining religiosity, the normalization of cohabitation, no-fault divorce, the sexual revolution, and what they describe as a broader retreat from commitment. In this telling, the social advances of the last decades are signs of a failing society, and Americans need moral formation and institutional reinforcement. If churches, nonprofits, and the government encourage marriage more aggressively and if public policy sends clearer signals that marriage is socially preferred, then family stability will follow.
The Heritage Foundation blueprint fits squarely within that framework. Marriage camps and wedding bonuses are not merely economic policies but cultural statements. They attempt to elevate marriage as both a norm and a goal, under the assumption that more young people will get married if it is once again an unquestioned expectation.
The U.S. military shows where these policies lead. There are significant financial and emotional incentives to get married while serving in the military. Once married, service members qualify for housing, subsistence, and dependent allowances, move out of shared barracks, and gain access to spousal benefits. For junior enlisted troops, often in their late teens and early twenties and earning as little as $29,000 per year, the difference between single and married status can mean thousands of dollars per year and immediate residential independence.
At the same time, the Army runs relationship-strengthening initiatives such as Strong Bonds, which provides premarital counseling, communication workshops, and free couples retreat weekends. The model pairs financial incentives with educational programming, much like the “marriage camps” envisioned by Heritage. If financial carrots and relationship training were enough, the military would be a national model of marital stability. It isn’t.
Divorce rates among service members, particularly in the junior enlisted ranks, are up to twice as high as among civilians, and both perpetration and victimization of intimate partner violence are also elevated. That pattern maps closely onto what decades of demographic research show about marriage timing and economic security. The people most strongly nudged toward marriage in the military are also those at highest statistical risk of divorce: young adults with limited income and limited time in their relationships before marrying. Youth itself is one of the strongest predictors of divorce. Marrying before one’s mid-twenties substantially increases the likelihood of marital dissolution. So does economic instability. Lower earnings and job precarity correlate both with lower marriage rates overall and with higher divorce rates among those who do marry.
The military intensifies these risk factors. Junior troops marry young, often after short courtships accelerated by deployment timelines. They face repeated relocations, long separations, and occupational stress. The financial incentive to marry may solve an immediate housing problem and drive up marriage rates, but it does nothing to mitigate age-related immaturity, limited savings, or the strain of deployment cycles. In other words, the institution demonstrates a central lesson of family sociology that relationship skills matter at the margins, but structural conditions matter more.
In the civilian world, there are even fewer practical supports than in the military, and the same logic of incentivizing marriage would disproportionately affect women. Early marriage has historically been one of the primary ways women’s economic survival was tied to men. When financial security is made contingent on marital status, women with fewer resources are pressured to secure stability through partnership rather than through independent earnings. That pressure narrows the window in which women can pursue education, relocate for work, leave incompatible partners, or delay having children—which is exactly what organizations like the Heritage Foundation want.
Research on early marriage consistently shows that women bear the brunt of its consequences. They are more likely to reduce paid work after marriage and especially after children, more likely to shoulder unpaid labor, and more vulnerable to economic hardship after divorce. In environments already marked by stress—like the military, or low-wage civilian labor markets—marrying young can amplify isolation. Frequent relocations and limited social networks can trap women far from family and support systems. Financial dependence can make leaving a deteriorating or abusive marriage materially daunting.
This is why simply increasing marriage rates cannot be equated with increasing well-being. A policy that rewards people for marrying before they are financially or emotionally ready may create more legal unions, but it also increases the number of people—disproportionately young women—whose autonomy is constrained by those unions. The language of “bootcamps” is telling: marriage is treated as something to be disciplined into, an institution to which individuals must conform, rather than a partnership freely chosen and sustained because it enhances both partners’ lives.
Across the broader population, the decline in marriage has been steepest among Americans without college degrees, particularly men whose wages have stagnated. Marriage has become increasingly stratified by class. College-educated Americans still marry at relatively high rates, but they tend to do so later, after completing education and establishing careers. That delay is not incidental but protective. Marrying after achieving financial stability and after several years in a relationship is consistently associated with lower divorce risk.
The conservative concern about and solution to falling marriage rates mirrors their approach to abortion and birth control. It takes a religious viewpoint disfavored by a majority of Americans, pulls statistics that confuse correlation with causation in support of their solution, and seeks to impose its solution on the entire country. Just as Heritage stops caring about children forced upon people who do not want to be parents or to have more children the moment a child is born, it washes its hands the moment a couple says, “I do.”
If they cared about improving people’s lives rather than simply forcing their beliefs on others, they would also push for social programs to ensure that everyone’s basic needs are met. Removing economic hardship, the threat of homelessness, and encouraging policies that would give parents more time at home with their children would support the strong families that they purport to care about, while giving them exactly what makes marriages and other relationships more likely to last.
I am among the extreme minority of my lower-enlisted comrades from the Army still married to the same spouse as when we served together, and I am still amazed that we even survived the first five years of our marriage, let alone build the relationship that we have fifteen years later. It took commitment—and honestly, unhealthy codependence—to get through that time after diving headfirst into it before we were ready. It also would not have happened if not for the veterans benefits that kept us financially stable as we struggled through our personal and relationship issues.
Encouraging financially insecure couples to marry in order to become financially secure mistakes the symptom for the cause. For that matter, it mistakes marriage as an actual solution in itself. Relationships flourish where they are entered into and continue based on a shared understanding free of internal or external coercion. When the state tries to use marriage as the tool to create that foundation, it risks producing exactly what the data predict: more weddings, and more divorces to follow.