The Estate Planner’s Guide to Loneliness

An Essay on Rich Cooper, Andrew Wilson, and the Lie Young Men Are Being Sold About Marriage

The Concession

Rich Cooper conceded the argument forty-three minutes into the debate. “Andrew Wilson is right,” he said. “Orthodox Christians with strong Orthodox Christianity values have a lower divorce rate.” He then immediately added: “That still doesn’t deal with the risks that are involved. I still don’t think marriage is worthwhile for men.”

That sequence — concede the data, reassert the conclusion — tells you everything about what happened on Rattlesnake TV the night Cooper and Wilson sat down to debate whether marriage is worthwhile for Western men. Cooper came with a position. Wilson came with evidence. When the evidence contradicted the position, Cooper kept the position.

This matters beyond one livestream because Cooper is among the most prominent voices in what’s called the manosphere — a loose network of male-oriented content creators who advise young men on relationships, money, and self-improvement. He has spent a decade building an audience. He has written books. Thousands of young men take his framework seriously when deciding whether to pursue marriage and children. Those men deserved better than what they got that night. They deserved better than what they’ve been getting for ten years.

Cooper acknowledged this was his first debate. That fact deserves a moment’s consideration. A decade as one of the most influential voices on male relationships, and he had never once been required to defend his ideas against a prepared opponent in real time. His entire body of work — the YouTube channels, the books, the podcasts — exists in monologue format. Solo videos. Friendly interviews. Conversations with hosts who share his priors. The format protects the framework. It allows claims to go unchallenged, data to go unexamined, prescriptions to sound reasonable because nobody in the room is asking the next question. The moment the format changed — the moment someone sat across from him with notes, data, and the ability to follow up — the framework collapsed. Cooper was smooth, well-groomed, and practised at speaking into a camera. None of that survived contact with even modest scrutiny.

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The Number That Isn’t One Number

Wilson’s opening statement did something Cooper never recovered from: it disaggregated the divorce rate.

The national average for first marriages ending in divorce sits around 40%.¹ That number is real, and Cooper’s audience knows it. What they haven’t been told is that this figure is as misleading as citing the national workplace fatality rate to a software engineer. The risk isn’t evenly distributed. It clusters.

Wilson walked through the denominational breakdown. Amish communities approach a zero divorce rate.² Mennonites sit around 1%. Mormons and Catholics land near 18%. Orthodox Christians fall between 11% and 12%. Muslims are similarly low. The only religious group that tracks with the national average is nominal Christians — people who self-identify as Christian but don’t participate in any church community or practice.³

The question Wilson kept pressing was precise and Cooper never answered it: what is it about these communities that produces such radically different outcomes? Wilson’s answer wasn’t “become religious.” It was that these groups share structural features — accountability networks, shared values among social circles, community reinforcement of marital commitment, women whose peer groups discourage rather than encourage dissolution — and those features are what drive the mitigation. Emulate the structure, reduce the risk.

Cooper’s response was to call 11% unacceptable. When Wilson pointed out that a 9-in-10 success rate would be considered extraordinary in virtually any other risk assessment — and that 5-10% of people who ever drink alcohol will become alcoholics, yet nobody argues men should never have a beer — Cooper shifted ground. He always shifted ground. The risk is too high, the environment is too hostile, modern women aren’t marriageable, family law is biased. Each claim contained truth. None of them engaged with Wilson’s actual argument.

Cooper also introduced evidence that boomeranged. He cited a study showing that less than 13% of cohabiting couples report being “in love” after roughly nine years — intended to prove that marriage produces misery. Wilson caught it immediately: the study shows that cohabitation correlates with declining romance, but it says nothing about whether non-cohabitation preserves it. When Wilson asked Cooper for data showing that long-term dating without living together actually maintains love, Cooper admitted he didn’t have any. He had built a central plank of his prescription — live apart to keep the spark alive — on an assumption with no evidentiary support, and his own cited study didn’t help him. It only showed that living together is hard. Nobody disputed that.

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Living Like You’re Divorced On Purpose

Cooper’s alternative, when he finally articulated one, was this: don’t marry. Don’t cohabitate. Put the woman in a separate residence. Pay for everything. Parent the children across two households. Maintain authority as head of the household while not actually sharing a household.

Wilson’s response was immediate: “You’re just asking men to live like they’re divorced.”

Cooper insisted the distinction was meaningful — that by avoiding legal marriage, the man eliminates exposure to alimony and asset division, which he estimated at two-thirds of the financial risk. Wilson granted that point and then asked the question Cooper spent the rest of the debate failing to answer: how does any of this help the children?

The data on this is unambiguous. Children raised in intact married households produce the best outcomes across every measurable dimension — academic achievement, psychological wellbeing, substance avoidance, future relationship stability, lifetime earnings.⁴ Children in separated households, regardless of how the separation is structured, show elevated rates of depression, behavioral problems, and addiction that track closely with outcomes from divorce.⁵ The USDHS has collected this data for fifty years. Cooper’s proposed arrangement — two homes, split parenting time, mother and father living apart — replicates the conditions that produce those negative outcomes. It just does so on purpose.

When pressed on the children’s outcomes, Cooper kept reverting to what the arrangement does for the man’s financial exposure. Wilson identified this pattern explicitly during the debate: “You keep defaulting to ‘what about me the father.’ I’m always trying to bring it back to — what about the kids?”

Cooper’s framework is also self-defeating on its own terms. He talks about legacy, about passing on your DNA, about the drive men have to reproduce and leave something behind. But his prescription — don’t marry, maybe have children in a split household arrangement that requires substantial wealth — produces fewer children with worse outcomes. The men who follow his advice to the letter are more likely to end up as genetic dead ends than the men who ignore him. The framework invokes legacy as a motivation and then engineers its destruction.

This is where the asset protection analogy becomes unavoidable. Cooper’s framework operates exactly like a trust and estate attorney advising a client on how to shield wealth from creditors. Identify the legal exposure. Structure around it. Retain maximum optionality. A trust attorney doesn’t ask whether the client’s children are thriving or whether the arrangement produces a fulfilling life. Those questions are outside the scope of the engagement. Cooper imported that logic into the domain of family formation, where it is catastrophically incomplete. Marriage, fatherhood, and child-rearing are not asset classes. But his framework can only process them as such.

The moderator asked Cooper what a 23-year-old man who wants children should do. Cooper said he didn’t have an answer. He suggested the man should “become wealthy” first, then structure something. When pressed on the fact that this isn’t achievable for most men, he acknowledged it. “That’s the shitty thing about the environment men live in today.”

Wilson had an answer for the 23-year-old. It was about structure: build or join a community with genuine marital support systems — shared values, accountability, social reinforcement of commitment. Not “go become Amish.” Identify what those low-divorce communities actually do and replicate those features in your own life. Wilson’s denominational data wasn’t a prescription to convert. It was an analysis of what works, and an argument that the operative ingredients — support networks, peer groups that reinforce rather than undermine commitment, shared expectations — can be emulated. On the legislative side, Wilson pointed to state-level reform on family law as the political project, not as individual advice to uproot your life. Cooper, by contrast, was the one recommending men move to states with favorable custody laws — which for most young men means abandoning existing family and friendship networks in pursuit of hypothetical legal protection. Wilson should have pushed back harder on that point. Telling a 23-year-old to tear up his roots and relocate is no less absurd than telling him to buy his girlfriend a condo.

Wilson also engaged with prenuptial agreements, but within Cooper’s frame rather than as his own central recommendation. His point was simpler: if your primary concern is financial exposure, a prenup addresses that concern directly and can be renewed periodically — without the preposterous gymnastics of maintaining separate households and hoping the courts don’t notice.

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The Wave He’s Surfing

Cooper’s message doesn’t land because it’s philosophically sound. It lands because it arrives at the exact moment young men are looking for permission to stop trying.

The economics of family formation have shifted beneath the feet of an entire generation. Median home prices relative to median income have roughly doubled since the early 1980s.⁶ A young man’s father could plausibly purchase a home, support a wife, and start a family on a single income at 24. That same trajectory now requires either exceptional earnings, dual incomes, geographic compromise, or delay — often all four. The material prerequisites for the life their fathers lived have moved out of reach at the age their fathers achieved them.

Into this gap walks Cooper, and content creators like him, with a message that converts economic frustration into philosophical conviction. You can’t afford to start a family at 23? Good news — it’s not worth doing anyway. The women aren’t worth it. The courts will destroy you. The institution is rigged. Stay single, build wealth, and maybe at 35 or 40 you can set up some arrangement with enough legal insulation to protect your assets.

This is a permission structure, not a philosophy. It takes a real material problem — the genuine difficulty young men face in achieving financial stability early enough to start families — and transmutes it into an ideology that flatters inaction. The young man who can’t afford a house doesn’t have to sit with the discomfort of that failure if he can be convinced that the house, the wife, and the marriage were traps all along.

The cynicism of this is considerable. Cooper’s audience consists largely of men in their twenties who are struggling economically and relationally. They are not wealthy. They cannot implement his prescribed arrangement of separate residences and financial leverage over a partner. He acknowledged this in the debate. His framework serves perhaps 2% of men — those with enough wealth to maintain dual households and enough leverage to dictate terms. For everyone else, it functions as a sophisticated justification for withdrawal.

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The Business of Pessimism

There is a structural problem with Cooper’s enterprise that his audience should consider. He has commercialised pessimism. The books, the YouTube channels, the podcast — all of it depends on a continuous supply of disaffected young men who believe relationships are rigged against them. If those men solve the problem — if they get married, have children, build stable families — they stop consuming the content. They stop buying the books. They move on with their lives. Cooper’s business model requires the problem to persist.

This isn’t speculation about motive. It’s an observation about incentive structure. “Enjoy the decline” isn’t just a philosophical position. It’s a content strategy. Optimism doesn’t generate clicks in this market. Resolution doesn’t generate repeat customers. The man who gets married at 27 and has his first child at 29 is not watching Rich Cooper videos at 32. The man who stayed single, “built value,” and is now staring at his mid-thirties alone — he’s still watching. He’s the returning customer. He needs the next video to explain why his growing unease is actually everyone else’s fault.

Compare this with Wilson’s incentive structure. Wilson runs a debate channel and a daily show. His content benefits from engagement, controversy, and the clash of ideas — but it doesn’t depend on his audience remaining in a state of paralysis. He can advocate for marriage, for family formation, for political engagement, because none of those outcomes reduce his audience. A man who gets married because Wilson’s arguments persuaded him might still watch the next debate. Cooper doesn’t have that luxury. His product is the problem, repackaged as insight.

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What Risk Actually Looks Like

Wilson went deep on the risk question during the debate. He could have gone deeper. The numbers support an argument he left on the table, probably because his opponent couldn’t handle the basics.

Wilson’s denominational data is powerful, but it actually understates the case. You don’t need to be part of a structured religious community for marriage to be worth the risk. The numbers tell this story even at the national level, once you stop treating divorce as a single undifferentiated catastrophe.

Consider what the 40% divorce rate actually contains.

The median length of a first marriage that ends in divorce is approximately 12 years as of 2023, up from 10 years in 2008.⁷ That figure blends all divorces together — childless marriages and marriages with children. Since children increase relationship stability and delay dissolution,⁸ marriages with children will sit above that median. The blended figure includes childless marriages pulling it down and child-present marriages pulling it up; a reasonable estimate for the child-present group is 13-14 years, though precise current breakdowns aren’t published. That’s the number that matters for this argument, because those are the marriages producing the children whose outcomes we’re discussing.

Work through what this means. If children typically arrive around year three of a marriage, and the marriage with children that ends in divorce lasts roughly 13-14 years, those children have had ten or eleven years of both parents in the home before any disruption occurs. A decade of intact family structure covering the entirety of early childhood and most of middle childhood — the years when attachment forms, when identity consolidates, when a child internalizes what a functioning household looks like. And that’s the median for marriages with children that fail. Many last considerably longer before dissolving — Pew found that 22% of divorces in 2023 occurred in marriages that had been intact for 25 years or more.⁷

The age of the child at the time of divorce matters enormously, and not all divorces are equal in their consequences. Research from University College London found a 16% increase in emotional and behavioral problems during childhood when parental divorce occurs between ages 7 and 14 compared to other age brackets.⁹ Looking at adult outcomes, a major 2026 Census Bureau working paper tracked over 5 million children and found that early childhood divorce — ages 0 to 5 — produced the worst long-term results: income reduced by 9-13% into their late twenties, teen birth rates up 60%, incarceration risk up 40%, mortality risk at age 25 up 45%.¹⁰ Older siblings within the same divorcing family, who experienced more of their childhood in an intact home, showed measurably better outcomes than their younger siblings who experienced more of their childhood post-divorce.¹⁰ The implication is direct: even among the 40% of marriages that fail, those that last long enough to give children several years of stability produce materially better outcomes than early dissolution or never forming the family at all.

Now layer on the fact that 60% of first marriages don’t end in divorce. The majority hold. And within the subgroups Wilson identified — religious communities with support structures — the success rate climbs to 82-91%. But even without that additional mitigation, the base rate tells you that most men who marry will stay married, and most of the rest will have provided their children with years of intact family life before any dissolution occurs.

Cooper’s framework treats divorce as binary — it either happened or it didn’t — and assigns identical catastrophic weight to all instances. A marriage that lasted 15 years and dissolved when the children were teenagers gets the same classification as a marriage that collapsed after 18 months. This is not serious analysis. It is the flattening of a complex phenomenon into a scare statistic designed to justify a predetermined conclusion.

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The Question He Can’t Answer

There is a final question that Cooper’s framework cannot process, and it is the one that collapses the entire structure.

Ask a divorced father with children whether he regrets having married.

The Seddons/Marriage Foundation survey of 867 divorced individuals found that 61% did not regret marrying or cohabitating, despite the relationship ending.¹¹ Among divorced parents, the most commonly cited regret was not the marriage itself, but the impact of the divorce on their children.¹¹ The Gallup Organization found that only 7% of American parents over 45 said they would choose to have zero children if they could do it over.¹² Broader survey data from the US and Germany puts parental regret at roughly 7-8% of the population.¹³

These numbers should stop Cooper’s audience in their tracks. The people who actually went through the worst-case scenario — the divorce, the financial hit, the custody battles, all of it — overwhelmingly say the marriage was worth it. Not because the divorce wasn’t painful. Not because the system wasn’t unfair. But because the marriage produced their children, and their children are irreplaceable.

This is where the asset protection framework reveals its terminal limitation. Cooper treats marriage as an investment that either returns value or doesn’t — a stock that goes up or goes down. But marriage that produces children is a generative act. Even the “failed” version of it produces something of irreducible worth to the people involved. You can lose money in a divorce settlement and still possess the most important thing you will ever have. You can’t put a child in a trust structure. You can’t hedge against the meaning of your son’s existence. The vocabulary of risk management simply doesn’t apply to the creation of life, and any framework that tries to force it there will mislead every man who listens to it.

On a forward-looking basis, the risk of bringing life into the world is worth taking for the overwhelming majority of people. On a retrospective basis, having taken that risk, the overwhelming majority are glad they did — including those for whom the marriage itself didn’t survive. The risk is worth it coming and going. Cooper’s framework acknowledges neither.

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What They Deserved

Cooper was gracious about the debate. “I’m up against the champ,” he said at one point, “and this is my first time doing a debate.” Wilson, for his part, said he held no bad will, that debates are designed for clashing worldviews, and that men can do that and walk away as friends. That’s admirable from both of them, and there’s no reason to doubt the sincerity.

But graciousness doesn’t rescue a failed argument, and Cooper’s audience isn’t watching for sportsmanship. They’re watching because they want to know whether to get married. Whether to have children. Whether to take the risk.

Cooper told them he didn’t have an answer for the 23-year-old. He told them his solution requires wealth most of them will never accumulate. He told them to “enjoy the decline.” He presented an arrangement that replicates the conditions of divorce on purpose and called it risk management. He conceded his opponent’s data and then reasserted his conclusion as though the concession hadn’t happened.

There is a clock running on Cooper’s audience that he never mentions. The men who started following him at 22 are now 32. They took the advice. They didn’t marry. They “built value” or tried to. Some accumulated wealth; most didn’t. And now they’re watching their peers’ children grow up, feeling the window narrow, and discovering that the permission structure they were sold at 22 has become a cage at 32. Cooper’s framework has no answer for the man who followed his advice faithfully and now regrets it. It can’t, because acknowledging that man’s existence would undermine the entire product.

A decade of content. Multiple books. One of the most prominent voices advising young men on the most consequential decision of their lives. And when he sat across from someone who had actually done the work, he had nothing.

The young men watching deserved a real debate about real risks and real solutions. They got an estate planner arguing with a strategist. The estate planner lost, because estate planning is not a philosophy of life, and protecting your assets is not the same thing as building something worth protecting.

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References

¹ U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2023. First marriage divorce rate approximately 40-41%.

² Amish Studies, Elizabethtown College. Divorce rate approaching zero in Amish communities.

³ Denominational divorce rate data compiled from multiple sources including Pew Research Center and the National Center for Family & Marriage Research (NCFMR), Bowling Green State University.

⁴ Anderson, J. (2014). “The impact of family structure on the health of children: Effects of divorce.” Linacre Quarterly, 81(4), 378-387. PMC4240051.

⁵ U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, data on child outcomes across family structures, compiled over 50 years of longitudinal studies.

⁶ Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED). Median home price to median household income ratio, 1980-2024.

⁷ Pew Research Center (2025). “8 facts about divorce, marriage and remarriage in the United States.” Median length of marriages ending in divorce: 12 years as of 2023.

⁸ Fatherly.com (2023), citing U.S. Census data: “Census data suggests the average couple begins having children around year three, and there is ample evidence that children increase relationship stability and decrease divorce risk.” Multiple sources confirm marriages with children last longer than childless marriages before dissolution.

⁹ University College London research, cited in LegalJobs.io (2023). “13 Devastating Children of Divorce Statistics.” 16% increase in behavioral/emotional problems for children aged 7-14 at time of divorce.

¹⁰ Jones, M.R., Johnston, A.C., & Pope, N.G. (2026). Working paper, U.S. Census Bureau. Analysis of 5 million children born 1988-1993 using tax records and SSA data.

¹¹ Seddons Solicitors/The Marriage Foundation (2013). Survey of 867 divorced/separated individuals. 61% did not regret marrying; biggest regret among parents was impact on children.

¹² Gallup Organization (2013). Survey of Americans 45+. 7% of parents would choose zero children if given the chance to decide again.

¹³ Piotrowski, K., Żemojtel-Piotrowska, M., et al. (2021). “How many parents regret having children and how it is linked to their personality and health.” PLOS ONE, 16(7).

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