While waiting for my daughter to finish her summer class earlier this week, I struck up a conversation with another mom. Our chat quickly turned from the weather to generators, since our town had just been hit by a severe thunderstorm. She then told me a story that fits perfectly with a topic I explored in my latest Washington Post article.
During the worst snowstorm ever in our town’s history, her house lost power. With three young children in the cold and dark, she felt frightened and helpless. Then she saw her neighbor’s husband rush back with the last generator available to rent in town. The neighbor’s house was warm and bright, but hers was not. “That’s why you get married!” she said, laughing. But I know it wasn’t really a joke.
We have all been there. When something is seriously wrong, an emergency, a crisis, we want someone we trust completely to make a decision and take care of it. We want to feel secure. That’s when having a man in the house matters most.
This sense of security has many layers. In my WaPo piece, I only scratched the surface by focusing on physical safety. The data is striking: Single young women are four times more likely than married young women to say they feel unsafe most days (18% vs. 4%). This finding holds even after controlling for the financial status and other demographics such as age and race/ethnicity. In other words, it is not simply that married women tend to be better off financially and possibly live in safer neighborhoods.
Interestingly, feeling safe is about more than just having a man in the house: He needs to be a committed partner. Women who live with a partner but are not married are more than twice as likely to report feeling unsafe most days compared with married women. In the same survey, when asked how much their spouse or partner contributes to their sense of physical safety, 9% of cohabiting women say their partner didn’t help much, compared with just 2% of married women.
Feeling safe and protected matters more than most people realize. Research finds that having a protective spouse is the second strongest predictor of marital happiness for women, behind only full commitment to the marriage itself. To a woman, a protective husband means not only that he makes her feel safe, but also that he cherishes and supports her.
One WaPo reader captured this sentiment beautifully:
Protecting and providing are the two core components of masculinity. Across human history, men have not always been the primary providers (think hunter‑gatherer societies when women supplied most of the food while men’s hunting yields were unpredictable), but men have always been the protectors of their families. That role has never faded.
Men’s protector role shows up at a larger scale. Men represent the vast majority of personnel in military, police and protective service occupations. While the gender makeup has gradually shifted in recent years, men continue to dominate the military workforce: as of 2023, 79% of active-duty members are male.
Finding a man who can “have your back” and give you a genuine sense of security is one of the most important, yet most underrated ingredients of a successful marriage. We just don’t say it out loud enough.
https://wendyrwang.substack.com/p/this-is-why-you-get-married
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