I have a secret habit: I read advice columns the way other people read sports scores. If I’m being honest, they make me feel good about having a nice, boring life with a loving family and no real personal drama.
The problems are different, the stakes feel personal, and the rhythms are familiar: betrayal, resentment, mismatched expectations, a mother-in-law who will not stop interfering. But the most predictable part isn’t the letter; it’s the comments.
No matter what the question is — one spouse is messy, one is distracted, one is depressed, one is anxious, one is selfish, or one is exhausted — the chorus is the same: Divorce. Leave him. Pack a bag. Lawyer up. You deserve better. The commenters speak with the calm certainty of people recommending a better brand of dishwasher detergent.
Sometimes a marriage really is dangerous or irreparable. Abuse is not “a rough patch,” and infidelity isn’t always something a couple can or should survive. But what’s striking is how often the “leave” reflex shows up even when the situation is plainly ordinary: the grind of cohabitation, the stress of money, the monotony of raising children, the disappointment of discovering your spouse is a human being rather than a Disney-scripted soulmate.
This isn’t just an internet quirk. It’s a cultural tell, and it’s part of what’s behind the loneliness epidemic.
In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General warned that social disconnection is a serious public health issue, associated with higher risks of premature death and a range of mental and physical health harms. Loneliness isn’t simply a sad feeling; it’s what happens when the institutions and habits that tether us to other people weaken or collapse. And marriage, even an imperfect marriage, has long been one of the strongest tethers most adults have.
So when advice-column comments normalize “jump ship” as the default response to ordinary friction, they’re not just giving bad counsel. They’re reinforcing a broader story: Relationships are optional, people are replaceable, and the moment things get hard, you should optimize.
That mindset didn’t arrive by accident. It tracks with how modern dating has been redesigned.
For heterosexual couples in the United States, meeting online became the most common way people meet, overtaking meeting through friends by around 2013. The same research describes something subtle but profound: Online dating “disintermediates” your friends and family. In other words, it doesn’t just give you more options; it removes the social scaffolding that once nudged people toward commitment and accountability.
And the interfaces matter. Tinder, the app that popularized the now-universal “swipe” gesture, launched in 2012. When romance is gamified and presented as a deck of faces and a thumb’s flick, it trains the brain in a particular logic: yes/no, like/dislike, next/next/next. It’s not that dating apps make everyone shallow. It’s that they encourage a consumer posture toward people, always a better option one swipe away, always a chance to upgrade.
Pew Research Center found that about half of adults under 30 have used a dating site or app. That’s not a fringe behavior anymore; it’s normal courtship. And with it comes a learned expectation that the right person will feel effortless, that compatibility should be immediate, and that discomfort is a sign you chose wrong rather than a sign you should grow up and work.
The downstream consequences are visible in the numbers. Marriage is on the decline nationally. Pew Research Center documented the decline in marriage over time: In 1960, 72% of U.S. adults were married; by 2010, that share had fallen to 51%.
Meanwhile, birth rates are falling to historic lows. The U.S. total fertility rate in 2024 was 1,626.5 births per 1,000 women — about 1.63 births per woman over a lifetime, hovering well below replacement level.
There are plenty of forces driving these trends: housing costs, student debt, stagnant wages, cultural polarization, delayed adulthood, and a broader collapse of trust. It would be simplistic to blame any single thing. But the refusal to invest in relationships, the default to exit rather than repair, doesn’t just reflect those forces. It intensifies them.
Marriage is one of the few places where people are asked to practice the virtues our culture praises but rarely requires: patience, forgiveness, compromise, repair, sacrifice, and endurance. When those muscles atrophy, everything else breaks more easily. Friendships become transactional, families fragment, and communities thin out. And as the number of stable, intact households declines, childbearing starts to look not just expensive but terrifying; it’s harder to imagine doing it without someone on whom you can count.
This is why the advice-column commentariat matters more than it seems. The constant “leave” refrain is a public ritual of contempt for the work of staying. It turns commitment into something you “deserve” only if your spouse performs perfectly, rather than something you build together through ordinary disappointments.
MODERN ROMANCE COULD USE A LITTLE JANE AUSTEN
A culture trained to treat people as swipeable also treats marriage the same way. And a culture that treats marriage as disposable shouldn’t be surprised when it produces more disposability: fewer weddings, fewer babies, fewer durable bonds, and more loneliness.
Maybe the braver advice, at least for ordinary problems, sounds less empowering in the short term: Pick one person, and then act as if vows mean something. Repair before you replace. The exit is always there, but what’s disappearing is the will to do the work.
Bethany Mandel (@bethanyshondark) is a homeschooling mother of six and a writer. She is the bestselling co-author of Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation.